/lit/ - Literature

>>10430198
Borges?

>>9381455
>calling Borges French
>complaining about foreign languages
>on cabildo discussing paraguayan ñanduti
>mfw

Labyrinths or Ficciones?

Explain why he isn't the best writer the world has ever seen

Greatest Latin American author thread?

The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature. He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty -- a mind turned thus wholly in on itself. His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything.

And the mind of those stories is nearly always a mind that lives in and through books. This is because Borges the writer is, fundamentally, a reader. The dense, obscure allusiveness of his fiction is not a tic, or even really a style; and it is no accident that his best stories are often fake essays, or reviews of fictitious books, or have texts at their plots' centers, or have as protagonists Homer or Dante or Averroes. Whether for seminal artistic reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one who makes stories out of stories, one for whom reading is essentially -- consciously -- a creative act. This is not, however, because Borges is a metafictionist or a cleverly disguised critic. It is because he knows that there's finally no difference -- that murderer and victim, detective and fugitive, performer and audience are the same. Obviously, this has postmodern implications (hence the pontine claim above), but Borges's is really a mystical insight, and a profound one. It's also frightening, since the line between monism and solipsism is thin and porous, more to do with spirit than with mind per se. And, as an artistic program, this kind of collapse/transcendence of individual identity is also paradoxical, requiring a grotesque self-obsession combined with an almost total effacement of self and personality.

Recordatorio diario de que si Pinchón nunca expreso perfectamente el ethos de tu país através de la literatura nacional, entonces es un no-país.

which great authors remained virgins until their death?
pic semi-related, Borges had initiation at around 40

What the hell happened to Borges? His later stuff became complete shit compared to his earlier works

Do you like him?
I haven't read him in english, do you approve the translation?

It's one of the authors that attracted me to literature, yet I rarely see anyone mentioning him. I wonder if it has to do with translation, with nationality or with mere dislike.