Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of Jorge Luis Borges’s death and the 20th anniversary of its original publication, bookstores welcome an updated reissue of Borges, the volume in which Adolfo Bioy Casares revealed the author of The Aleph in his most intimate and least familiar light.
Its publication in 2006 sparked intense controversy, and María Kodama, Borges’s widow, went so far as to say that Bioy considered him “a coward” and labeled him “human waste” and “Borges’s Salieri” for what she viewed as a betrayal of their friendship. In 2012, disagreements had escalated to such a degree that a group of writers organized in Buenos Aires an “act of redress” to Bioy Casares.
The new edition, spread across two volumes and more than two thousand pages, revisits the text from start to finish, incorporating materials that had been left out and adding new documents, as explained in the prologue by Daniel Martino, who collaborated with Bioy Casares in arranging the original material.
The core is the diary Bioy Casares kept over half a century, chronicling his conversations with Borges. They met in 1931 and never parted thereafter. The author of The Invention of Morel noted every night that Borges dined at his home, over four decades, sometimes once, sometimes twice, and sometimes three times a week.
Literary dialogues, gossip, complicity, sharp critiques, and recognitions fill the pages of this immense work, which brims with irony and literary play. “Two men who for decades share interests and hobbies, and who during long meals talk about the broadest array of topics with a freedom hardly imaginable”, says Martino.
On the Nobel Prize, Borges remarks: “Prizes do not aid anyone in posterity”; and referring to Juan Ramón Jiménez, whom he did not particularly esteem, he adds: “What a disgrace for Stockholm… first giving the prize to Gabriela (Mistral) and now to Juan Ramón. They are better at inventing dynamite than at bestowing prizes.”
Regarding Thomas Mann, Borges calls him “an idiot,” and in 1956 he notes the curious case of Ernesto Sabato: “He has written little, but that little is so coarse that it overwhelms us with a bulky work.” He also quips that “What can a brute like Hegel know of nothing” and that Marinero en Tierra by Alberti is “garbage.”
One of the major innovations of this reissue lies in its notes; the thousands of annotations that accompany the text enable the identification of people and works, but also allow the reconstruction of episodes, the verification of quotations, the location of sources, the explanation of references, and the contextualization of events.
Celebrating Borges in Madrid
The launch coincides with the Buenos Aires office in Madrid organizing a cultural program shaped by Borges’s legacy, which will take place from October 2 to October 30 across various venues in the city.
On Tuesday, October 20, the deposit of Borges and Kodama’s legacy in the Caja de las Letras will occur, organized by the Jorge Luis Borges International Foundation, the Instituto Cervantes, and the Ministry of Culture of the City of Buenos Aires.
That same day the Instituto Cervantes will host a public celebration around the artistic and cultural legacy of both figures.
At the Ortega-Marañón Foundation, from October 20 to November 6, visitors can view the exhibition Borges: the Other, the Same. Through books from his personal library, first editions, correspondence, dedications, photographs, paintings, records, and objects from the Madrid Writer’s Museum collection, the exhibition invites audiences to explore the different facets of Borges: the son, the brother, the friend, the translator, the early writer, and the established author.
Also on October 20, the Ortega-Marañón Foundation will host Sentir Argentino. A labyrinth of music and poetry featuring Borges, Piazzolla, Yupanqui, and Gardel, with Marcelo Balsells, Claudio Méndez, César Angeleri, and Gustavo Nardi.