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From: don@allegra.UUCP (D. Mitchell)
Newsgroups: net.books
Subject: Jorge Luis Borges
Message-ID: <2647@allegra.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 26-Jul-84 23:54:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: allegra.2647
Posted: Thu Jul 26 23:54:28 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 28-Jul-84 07:36:40 EDT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
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	There are a number of great authors from South American worth
	reading.  Marquez, Cortazar, and Borges may be the best.  I
	am reading Borges now, and I have never had so much fun from
	an author.  His imagination and humor are wonderful and
	complex.  Here are a couple samples from "Labyrinths", a
	collection of short stories:
-------------------

Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have
wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now
that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die
just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born.  Once I am
dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the
railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink
endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall,
which is infinite.  I say that the Library is unending.
------------------

It is a revelation to compare Menard's "Don Quixote" with Cervantes'.

	...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository
	of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the
	present, and the future's counselor.

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the "lay genius"
Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history.
Menard, on the other hand, writes:

	...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository
	of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the
	present, and the future's counselor.

History, the MOTHER of truth: the idea is astounding.  Menard, a
contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquirey
into reality but as its origin.

The contrast in style is also vivid.  The archaic style of
Menard--quite foreign, after all--suffers from a certain affectation.
Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current
Spanish of his time.