The Art of Fiction No. 39
“I live in a grey world, rather like the silver screen world. But yellow stands out.”
Jorge Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Fascinated at once by the simplicity of language and the complexity of the human psyche, Borges used the short story form to craft distorted, dreamlike representations of reality. He served as professor of English and American literature at the University of Buenos Aires and director of Argentina’s National Library, and his fiction displays a corresponding reverence for arcane history and scholarship. Borges’s oeuvre includes volumes of fiction including Ficciones (1944) and Labyrinths (1962), as well as works of nonfiction and harder-to-classify books, such as The Book of Imaginary Beings (1957). Although Borges was born and spent most of his adult life in Buenos Aires, he was raised in Geneva, Switzerland, to which he returned three months before his death at age eighty-six in 1986.
“I live in a grey world, rather like the silver screen world. But yellow stands out.”
I remember him (I have no right to utter this sacred verb, only one man on earth had that right and he is dead) with a dark passion flower in his hand, seeing it as no one has ever seen it, though he might look at it from the twilight of dawn till that of evening, a whole lifetime.
to Antonio M. Cubero
The flags sang their colors
and the wind is a bamboo shoot between the hands
The world grows like a bright tree
Tipsy as a propeller
I have forgotten my name. I am not Borges
(Borges died at La Verde, under fire)
Nor am I Acevedo, dreaming of battle,
Thousands upon thousands of grains of sand,
Rivers that know no rest, the sparkling white
Snowflake more delicate than a shadow, light
The story is always the same story,
With every step retraced;
They tell the story in Buenos Aires
I might have been a martyr. Instead I was
A scourge of martyrs, trying souls in fire.
To save my own soul, I tried tears and prayer,
There is so much lonliness in that gold.
The moon of every night is not the moon
That the first Adam saw.