Borges & I

[The translation I originally linked to in the email post below really dissatisfied me. So I thought I'd break some more copyright laws (Fuck off Viacom and the like!) and offer the translation from my course reader, which can be found in Labyrinths but, honestly, I'm not sure where this translation comes from or who performed it as our reader has none of that information. It's simply thrown in directly after Roland Barthes's seminal Death of the Author!]

[Please enjoy these yummy words.]

It's Borges, the other one, that things happen to. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause--mechanically now, perhaps--to gaze at the arch of an entryway and its inner door; news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson; Borges shares those preferences, but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accoutrements of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that our relationship is hostile--I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges can spin out his literature, and that literature is my justification. I willingly admit that he has written a number of sound pages, but those pages will not save me, perhaps because the good in them no longer belongs to any individual, not even to that other man, but rather to language itself, or to tradition. Beyond that, I am doomed--utterly and inevitably--to oblivion, and fleeting moments will be all of me that survives in that other man. Little by little, I have been turning everything over to him, though I know the perverse way he has of distorting and magnifying everything. Spinoza believed that all things wish to go on being what they are--stone wishes eternally to be stone, and tiger to be tiger. I shall endure in Borges, not in myself (if, indeed, I am anybody at all), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many other's, or in the tedious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and I moved on from the mythologies of the slums and outskirts of the city to games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now, and I shall have to think up other things. So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away--and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.

I am not sure which of us it is that's writing this page.

[It strikes me now, after this transcription, that Borges would have loved how the internet has exploded and expanded into this complex network of classifications and definitions and identities we exist in & through -- every day, here and now. There's more there in that germ of an idea, I'm sure, but that's for another paper. That is, not the one I'm wrestling to the ground, character by character & letter by letter (word by word!) until we're all exhausted. Back to the mat! No tapping out!]