5/20/2023 0 Comments Jay parini borges![]() ![]() ![]() “The world is built upon facts!” It was arranged for me to meet Alastair at the Central Tavern, on Market Street, the following afternoon. A stickler for facts, she had me recite the kings and queens again and again. ![]() Andrews, where I had weekly tutorials with her in 19th-century British history. She phoned him from her study in Hamilton Hall at the University of St. ![]() When I told her that I wrote poetry, she said, “In which case you must meet I had met him at the suggestion of my history tutor, Miss Anne Wright. Andrews, with a view of the North Sea through his kitchen window. Alastair lived at Pilmour Cottage, on the edge of the Old Course in St. He had been translated by Alastair Reid, the Scottish poet and essayist, who was my mentor and close friend during my seven years in Scotland. Borges the first time we met, and he corrected me. Fiction means, in its Latin root-word, “shaping.” And Borges was always shaping realities, even making them. It was all fiction for him, as in the title of his most celebrated volume, Ficciones, first published in the early 1940s. And the odor gives off a peculiar sweetness, too, as if he has smoked ripe old tobacco in a pipe for many decades, although I suspect he didn’t.Ī writer of poems and brief, enigmatic stories, and provocative essays that were also stories, Borges moved easily between fact and fiction, and his wild inventions became truths. He reeks of age, with the mustiness, the sourness of years. I can smell Borges in my dreams, and I dream about him often. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |