I have been reading a lot of articles about Borges lately, so this week’s weekend reading post to exclusively for him:

Borges: The Blind Visionary

Barbara Joan Schaffer on The Circular Ruins.

Robert Ford writes about Scott Rettberg’s The Meddlesome Passenger

I came across Eric Ormsby’s essay on Borges & I sometime last year while searching for something else.

Andrew Hurley’s The Zahir & I.

Artful Dodge interviewed Borges in 1980:

DB: Could this be tied in then with you saying that there is only a finite combination of elements and so actually the conception of ideas is only a rediscovery of the past?

Borges: Yes, I suppose it is. I suppose that each generation has to re-write the books of the past and do it in a slightly different way. When I write a poem, that one has already been written down any amount of times, but I have to rediscover it. That’s my moral duty. I suppose we all attempt very slight variations, but the language itself can hardly be changed. Joyce, of course, tried to do it. But he failed, though he wrote some beautiful lines.

DB: Would you say then that all of these poems that have been rewritten are the coming back upon the same wall in the labyrinth?

Borges: Yes, it would. That’s a good metaphor, yes. Of course it would be.