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/lit/ - Literature

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18462617 No.18462617 [Reply] [Original]

What did he read?

>> No.18462626

>>18462617
Everything worth reading in terms of literature. Read his work, his references are all there.

>> No.18462636

>>18462617
The bumps on the wall.

>> No.18462671

>>18462617
Dude loved Arabian Nights. It's in at least five of his short stories.
Hamlet
Macbeth
Schopenhauer
Spinoza
Moby Dick
Demons and The Double by Dostoevsky
Faust
Aeneid
The Odyssey

That's what sticks out after rereading him

>> No.18462675

>>18462626
He admitted to not completing Ulysses though

>> No.18462684

>>18462671
Pliny as well: both but especially the elders book on natural history

>> No.18462690

>>18462675
Are you sure of was Ulysses? He made a vague reference which was, I thought, aimed towards Finnegans Wake

>> No.18462776

>>18462617
>>18462671

He wasn't a fan of Spanish literature (by that I mean from Spain, not literature in Spanish)
But he did like Don Quixote and Quevedo a lot. There is an anthology of Quevedo poetry edited by Borges. IIRC he prefered the Spanish writers of the renaissance like Fray Luis de Leon to the writers of the 1600s.

He had a hate-respect relationship with a very weird Spanish writer called Baltasar Gracian, who was translated into German by Schopenhauer. His Spanish was so baroque, stylized and difficult to read that it's preferable to read him in translation. I'm a native speaker of Spanish and after reading an aphorism of Gracián very often I don't understand anything of what he said, even though I know the meaning of the words.

He wrote a poem about Gracian that is actually about himself
Too long to post but here is the translation
https://www.poesi.as/jlb0516uk.htm

>> No.18462782

>>18462776
He liked Góngora as well.

>> No.18462792

>>18462782

Yes. He thought Góngora mogged Quevedo with the "menos solicitó veloz saeta.." poem

>> No.18462794

Get a copy of The Book of Fantasy. It's an anthology he put together with Casares and Ocampo back in the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Fantasy

>> No.18462796

- Jack London - The minion of Midas
- Giovanni Panini - Lo specchio che fugge
- Leon Bloy: Histoires désobligeantes
- Gustav Meyrink : Der Kardinal Napellus
- Arthur Machen: The Shining Pyramid
- Jacques Cazotte:Le Diable amoureux
- Herman Melville: Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street
- Pedro Antonio de Alarcón: El amigo de la muerte
- Franz Kafka: The Vulture
- William Beckford: Vathek
- Charles Howard Hinton: Scientific Romances
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton: The Eye of Apollo
- Voltaire: Micromégas
- Rudyard Kipling: The Wish House
- Robert Louis Stevenson: The Isle of Voices
- Edgar Allan Poe: The Purloined Letter
- P'u Sung-Ling: Gast Tiger
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Great Stone Face
- Henry James: The Friends of the Friends
- Leopoldo Lugones:La estatua de sal
- Saki: The Reticence of Lady Anne
- Villiers De L'Isle-Adams: Le Convive des dernières fêtes
- H. G. Wells: The Door in the Wall
- Oscar Wilde: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories
- One Thousand and One Nights by Galland
- One Thousand and One Nights by Burton
- Cuentos Argentinos
- Lord Dunsany: Idle Days on the Yann
- Russian Tales
- Jorge Luis Borges: Libro de Sueños

>> No.18462805

>>18462794
Yes, it's a nice anthology but for some reason some stories were added for the American version by the American publisher (Ballard is not part of the original).

>> No.18462835

>>18462617
Adding to the already mentioned names and titles, he was buddies with the Mexican writers Juan Rulfo and Juan José Arreola, and he included Rulfo's Pedro Páramo and Arreola's short stories in his Personal Library collection.

>> No.18462864

>>18462617
Summa theologica
The Bible
Divine Comedy

>> No.18462917

>>18462617
I heard that he liked some adventure novels: Stevenson, Conrad... Cervantes?

>> No.18462942

>>18462917
Yes, he quotes those authors in several interviews.

>> No.18462950

>>18462917
Some of his favourites are
Bertrand Russell
Louis stevenson
GK chesterton

>> No.18462981

He also liked a Swede that wrote in Latin in the 1700s called Swedenborg. He was basically the creator of a new christian heresy.

>> No.18462982

These were going to be part of a 100 book titles of his Biblioteca Personal that he was preparing for a publisher but he died before he could complete the list. It's not a ranking.

1. Stories by Julio Cortázar
2. & 3. The Apocryphal Gospels
4. Amerika and The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka
5. The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery by G.K. Chesterton
6. & 7. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
8. The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlinck
9. The Desert of the Tartars by Dino Buzzati
10. Peer Gynt and Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
11. The Mandarin: And Other Stories by Eça de Queirós
12. The Jesuit Empire by Leopoldo Lugones
13. The Counterfeiters by André Gide
14. The Time Machine and The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
15. The Greek Myths by Robert Graves
16. & 17. Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
18. Mathematics and the Imagination by Edward Kasner
19. The Great God Brown and Other Plays, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O’Neill
20. Tales of Ise by Ariwara no Narihara
21. Benito Cereno, Billy Budd, and Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
22. The Tragic Everyday, The Blind Pilot, and Words and Blood by Giovanni Papini
23. The Three Impostors
24. Songs of Songs tr. by Fray Luis de León
25. An Explanation of the Book of Job tr. by Fray Luis de León
26. The End of the Tether and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
27. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
28. Essays & Dialogues by Oscar Wilde
29. Barbarian in Asia by Henri Michaux
30. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
31. Buried Alive by Arnold Bennett
32. On the Nature of Animals by Claudius Elianus
33. The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
34. The Temptation of St. Antony by Gustave Flaubert
35. Travels by Marco Polo

>> No.18462987

>>18462982
36. Imaginary lives by Marcel Schwob
37. Caesar and Cleopatra, Major Barbara, and Candide by George Bernard Shaw
38. Macus Brutus and The Hour of All by Francisco de Quevedo
39. The Red Redmaynes by Eden Phillpotts
40. Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard
41. The Golem by Gustav Meyrink
42. The Lesson of the Master, The Figure in the Carpet, and The Private Life by Henry James
43. & 44. The Nine Books of the History of Herodotus by Herdotus
45. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
46. Tales by Rudyard Kipling
47. Vathek by William Beckford
48. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
49. The Professional Secret & Other Texts by Jean Cocteau
50. The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant and Other Stories by Thomas de Quincey
51. Prologue to the Work of Silverio Lanza by Ramon Gomez de la Serna
52. The Thousand and One Nights
53. New Arabian Nights and Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson
54. Salvation of the Jews, The Blood of the Poor, and In the Darkness by Léon Bloy
55. The Bhagavad Gita and The Epic of Gilgamesh
56. Fantastic Stories by Juan José Arreola
57. Lady into Fox, A Man in the Zoo, and The Sailor’s Return by David Garnett
58. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
59. Literary Criticism by Paul Groussac
60. The Idols by Manuel Mujica Láinez
61. The Book of Good Love by Juan Ruiz
62. Complete Poetry by William Blake
63. Above the Dark Circus by Hugh Walpole
64. Poetical Works by Ezequiel Martinez Estrada
65. Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
66. The Aeneid by Virgil
67. Stories by Voltaire
68. An Experiment with Time by J.W. Dunne
69. An Essay on Orlando Furioso by Atilio Momigliano
70. & 71. The Varieties of Religious Experience and The Study of Human Nature by William James
72. Egil’s Saga by Snorri Sturluson
73. The Book of the Dead
74. & 75. The Problem of Time by J. Alexander Gunn

>> No.18463050

>>18462617
His praise to some Latin American writers sometimes pops up and it always surprises me because I forget he was contemporary to many of them. From what I remember he liked Martín Fierro –even wrote some essays about it– and Macedonio Fernández. I have the vague memory of him talking about Arlt and Lugones. I also know he hated Ortega y Gasset as most Spanish lit; he must have read the Ultraísta poets, I know later in his life he came to hate them too. He also translated some of Woolf's work and mentioned Thomas Browne at least once.

>> No.18463076

>>18463050
Yea, this is curious. A younger Borges was also reading the work of Kafka (Borges taught himself German in his 20s, I believe), Faulkner and Joyce as they were coming out. He even refers to Finnegans Wake as "Work in Progress" in a magazine article, which was the way it was called before release. I wonder what contemporary authors he would be reading if he were alive today.

>> No.18463112

>>18463076
>A younger Borges was also reading the work of Kafka (Borges taught himself German in his 20s, I believe), Faulkner and Joyce as they were coming out.
Damn. It's always hard to believe he didn't die til 1986, I always just assume he came before most XX century writers.
>I wonder what contemporary authors he would be reading if he were alive today.
I do wonder what he would've thought about some of his spiritual successors like Bellatín, I can't imagine Borges liking his work.

>> No.18463180

>>18463076
Would probably hate Paul Auster

>> No.18463340

>>18463076
He would read my diary desu

>> No.18463382

>>18462626
Nonsense. He read relatively little, compared to your average ''erudite'' intellectual.
He never read Brothers Karamazov, couldn't finish reading Thackeray, and so on.
What he mostly did was to reread the same authors over and over, mainly Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Heine, Stevenson, Kipling, The Arabian Nights, Conrad, Chesterton, and a few others.

>> No.18463393

>>18463112
>It's always hard to believe he didn't die til 1986

It's always weird for me to watch those interviews with him, in color, from the 80's.

>> No.18463818

>>18462675
>>18462690
supposedly he never finished any novel, he just read parts of them

>> No.18463979

>>18462617
The spots on a leopards fur

>> No.18464708

>>18462982
Borges-pill

>> No.18464757

>>18462617
Martin Fierro