/lit/ - Literature

Just learn the language, you stupid monoglot

Is Borges' whore of an ex-wife dead yet?

Can the Di Giovanni translations go back into print now?

What's your favorite Borges story?

>>16056568
Books have brought me to tears more often than movies or television shows. In general reading generates huge emotions in me more often than the visual arts. Only music makes me feel passions the way reading does.

The Norman Thomas di Giovanni translations of Borges.

FUCK his absolute whore of an ex-wife for screwing di Giovanni out of those translations. I cannot wait for her to die. Fuck that cunt. When she finally fucks off and dies we will get the best Borges translations of them all back into print.

>>15667023
Borges. Borges fucking loves to do this with his short stories. A lot of his short stories are written to be like encyclopedia entries, or blurbs for longer books in a magazine, or entries in a history book, but all of them are talking about things that are totally fake. Borges loves to take things that aren't real and treat them like they are.

If Kafka truly did not want his work to survive he would have destroyed it himself.

Borges talks about this in one of his interviews. He mentions that, whatever Kafka's feelings of inadequacy, and his desire to be forgotten, there remained, deep in his soul, a core of self-respect, and a belief that he was actually a great artist. There remained, in the depths of his heart, an element that believed his work was worth preserving.

So he didn't destroy his stories himself. He told his friend to do it, because he knew there was at least a chance that his friend would NOT burn his work, that he would preserve it instead. If Kafka had been truly determined to see that no one ever read his work, he would have taken no chances and done it himself.

By contrast, Samuel Johnson had several papers and writings that he DEFINITELY did not want anyone to see, and he personally burned them all only a few days before his own death. If you really want your shit destroyed, don't ask someone else to do it.

Only a robot with an immortal soul could write great poetry.

But if a robot had an immortal soul, of course, he would cease to be a robot. He would be human.

>>15197188
He's probably read him. All the popes of the last 200 or so years have been very /lit/, Francis included.

In particular, being from Argentina, Francis is a big fan of Borges. He supposedly actually met Borges once, when he was a young priest teaching literature at a university. Francis has also directly quoted Borges in one of his apostolic exhortations.

What are some works of literature you've read that made you genuinely thrilled you were reading them, genuinely happy you were experiencing them? You see threads all the time talking about how people on this board don't want to read, or don't like to read. What are some personal experiences you have had where reading was totally worth it?

I'm posting Borges because my strongest experience like this was reading one of his short stories: "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." I wasn't quite sure what I was getting into with the story when I started it. Then, about halfway through it, I realized what was going on in the story, and I felt a rush of excitement and happiness. It felt like I'd walked through a door into some strange other world, but also a world where everything made sense. It was amazing and thrilling and I'd never trade that feeling for anything.

>Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

Is Borges right, /lit/?

>"Sometimes learning a fact is enough to make an entire series of corroborating details, previously unrecognized, fall into place." -Jorge Luis Borges

What's her name, /lit/?