Bundan yaklaşık bir yıl önce elime aldım Alef'i ve ilk öyküleri okudum. Ama Borges içine girilmesi, anlaşılması çok zor bir dünya yaratmıştı. Bir hikâyenin içinde anlamadığım ve hikâyenin hiçbir yerinde açıklanmayan onlarca gönderme, referans oluyordu ve bazen bunlar hikâyenin meramını anlamamı engelliyordu. Sinirlendim ve Borges'i anlaşılmayacak bir şeyler yazdığı için kibirli buldum.

Üstünden aylar geçti ve ben kitaba hiç dokunmadım. Sonra geçenlerde aklıma düştü ve Borges'le olan içimdeki tartışmanın mutlak galibi olmanın rahatlığıyla yine sinirli sinirli söylendim. Ama geçen zaman içinde içimdeki Borges de boş durmamış olacak ki, "Belki Borges sen anla diye yazmıyordur, kendi bilgi birikimine eş seviyedeki insanlar için yazıyordur, neden kendinden cahiller için normalde yazacağından daha basit yazsın ki?" dedi.
"Borges'in işi okumak ve yazmaktı, okurunun onun seviyesinde olmasını şart koşması kibir değil mi?" dedim içimdeki Borges'e.
"Şart koşmuyor ki, sen birkaç şeyi anlamamaktan korktuğun için o kitabı eline almayacak kadar kibirlisin sadece," dedi. "Bazı şeyleri anlamaman çok doğal, o hikâyelerde anlayabileceğin, keyif alabileceğin şeyler de var."

İkna ediciydi ve ben de tekrar okumaya başladım. Yine arada sırada "Acaba neden bahsediyor, nereden alıntılıyor, neye gönderme yapıyor?" dediğim olsa da bunun -mecburiyetten belki de, o kadar da önemli olmadığı sonucuna vardım. Borges'in hikâyeleri bundan ibaret değildi.

Ve tuhaf bir şekilde Borges'in hikâyelerini samimi bulmaya başladım. Olaylara getirdiği farklı bakış açılarını sevdim. Cesaretini gördüm. Zekâsını, yaratıcılığını gördüm. Borges'in samimiyetine inanmayı tercih etmeden Borges'in kabiliyetini kavrayamayacağımızı düşünüyorum.

Borges me cambió desde la primera vez que lo leí y desde entonces sigue siendo insuperable.

I know why I didn't write a review. I wrote several reviews about Borges' books and I got tired of saying how amazing this writer was. Is. Will always be. This is one of the greatest short stories collections I've ever read. There are ordinary situations combined with magical events, sometimes very subtle, sometimes not. But it's there. And they're all beautifully written. Stories like "El Inmortal", "Emma Zunz", "La casa de Asterión" or "Los teólogos" are outstanding pieces of literary work that nobody should miss. This guy created an amazing universe that will surely captivate you, if you give it a chance. I think about it and dsadsafsafs. Breathtaking.

EL aleph = The Aleph and Other Stories, Jorge Luis Borges

The Aleph and Other Stories is a book of short stories by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The title work, "The Aleph", describes a point in space that contains all other spaces at once.

The work also presents the idea of infinite time. Borges writes in the original afterword, dated May 3, 1949 (Buenos Aires), that most of the stories belong to the genre of fantasy, mentioning themes such as identity and immortality. Borges added four new stories to the collection in the 1952 edition, for which he provided a brief postscript to the afterword.

Contents:
The Immortal;
The Dead Man;
The Theologians;
Story of the Warrior and the Captive;
A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829–1874);
Emma Zunz;
The House of Asterion;
The Other Death;
Deutsches Requiem;
Averroes's Search;
The Zahir;
The Writing of the God;
Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth;
The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths;
The Wait;
The Man on the Threshold;
and The Aleph.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز دوم ماه ژوئن سال 2008میلادی

عنوان: الف (مجموعه 17 داستان کوتاه)؛ اثر: خورخه لوئیس بورخس؛ برگردان: م. طاهر نوکنده؛ مشخصات نشر تهران، نیلوفر، چاپ دوم 1387، در245ص، شابک 9789644483288، چاپ قبلی 1387 در 254ص، کتابنامه از ص 241؛ تا ص 245، داستانهای کوتاه از نویسندگان آرژانتین، سده 20م

فهرست داستانها: یک «نامیرا»، دو «مرده»، سه «حکمای الهی»، چهار «داستان جنگجو و اسیر»، پنج «زندگی نام�� تادئو»، شش «اما تزونتث»، هفت «خانه ی آسته ریون»، هشت «مرگ دیگر»، نه «مرثیه ی آلمانی»، ده «تحقیق ابن رشد»، یازده «طاهر»، دوازده «کلام خداوند»، سیزده «ابن خاقان البخاری»، چهارده «دو شاه و دو هزار تو»، پانزده «انتظار»، شانزده «مرد بر آستانه» و هفده «الف»؛

در جهان داستان‌ نویسیِ «آمریکای لاتین»، پس از انتشار آثار «بورخس»، کمتر نوشتاری را می‌توان یافت؛ که برای دور شدن از واقعگرائیِ عینی، توانسته باشند، از جادو، و آفرینشها و خیالی‌ سازی‌های «بورخس»، که از نخستین پیشتازان سده‌ ی بیستم میلادیِ این نوع از نوشتارها بوده اند، چندان دور شده باشند؛ «زمان»، «جاودانگی»، «مرگ»، «ویژگی‌های شخصیت آدمیان و دوگانگی‌ اش»، «جنون»، «درد»، «تقدیر»، همه و همه، درونمایه‌ های آثار غنائی–ماوراء الطبیعه‌ ایِ (فرا گیتی وار یا همان عالم غیب)؛ «بورخس‌» هستند؛ خوانشگر ایشان هماره با حکایت‌های «رقت‌ انگیز»، یا «مصیبت‌بار»، روبرو می‌شود؛ و بی‌درنگ خود را بدون پیدا کردن فرصتی، برای یافتن راه‌ حل، همانند اسیری چاره‌ ناپذیر، در آینه‌ ی هزارتوی آنها می‌یابد؛ قالب ابداعیِ ایشان را، نمی‌توان به‌ جبر و زور، در جغرافیای فرهنگیِ ویژه ای گنجاند؛ وسعتِ دامنه‌ اش به‌ اندازه‌ ای است، که سرتاسر جهان را درمی‌نوردد، و ژرفای آن، به‌ یمن نامتناهی‌ (پایان ناپذیر) بودنش، فراتر از گستره‌ ای است، که بستر تاریخ اندیشه‌ ها را می‌سازد، اندیشه‌ هائی که نسبت انسان را با کائنات (آفریده ها) رقم می‌زند

کتاب «الف» در سال 1949میلادی، نخست با سیزده داستان، و سپس با یک ویرایش نو، در سال 1952میلادی با هفده داستان، در «آرژانتین» به چاپ رسید؛ نخستین داستان این مجموعه «نامیرا»، و داستان پایانی آن «الف» نام دارد، که عنوان همین کتاب نیز از آن برگرفته شده؛ ترتیبی که از گوشه چشم نگارش و ساختار و درونمایه ی کتاب هماره میتوان به آن اندیشید و آن را بررسی کرد؛ «بورخس» در یکی از گفت و شنیدهای خویش به داستان «ناخوانده» و چاپ آن اشاره می‌کنند، که از سال 1966میلادی، به مجموعه افزوده می‌شود؛ از آنجا که بسیاری از ترجمه‌های کتاب «الف» به زبان‌های گوناگون، همچنان مرجع ترجمه را همان هفده داستان، در نسخه‌ ی سال 1952میلادی می‌دانند، داستان «ناخوانده» بیشتر به صورت ضمیمه در کتاب قرار می‌گیرد؛ مترجم فارسی نیز از آن تبعیت کرده و این داستان را در بخش ضمیمه‌ ی الحاقی به کتاب آورده اند

بورخس باور داشتند، زیبایی‌شناسی در ادبیات، همانند وحی است، و به آسانی نمی‌توان به آن رسید؛ همین امر است، که داستان‌های کتاب «الف»، و زبان بیشتر داستان‌ها، روایی و گزارشی‌ هستند؛ زبانی که «واقعی» به دیده می‌آید، و «بورخس» تلاش دارند، خوانشگر خویش را، هماره درگیر احساسات و تلاطم متنی نکنند؛ انگار که خوانشگر، با امری واقعی رودررو است؛ همانند وحی، که در غیرواقعی بودن ذاتش، به نوعی واقعیت نیز، در خود به همراه دارد؛ «بورخس» برای ایجاد چنین فروهشی، با معماری حساب‌ شده‌ ای از نشانه‌ ها، و علوم فلسفه و ریاضیات نیز، بهره می‌گیرند؛ ایشان به عنوان مثال در داستان «جنگجو و اسیر»، «نامیرا»، «دو شاه و هزارتو»، «خانه‌ ی آسته ریون»، «ظاهر (زهیر)» به‌ گونه ی شناخته شده تری نسبت به سایر داستان‌های مجموعه، از مفهوم «تضاد» برای شکل‌گیری داستان، و شخصیت‌ پردازی قهرمان‌های خویش سود برده اند؛ مفهومی که «خیر و شر» را، وجوه دوگانه‌ ی آدمیان می‌بینند، انگار که «شر» می‌تواند آینه‌ ی رویه ی نیک و خوب همان فرد باشد، و در یک آن این اشراف، در آدمی شکل گیرد، که کدام را برگزیند؛ در این داستان‌ها، «انسان» خداوند جهان هستی و وجود خویشتن، است؛ اینکه هر ذره، نشانه‌ ای از کل است، و انسان هم می‌تواند، نشانه‌ ی خالق و یا خود خالق باشد؛ دیگر داستان‌های، این مجموعه: «مرده»، «حکمای الهی»، «زندگینامه‌ ی تادئؤ ایسیدرو کروتث»؛ «مرگ دیگر»، «مرثیه‌ ی آلمانی»، «تحقیق ابن‌ رشد»، «کلام خداوند»، «مرد بر آستانه»؛ که برخی از این داستان‌ها با ترجمه‌ های دیگران پیش‌تر از این کتاب در مجلات و مجموعه‌ های دیگری در ایران منتشر شده اند

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 15/10/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 19/07/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Mükemmel bir bilgi birikimi ve harika kurgulanmış öyküler eğer siz de bu bilgilere sahipseniz. Yüzeysel olarak okunarak da zevk alınacak bir kitap ama ben ayrıntılarda boğuldum, bilmediğim pek çok efsane, kültür, olay... Daha iyi bir dönem de tekrar okumayı kesinlikle isterim.

“Anything can drive a person insane if that person cannot manage to put it out of their mind” – even… “a map of Hungary”! Obsession is the unifying theme of virtually all these stories, which is apt, because I’m beginning to be a trifle obsessed myself. It is perhaps most central to The Zahir.

I have the Collected Fictions (with copious translator's notes), but am splitting my review of that into its components, listed in publication order: Collected Fictions - all reviews. This is the fourth, published in 1949.

The now familiar Borgesian tropes are also here in abundance too: time, reality and dreams, immortality, infinity, mirrors and opposites, labyrinths, recursion and circularity, memory.

At this stage of working though Borge’s Collected Fictions, I feel deeply connected. There is still a beguiling, mysterious layer, but it’s not impenetrable by any means, even though I’m very aware that I’m nowhere near as erudite as Borges, so although I know many of the great literary names he drops, I’m not necessarily intimately familiar with their works.

The Immortal 6*

What price immortality? And what an opening premise: a story by a rare-book dealer, found by a princess, in a copy of The Ilyad! The story itself is about a mysterious, obsessive quest to find the secret City of the Immortals.

The journey includes Roman soldiers; escape; loneliness; fear of otherness; extraordinary architecture; finding a way through a labyrinth of caves, ladders, doors and multiple rooms; sinister troglodytes, references to The Odyssey, and much musing on life, death, mortality, and the nature of time. It sounds like a checklist of clichés, but in the hands of this master storyteller, it is fresh, beautiful, profound – and unsettling.

The city is found – abandoned and part ruined. It is beautiful and impressive, but somehow sinister – not an easy combination to describe: “This place is the work of the gods… The gods that built this place have died… The gods that built this place were mad… The impression of great antiquity was joined by others: the impression of endlessness, the sensation of oppressiveness and horror, the sensation of complex irrationality… A maze is a house built purposely to confuse men… the architecture had no purpose.” Its very existence “pollutes the past and the future and somehow compromises the stars.”

The barely-communicative, primitive troglodytes turn out to be the immortals, who have left their city to live in the labyrinth instead. The one the traveller befriends, and names Argos after the dog in the Odyssey, turns out to be Homer himself.” This sort of evolutionary regression is explored in two stories in Brodie’s Report: The Gospel According to Mark and the eponymous report of Brodie.

The philosophical aspects mainly concern the essence of opposites, and hence, ways and forms of immortality: the “Wheel, which has neither end not beginning, each life is the effect of the previous life and engenderer of the next… Over an infinitely long span of time, all things happen to all men… heads and tails tend to even out… Viewed in that way, all our acts are just, though also unimportant.” Worse, “the notion of the world as an exact system of compensation… made them immune to pity.”

For mortals, it’s different: “Death… makes men precious and pathetic… any act they perform may be their last… Everything in the world of mortals has the value of the irrecoverable and contingent.”

The Dead Man

The story is summarised in the opening sentence: a low-life urban hoodlum becomes a horseman and the leader of a band smugglers. His obsession is gaining power.

This is more than 1/3 through the Collected Fictions, and I think this has the first female character who merits more than a sentence (though it’s not a very enviable role).

Of course, it’s really about death. If you’re almost dead anyway, does it matter what happens just before?

The Theologians

A rather dry piece that perks up towards the end. It concerns two sects, each of which thinks the other heretical, compounded by a pair of believers in a doctrine, and one protagonist is obsessed with gaining the intellectual upper-hand. Are they allies (the same) or opponents (opposites)?

If “every man is two men, and… the real one is the other one, the one in heaven… our acts cast an inverted reflection” so by doing bad things on earth, good things can happen in heaven! I’m not sure that would stand up in court. The final revelation is one that recurs in Borges: the two men are one and the same man.

Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden

Is “going native” a choice or a necessity? Are contrasting stories essentially two sides of the same story? This is only three pages long, and the story starts halfway through.

This has echoes of The Captive and The Ethnographer (reviewed in Dreamtigers).

A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz

“Any life… actually consists of a single moment - the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.”

There is lots of historical background in the translator’s notes and the conclusion echoes that of The Theologians ”He realized that the other man was himself”.

Emma Zunz 6*

A woman (at last), with clear inspiration from Kafka although Borges says in the afterword that the plot was given to him by a woman (without indicating whether it’s meant to be fact or fiction). It’s a compelling, twisted, and tragic story of bereavement and obsessive revenge, leading to thoughts of justice and truth.

Like the tree falling in the deserted forest, if the condemned man doesn’t know or understand what he’s guilty of, does it matter – is the sentence valid? See Kafka’s The Penal Colony for another approach to the same question. There’s a similar idea in Borges’ “The Secret Miracle”, which is in Artifices

Then what? An unbelievable story may convince everyone if the substance is true. Her “shame was real, her hatred was real… all that was false were the circumstances, the time, and one or two proper names.”

Plot summary:Emma blames her employer for disgracing her father, leading him to commit suicide. She is young, virginal, with “an almost pathological fear of men”, which makes her plan especially painful for her. She picks up a man (“He was an instrument for Emma as she was for him – but she was used for pleasure, while he was used for revenge”), then goes to her boss, shoots him, and claims it was self-defence because he’d just raped her. She tells him why she’s doing it, but probably too late for him to hear and understand. Her story is believed, and the fact of revenge absolves her guilt.

The House of Asterion 6*

The son of a queen lives a strange and solitary life in an empty house “like no other”, with many doors and corridors.

The oddness and sadness only increase when Asterion confides, “A certain generous impatience has prevented me from learning to read”.

He runs “joyously” to greet rare visitors, in part because he can “free them from evil”. Then you realise how, why - and who. Asterion is the Minotaur. There are (at least) two sides to every story.

The Other Death

Does each choice or change create a new path through time?

Grim but dull memories of a bloody civil war followed by interesting diversions into truth versus memory and the omnipotence of god, encapsulated in the question of whether a hero and a coward with the same name are two people, or two facets of one.

Deutsches Requiem

A brave and controversial piece: on the eve of his execution, the subdirector of a Nazi concentration camp sets down his thoughts, so he can be understood (he has “no desire to be pardoned, for I feel no guilt”).

He sees Nazism as “intrinsically moral” in part, because “compassion on the part of the superior man is Zarathustra’s ultimate sin”. That justifies murdering Jews, even a poet he admired: “I destroyed him… to destroy my own compassion”. Chilling.

He engenders no sympathy, but I did, reluctantly, feel the desire to be understood had been partially achieved.

Averroes’Search

A look at failure and defeat, despite great striving. An Arab physician in Al-Andalus is writing interpretations of Aristotle, but is stumped by the terms “comedy” and “tragedy”.

The Zahir 6*

Head-spinning time. “Idealist doctrine has it that the verbs ‘to live’ and ‘to dream’ are at every point synonymous; for me, thousands upon thousands of appearances will pass into one; a complex dream will pass into a simple one. Others will dream that I am mad, while I dream of the Zahir.

This opens by listing the many meanings of the word, zahir, in different languages and cultures. The one that matters here is an object that can inspire obsession to the extent that the victim loses touch with reality. Perhaps that is why, at the outset, Borges writes “I am still, albeit only partially, Borges”.

All sorts of things have been zahirs in mythology, but this one is an innocent-looking coin that Borges is given in a bar, when drowning his sorrows about a lost, dead love (a woman with an obsession of her own: glamour and perfection). It has the letters N and T scratched on it.

“There is nothing less material than money, since any coin… [is] a panoply of all possible futures”, a symbol of free will, perhaps. Money is abstract… Money is future time.”

After sleepless nights, confusion, consultation with a psychiatrist and scouring books, Borges learns more about zahirs and resolves to rid himself of the coin in another anonymous bar and to write a fantasy about it.

In Deutsches Requiem, a couple of stories earlier, the idea of being driven to madness by being fixated on a single thing (even a map of Hungary) is mentioned, and that idea is extended here. He tells of a magic tiger that was a zahir, and a fakir who painted “an infinite tiger… composed of many tigers in the most dizzying of ways”. In fact, it contained almost everything (like an Aleph – the final story in this collection). “Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we might know who we are and what the world is” because everything has elements of everything else. Another obsession-inducing object is The Book of Sand, in the collection of the same name.

“Perhaps behind the coin is God.”

“The Writing of the God

“Wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity.”

A priest of the god (lower case, no possessive) is in prison, with a tiger/jaguar the other side of a piece of glass. Following on from The Zahir, his growing obsession with this tiger is no surprise.

The priest believes the god created a secret magical phrase that is hidden in creation and can ward off evil. He may have seen it many times, without realizing it, or without understanding it. He trawls his memories of the world and starts to see god and a message in everything – but especially the creature’s markings. The obsession drives him to the brink of insanity.

He has a final revelation, but it was unique to him and it dies with him.

“In the language of a god every word would speak that infinite concatenation of events… A god… must speak but a single word, and in that word there must be absolute plenitude.”

Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in his Labyrinth 5*

Cornwall, 1914 (quite a shock, compared with the vague and more exotic locations of most of the other stories), and two men explore a ruined labyrinthine house, while one tells the other its story, involving a north African prince, a slave, a lion, and a prophesy of a murderous dead man.

Walking around “They felt they were being suffocated by the house… through the knotted darkness… the invisible wall, cumbered with ruggedness and angles, passed endlessly under his hand”.

When it was built, the local vicar had condemned it from the pulpit, declaring it “intolerable that a house should be composed of a single room, yet league upon league of hallways… No Christian ever built such a house.” He also told a story – which is the one after this: The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths.

Like a detective, the listener is intrigued but unconvinced: “the facts were true… but told the way you told them, they were clearly humbug”. He unpicks the less plausible aspects of the story, turns it round, and suggests an alternative.

The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths

This is the short tale quoted by the vicar in the previous story: “It is the prerogative of God, not man, to strike confusion and inspire wonder.”

The Wait

“It is easier to endure a terrifying event that to imagine it, wait for it endlessly.”

According to the afterword, this was “suggested by a true police story”. A man arrives in a new town, wanting to be inconspicuous, using a false name – that of his enemy – even though “he was not seduced by the literary error of imagining that adopting the name of his enemy would be an astute thing to do”.

He keeps to himself, goes out rarely and cautiously, tries to live in the present, and scours the news to discover if the other man has died. Instead, his enemy comes to him.

The Man on the Threshold

“One house is like another – what matters is knowing whether it is built in heaven or hell.”

A man sent to quell riots in an Indian city vanished a few years later; the narrator is trying to find him. In the afterword, Borges says he set it in India “so that its improbabilities might be bearable” though it seems no less probable than most of the others.

In “the opaque city that had magically swallowed up a man… I felt… the infinite presence of a spell cast to hide Glencairn’s whereabouts”. Everyone claimed either to have never heard of, let alone seen him, or to have seen him moments ago.

Finally, a very old man seems to know something, though what he knows is obscure and its relevance unclear, especially because he seems to be talking about events many years ago.

The Aleph 6*

This has similarities with The Zahir, earlier in this collection: a man obsessed with a dead woman, and a mysterious object that inspires obsession and seems to contain everything.

Borges visits the house of his love each year, on the anniversary of her death, staying a little longer each time, until he ends up a dinner guest. Her cousin is an obsessive poet, who “planned to versify the entire planet” and delights in reading his epic doggerel to Borges. He lavishly praises his own work, but won’t publish for fear “he might create an army of implacable and powerful enemies”. Borges “realized that the poet’s work had lain not in the poetry but in the invention of reasons for accounting the poetry admirable” – which it wasn’t, “a poem that seemed to draw out to infinity the possibilities of cacophony and chaos”!

The poet’s house comes under threat of demolition, and he is distraught because in his cellar is the Aleph, which he shows to Borges. “An Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all points”, in this case, a disc about three centimetres in diameter. This provides a dizzying effect, wonderfully described (and also explains the poet’s attempt to write about everywhere in the world). “In that unbound moment, I saw millions of delightful and horrible acts… all occupying the same point, without superposition and without transparency… Each thing… was infinite things because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos.”

Those stream-of-consciousness passages are wonderful, but the ending is unexpectedly flat: Borges (the one in the story) questions the authenticity and uniqueness of the Aleph and implies he couldn’t see it, thereby suggesting the poet might be mad. The house is demolished, but rather than be broken by Borges' implication, the poet, liberated from his obsession, publishes his poetry – and wins prizes for it..

Quotes

•t“The black shadow – bristling with idolatrous shapes upon the yellow sand – of the City’s wall.”

•t“I imagined a world without memory, without time” and “a language that had no nouns, a language of impersonal verbs or indeclinable adjectives.”

•t“All creatures are immortal for they know nothing of death.”

•t“Argos and I lived our lives in separate universes… our perceptions were different, but that Argos combined them differently than I.”

•t“Like all those who possess libraries, Aurelian felt a nagging sense of guilt at not being acquainted with every volume in his.”

•t“The heresies we ought to fear are those that can be confused with orthodoxy.”

•t“Her eyes were that half-hearted blue that the English call grey.”

•t“The most solemn of events are outside time… the immediate past is severed… from the future because the elements that compose those events seem not to be consecutive.”

•t“Tearing up money is an act of impiety, like throwing away bread.”

•t“To change the past is not to change a mere single event; it is to annul all its consequences, which tend to infinity.”

•t“There is no more cunning consolation than the thought that we have chosen our own misfortunes.”

•tIt’s hard to follow fashion in war, so “A foreign man she had always had her doubts about was allowed to take advantage of her good will” by sending her hats. “These ridiculous shapes had never been worn in Paris” and “were not hats, but arbitrary and unauthorized caprices”.

•t“The predictable ranks of one- and two-story houses had taken on that abstract air they often have at night, when they are simplified by darkness and silence.”

•t“A man comes to resemble the shape of his destiny.”

•t“Weary of a world that lacked the dignity of danger, the friends prized the solitude of that corner of Cornwall.”

•t“The past is the stuff that time is made of.”

•t“The notion that there might be parallels between art and life never occurred to him… Unlike people who had read novels, he never saw himself as a character in a book.”

•tA very old man “His many years had reduced and polished him the way water smooths and polishes a stone or generations of men polish a proverb.”

•t“This ancient little man for whom the present was scarcely more than an indefinite rumor.”

•t“Our minds are permeable to forgetfulness” which sounds rather back-to-front.

Un universo que contiene universos. Creo que el propósito de Borges era materializar su último Aleph en toda la serie de cuentos. Un repaso histórico, bíblico y fantástico de la Historia del antes y el ahora, a través de esperanzadoras llanuras, cruzando desiertos inabarcables y sufriendo las balas de los forajidos más despiadados, cruzadas con la erudición de los teólogos y de los escritores rematadamente fracasados. Entre laberintos que no cumplen del todo su final y crecimientos de mujer a golpes con la realidad, se distraen naciones sin destino y muertos que terminaron dos veces.

La miríada de dinamismos crudos se sucede entre un estilo sencillo y un aderezo contundente de datos históricos y místicos que no impide seguir el hilo de las profundas reflexiones que impulsa Borges. Una lectura obligada, junto a Ficciones, del verdadero hombre que vivió por y para la literatura.

Se recomiendan los relatos:
"La casa de Asterión": un hogar, laberinto de multiplicidades.
"Emma Zunz": una trabajadora de la fábrica de tejidos afronta un crecimiento no consentido para cobrar una venganza.
"El Aleph": el primo hermano de la fallecida Beatriz Viturbo es un poeta atormentado de universos que se esconden en una casa de próxima demolición.

THE IMMORTAL
We have all experienced different dimensions in our life, to name just three: waking, deep sleep and dreaming. Yet when it comes to describing or imagining the afterlife, I’ve read very few accounts postulating how awareness could shift between various levels; rather, life (or lack of life) after death tends to be portrayed as an uninterrupted hum all at one frequency, the three major frequencies: 1) awareness within a specific form, like a light body 2) formless awareness, that is, our consciousness merging with undifferentiated oneness, an ocean of universal conscious 3) complete obliteration without a trace of conscious awareness.

Why is this? Why can’t we think in terms of an alternating between various frequencies or modes of awareness, perhaps even with an occasional shift into oblivion? And these questions are compounded if we also think of our bodily existence on planet earth continuing forever, if we became part of the race of the immortals. Questions such as these pop up, at least for me, after reading this Jorge Luis Borges tale.

Vintage Borges: The Borges-like narrator discloses a verbatim transcription of a document a French princess purchased in an old London bookshop after a conversation she had with the grubby old bookdealer in various languages: French, English, Spanish, Portuguese; she subsequently walked out of the shop with Alexander Pope's rendering of Homer’s Iliad in six volumes and later found this document in the last volume. You have to love how our Borges-like narrator isn’t claiming to invent the story; quite the contrary, he is simply reporting on someone else’s factual account of their extraordinary experience.

The Manuscript: The document’s narrator provides us with his back-story in brief: he is an officer in the Roman army in Egypt, the Roman legions that have recently defeated Egyptian forces; however, since he himself didn’t participate in any of the bloody combat, he was propelled to embark on an adventure through the deserts in quest of the secret City of the Immortals. You also have to love how the narrator, an adventurous soldier, hale, hearty, bold leader of men and lover of the god Mars, functions as an alter-ego to the frail, bookish, solitary Borges.

The Spark: One day a stranger, exhausted, covered in blood, rides into camp and, prior to dropping dead that very evening, informs the tribune how he is searching for the river that purifies men of death; and, he goes on to say, on the other side of that river lies the City of the Immortals, a city filled with bulwarks, amphitheaters and temples. With the inclusion of amphitheaters as part of his description of the immortal city, we are given a direct signal that what is contained within its walls shares a common culture with the Greco-Roman world. Anyway, the stranger’s words fire his spirit and imagination, thus primed for an astonishing discovery, off they go, the tribune and two hundred soldiers under his command provided complements of a high-ranking military commander.

Going Solo: As the tribune informs us, the first part of the journey proved harrowing, grueling and strenuous beyond endurance - most of his men were either driven mad or died, while others, attempting desertion, faced torture or crucifixion. Also in this initial phase, the seekers crossed lands and deserts of fantastic tribes, including the Troglodytes who “devour serpents and lack all verbal commerce.” Events reach such a pitch he is told by a soldier loyal to his cause that the remaining men desire to avenge a crucifixion of one of their comrades and plan to kill him. He subsequently flees camp with several soldiers but disaster hits: in the fury of blinding desert whirlwinds he quickly gets separated - from now on, he is on his own.

Turning Point: Our tribune wanders for days in the desert, forever scorched by the sun and parched by thirst until his living nightmare shifts and somehow he finds himself bound hands behind his back and lying in a stone niche the size of a grave on the slope of a mountain. There’s a stream running at the foot of this mountain and beyond the stream he beholds the dazzling structures of the City of the Immortals. Marcus Flaminius Rufus (at this point the tribune lets us know his name) can also see numerous holes riddling the mountain and valley and from those holes emerge grey skinned naked men with scraggly beards, men he recognizes as belonging to the race of Troglodytes. My sense is these Troglodytes represent a mode of being at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum from that of a refined aesthete and man of letters like Borges. I suspect Borges perceived (and perhaps dreamed) many of his fellow humans inhabiting a Troglodyte-like existence.

Exploration, One: After many days and having finally freed himself from his bonds, Marcus enters the City of the Immortals. Soon after he explores the periphery, we read, “The force of the day drove me to seek refuge in a cavern; toward the rear there was a pit, and out of the pit, out of the gloom below, rose a ladder. I descended the ladder and made my way through a chaos of squalid galleries to a vast, indistinct circular chamber. Nine doors opened into that cellar-like place; eight led to a maze that returned deceitfully, to the same chamber; the ninth led through another maze to a second circular chamber identical to the first.” Anybody familiar with Jorge Luis Borges will recognized a number of recurrent themes: mazes, caverns, ladders, doors, chaos, circular chambers.

Exploration, Two: Having spent what appears an eternity underground, Marcus spots a series of metal rungs on a wall leading to a circle of sky. He climbs the ladder, sobbing with tears of joy, until he emerges into a type of small plaza within the brilliant City. Marcus senses the city's antiquity and wanders along staircases and inlaid floors of a labyrinthine palace thinking how all what he sees is the work of the gods or, more accurately, gods who have died or, even, perhaps, since much of the architecture appears to lack any trace of practical purpose, gods who were mad. Then, we read, “I had made my way through a dark maze, but it was the bright City of the Immortals that terrified and repelled me.” And this is only the beginning: as Marcus further discovers, there are revelations even more astonishing, including the shocking true identity of one of those Troglodytes.

Universal Questions: The second half of the tale takes a decidedly philosophical turn and, in the spirit of this Borges classic, I will conclude with a series of question posed either directly or indirectly by the narrator:

•tHow does memory relate to immortality? Is the erasure of our memory the first step in achieving immortality?

•tLikewise, how does time relate to immortality and is the erasure of time a critical step in experiencing immortality?

•tIf we were to experience a state free of memory and time in this life, through powerful hallucinogens, deep meditation or otherwise, have we achieved a kind of immortality, at least for a time?

•tWhat part does ecstasy and bliss play in the state or experience of immortality?

•tHow far does the consequences of our action extend? To a subsequent rebirth or afterlife in another state?

•tHow much weight should we give to history or a specific epoch of history? To our own personal history? How much of history is so much smoke and mirrors?

•tWhat role does transformation on any level, physical, mental, artistic, spiritual, play in our life?





When I read the work of Jorge Luis Borges I feel like my universe is expanding a thousand-fold. And for good reason - my universe is, in fact, expanding a thousand-fold! This is especially true as I read The Aleph and Other Stories. Such sheer imaginative power. Fantastic! There are nearly fifty stories and brief tales collected here and every tale worth reading multiple times.

For the purposes of continuing this review, I will focus on 4 stories, the first 3 being no longer than 2 pages. (4,3,2 . . . moving down to the infinity of the Borges 0, which happens to be the shape of the Aleph). Sorry, I am getting too carried away.

THE TWO KINGS AND THE TWO LABYRINTHS
The king of Babylonia builds a labyrinth ". . . so confused and so subtle that the most prudent men would not venture to enter it, and those who did would lose their way." Although the king of Babylonia tricked the king of the Arabs into entering his diabolical labyrinth, the king, with the help of God, manages to find the secret exit. After claiming victory in a bloody war, the king of the Arabs leads the king of Babylonia, in turn, into a different kind of labyrinth, and says, " . . . the Powerful One has seen fit to allow me to show thee mine, which has no stairways to climb, nor doors to force, not wearying galleries to wander through, nor walls to impede thy passage." Then, the king of the Arabs abandoned the king of Babylonia in the middle of the desert. These two images of a labyrinth, one intricate, convoluted, infinitely confusing and the other an endless desert, have remained with me since I first read this tale some thirty years ago and will remain with me as long as there is a `me' with a memory.

THE CAPTIVE
A tale of identity where a young boy with sky-blue eyes is kidnapped in an Indian raid. The parents recover their son who is now a man and bring him back to their home. The man remembers exactly where he hid a knife. Not long thereafter, the man, now an Indian in spirit, returns to the wilderness. The story ends with a question, "I would like to know what he felt in that moment of vertigo when past and present intermingled; I would like to know whether the lost son was reborn and died in that ecstatic moment, and he ever managed to recognize, even as a baby or a dog might, his parents and the house." For Borges, memory and identity are ongoing themes. After reading Borges, I can assure you, memory and identity have become ongoing themes for me also.

THE PLOT
How many volumes have been written pondering and philosophizing over fate and free will? In two short paragraphs Borges gives us a tale where we are told, "Fate is partial to repetitions, variations, symmetries." How exactly? Let's just say life is always bigger than human-made notions of life.

THE ALEPH
Around the universe in fifteen pages. There is a little something here for anybody who cherishes literature - a dearly departed lover named Beatriz, a madman and poet named Carlos Argentino Daneri, who tells the first person narrator, a man by the name of Borges, about seeing the Aleph, and, of course, the Aleph. What will this Borges undergo to see the Aleph himself? We read, "I followed his ridiculous instructions; he finally left. He carefully let down the trap door; in spite of a chink of light that I began to make out later, the darkness seemed total. Suddenly I realized the danger I was in; I had allowed myself to be locked underground by a madman, after first drinking down a snifter of poison." Rather than saying anything further about the Aleph, let me simply note that through the magic of literature we as readers are also given a chance to see what Borges sees. I dare anybody who has an aesthetic or metaphysical bone in their body to read this story and not make the Aleph a permanent part of their imagination.

Go ahead. Take the risk. Be fascinated and enlarged. Have the universe and all its details spinning in your head. Read this book.

Hay libros (y autores) que suponen un reto para el lector. No ya porque su escritura sea alambicada y repleta de simbolismo y referencias culturales, sino porque sabes que existe un subtexto, unas obsesiones y a veces una lógica interna que son huidizos y a los que solo se accede tras un análisis exhaustivo; propio, si se es experto en el tema; o ajeno, si uno nunca ha leído antes a dicho autor. Creo que es el caso de 'El Aleph' y de Borges.

Desde el primer momento pude disfrutar de la manera de narrar de Borges, de su lenguaje exquisito, su adjetivación caprichosa, de la manera tan orgánica y hasta casual con la que consigue arrancar sus cuentos, de lo bien que sabe cerrarlos, dándole sentido a cosas que al inicio no lo tenían, de sus giros inesperados...

Sin embargo, a nivel más de contenido/detalle, de sus 17 cuentos, solo llegué a disfrutar plenamente de una cuarta parte; la gran mayoría, sin disgustarme en ningún caso, me dejó algo indiferente y sin las ganas suficientes de hacer ese esfuerzo añadido de buscar quién me los supiera explicar en detalle.

Por eso, he optado por una valoración intermedia. Eso sí, entre los cuentos que más he disfrutado (y que no descarto releer en un futuro) yo destaco: El inmortal, Emma Zunz, Deutsches Requiem o La busca de Averroes.

Me inicié con esta lectura con poquísimas expectativas, y he acabado alargando la lectura para no acarbarla tan pronto. La realidad es que Borges no es para todos los públicos. Me costó mucho meterme en su mundo y adaptarme a su pluma. Ahora bien, una vez lo hice, fue una absoluta maravilla. Me gustaron todos los relatos. Algunos más que otros, pero todos tiene ese algo que se te queda dentro al acabarlo. Genio.

به نظر من نوشتن درباره‌ی بورخس سخته. شاید به خاطر اینه که طوری رسمی می‌نویسه که جرئت نمی‌کنی چیزی بگی درباره‌ش :))

داستان‌هاش مولفه‌های مشخصی دارن که راحت می‌تونی موقع خوندنش بگی بورخسیه و بورخس رو از غیر بورخس متمایز کنی.

یکی اینه که به شدت ارجاع داره. مثلا یه داستان رو اینطوری شروع می‌کنه:
توی کتاب فلان، حاشیه‌ای دیدم که فلانی نوشته بود و به کتاب دیگه‌ای ارجاع می‌ده و داستان رو توی کتاب دوم خونده و حالا اومده که اون رو تعریف کنه. و این اسامی و کتاب‌شناسی، انقدر واقعی هستند که من نمی‌دونم واقعی‌ان یا نه. اگر واقعی هستن که نشون می‌ده این آدم چقدر با حافظه و مطالعه بوده (که تاریخ و زندگی‌نامه‌ش هم همین رو می‌گه) و اگر واقعی نیستن هم نشون از تکنیک بالاش در جعل واقعیت‌ه.

مورد دوم استفاده از اساطیر و داستان‌های قدیمیه. تقریبا توی تمامی داستان‌هاش یا ارجاع‌هایی به داستان‌های کهن داریم، یا اصلا خود داستان کهن رو که بازنویسی و اقتباس شده و به شکلی امروزی در اومده.

مورد سوم هزارتوها هستند که خیلی مورد علاقه بورخس بودن و توی بیشتر داستان‌هاش ردپایی ازشون هست :))

مورد بعدی علاقه‌ی بورخس به موضوع وحدته. مثلا داستان الف، که شیء‌ای در اون وجود داره که توش میشه همه چیز و همه زمان رو دید. یا داستان کلمه‌ی خدا که اونجا فرد به وحدت در همه چیز می‌رسه و همه چیز رو در یک چیز می‌بینه. اما بورخس نمیاد فقط این موضوع رو بازنمایی کنه. اتفاقا میاد و این مسائل رو با مسائل مدرن و به روز ترکیب می‌کنه. و باز مثالم داستان الفه که میاد امر متعالی رو، با عشق(یا مرگ) و هنر در جنبه هایی بررسی می کنه. در این که هر سه سوبژکتیو هستن و غیرقابل دست‌رسی. و آیرونی‌ای که توی توضیح دادن وجود داره. امر متعالی، توضیح‌ناپذیره و فقط درک شدنیه و راوی با این که می‌تونه برای لحظه‌ای درک‌اش کنه، اما هرچه می‌خواد توضیحش بده نمی‌شه و می‌شه این توضیح‌ناپذیری رو به هنر یا مرگ هم گسترش داد.

درون‌مایه‌های مرگ، حافظه، نامیرایی، توی داستان‌های بورخس زیاد تکرار شدن.

داستان‌هاش شاید در نظر اول سخت‌خون و پیچیده بیان، فقط کافیه که یکم با تمرکز بیشتری خونده بشن، مخصوصا این که از لحاظ زبانی کمی از کلمات قدیمی استفاده می‌کرده و در ترجمه هم این اتفاق رخ داده و باعث می‌شه که خوندنش کمی دشوار بشه. ولی این دشواری فقط اولِ راه خودش رو نشون می‌ده. من سایت واژه‌یاب رو هم کنار دستم داشتم و گاهی کلمات فارسی رو سرچ می‌کردم.
البته فکر کنم مترجم هم کمی زیاده‌روی کرده توی این امر و متن اصلی یکی از داستان‌ها رو که می‌خوندم اینقدر سخت‌خون به نظر نیومد.

نوع روایت بورخس به نظرم خیلی جذابه. تاثیر ادبیات شرق به خصوص هزار و یک شب توش دیده می‌شه. همین که داستان در دستان داریم یا ارجاع در ارجاع، یا فردی کناره‌ای هست که داستان اصلی رو روایت می‌کنه، همه فکر کنم از تکنیکایی هست که توی ادبیات شرق به چشم می‌خوردن و بورخس هم که کتاب‌دار بوده، حسابی اون‌ها رو خونده بوده.
اقتباس‌هاش از اسطوره‌ها و داستان‌ها هم به نظر من خیلی جذابن. محتویاتی کهن رو می‌ریزه توی فرم‌هایی جدید و وقتی اسم‌ها رو سرچ می‌کنی و داستان‌های پیشین رو می‌خونی، داستان بورخس برات جذاب‌تر می‌شه.

بعضی از داستان‌ها هم که مایه‌های اسطوره‌ای/تاریخی/کهن ندارن، مربوط می‌شن به ریزه‌کاری‌های ذهن انسان و پی‌رنگ توشون کمتر دیده می‌شه. مثلا مردی که جرمی مرتکب شده و فرار کرده به یه هتل و منتظره که بیان و بکشنش. (و اینجا چقدر شبیه می‌شه به داستان «آدم‌کش‌ها»‌ی همینگوی).
البته داستان‌های پی‌رنگ‌دار هم داره، مثلا داستان «ناخوانده» که دو برادر عاشق زنی هستن و کمتر درونیه و بیشتر بیرونی.

بورخس، استادی واقعی در داستان‌نویسیه. نه داستان، به معنای کلاسیک‌اش، شاید بهتر باشه بگیم قصه‌نویسی.
(چون بعضی داستان‌هاش واقعا از داستان فاصله می‌گیرن و حتا به یادداشت یا فرضیه‌بافی و خیال‌بافی نزدیک می‌شن)

Magistralmente escritos, este contos são dos mais originais e surpreendentes que já li.