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This is a quote from an interview he gave in 1931.
Traigo preparados cuatro libros. De teatro. De poesía. Y de impresiones neoyorkinas, el que puede titularse : la ciudad, interpretación personal, abstracción impersonal, sin lugar ni tiempo dentro de aquella ciudad mundo. Un símbolo patético : Sufrimiento. Pero del revés, sin dramatismo. Es una puesta en ...
answered Feb 26 '17 at 19:54
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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13
In 2016, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Cervantes' death, Taberna Libraria published a facsimile edition of all of the author's manuscripts. This edition contains only 12 manuscripts. For a description, see the PDF file Autógrafos de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (in Spanish). The book was published in a limited edition of 1616 copies. King ...
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Brenci Patiño makes the point that the two women, Modesta and the indigenous woman, are "pitted against each other" by the social structure around them. They "share similar experiences of oppression," but must fight each other for survival.
Modesta, as a servant to a wealthy family, was abused and made to live in fear. So the specific ...
answered Jan 25 '17 at 12:50
Nathaniel is protesting
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You are bringing the first quote a little out of context:
The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary from of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, ...
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Like many of Borges's tales, The Library of Babel is meant more as a thought experiment than a realistic story. Don't overthink it.
There's no mention anywhere in the story of any of various practicalities of life:
where the librarians get food and how they eat
how the plumbing for the toilets is operated and maintained
how the librarian population is ...
10
A central concern of The Library of Babel -- and particularly this section of it -- is the search for order and meaning within a chaotic world.
In this passage, Borges introduces the Purifiers; those who, in their pursuit of truth and meaning, destroy anything they consider of no value:
Others, inversely, believed that it was fundamental to eliminate ...
9
Remember that the Library is infinite and complete:
the Library is "total" - perfect, complete, and whole - and that its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite) - that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language.
Note the phrase "in every ...
9
Does the use of the verb swallow have anything to do with the fish that swallowed Jonah?
Exactly.
Jonah's wife had to "swallow" (accept) the ridiculous story (as an explanation for his disappearance for a few days) that Jonah had been swallowed by a whale and survived.
So "she" is talking about a story that is so ridiculous that not even Jonah's wife ...
8
As Cascabel rightly says, there is no direct equivalent to a Pension in Britain - in terms of the particular facilities provided.
As mentioned, this is not the only work in which Pension is not translated, either from Spanish or from French.
Translation to, for example, Bed & Breakfast would carry connotations to a British reader that are not intended ...
8
Hexagons are a natural pattern found in various orderly structures in nature: for example, the cells of a beehive, or the columns of the Giant's Causeway. By making his Library a hexagonal tessellation, Borges could be attempting to evoke thoughts of the most perfect and ordered natural phenomena.
One geometric reason for the popularity of hexagons is that ...
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There are several options -- which makes sense, as this is a story which explores the idea of infinity.
The Library is spherical
Immediately following the line "I say that the Library is unending", the narrator says:
Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose ...
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The Library of Babel cannot be taken as plausible, realistic worldbuilding. "How can real-world languages exist" is not going to have more of an answer than "How does an immense number of bound books exist," or "How can they know what bread or pyramids are, when they can't possibly have either." There is excellent reason for Borges to use real languages, but ...
7
Note that has outlined by Beastly Gerbil, the protagonist is living through events based on Borges's on life: in his novel, the protagonist hits a recently painted door jamb, while in his autobiography, Borges hits a freshly painted open casement window. The reference to fresh paint seems to make no doubt of the biographical nature of the event.
The many ...
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While this does not answer the significance of the entire book, it focuses on a few key points.
The story is actually partially autobiographical.
In his early life, Borges worked in a library. In the year 1938, the same year his father died, he bumped his head on a window and nearly died of septicemia - blood poisoning. 'The south' was published in 1953, ...
5
Note that Sancho's request in Ch 25 is not the first time he has asked for the injunction against his speaking be lifted. In Ch 21 (Mabrino's helmet) Sancho asks
As they went along, then, in this way Sancho said to his master, "Senor, would your worship give me leave to speak a little to you? For since you laid that hard injunction of silence on me ...
5
My comment about Borges got me web searching and this time I was able to find the author, by researching South American female contemporaries of Borges. She is Clarice Lispector (b. 1920, d. 1977).
If you Google "Clarice Lispector cockroach" you can find references to her story "The Fifth Story" about cockroaches who are frozen like "statues" by the borax ...
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Thank you for asking this question! (Not least because I am itinerant and my Borges is all in boxes, but your question led me to this collected stories of Borges in pdf, which will provide ℵ value on any mobile device.)
Borges was not only profound, he intended his stories to be enigmas. Any analysis I give can only be partial, and must be regarded as ...
5
Let's first get some more context from the excerpt and highlight a few words:
It’s always raining there, and there’s hardly a breath of air. I travel to Pachuca to see her once a month, usually on Sundays. But I never go as far as the cemetery, because I’m allergic to pollen and there are lots of flowers there. I get off the bus not far from the gates, at ...
5
I consulted a number of reference works, handbooks and biographies on Shakespeare to check whether Lope de Vega is mentioned at all. The results are listed below.
A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964, edited by F. E. Halliday (Penguin 1964) has an entry on Lope de Vega containing the following information:
About the time that Shakespeare was writing Romeo and ...
5
An English translation of "Encargo" appeared in New Orleans Review, vol. 6 no. 2, p. 105, with the title "Commission." The translators are Calvin Harlan, Manuel Menan, and Beatriz Varela. The journal is published by the Department of English at Loyola University. Although the issue does not give a specific date, the journal has been ...
4
In the beginning, Macondo was a city solidly set in reality. Magical things happened, but everybody agreed they happened. However, as time passed by, gradually the hold of Macondo on reality started slipping. Things became increasingly illusory. There are several instances of this:
Fernanda's prolonged correspondence with the imaginary doctors.
The massacre ...
4
It turns out Recabarren was a political figure in Chile who was imprisoned for 8 months.
As you will recall, the setting of the story is in Latin America.
The loss of voice could be a reference to being silenced politically, and connected to the black guitarist as a symbol of the oppressed classes, where "Iron War" might be taken as the brutality ...
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I'd really like to see the full text of your translation. It differs from the two translations I posted in the body of your question. In the latter cases, they use the English "obscured", but yours uses the literal translation of "darkness".
Looking at the etymology of obscure, the direct use of the English term, as opposed to the literal translation is ...
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The poem as a whole contrasts the experience of people of colour in their ancestral land with their experience of New York. The symbolic protagonist is a true "king" in his own land. But while he may also be "king" in Harlem, it is a far less noble office, one that is forced to play second fiddle to the of the white population.
In African myth, the ...
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Enrique Suárez Figaredo, in his edition to El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de La Mancha, uses the contents of the entry "átomo" in the Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española by Sebastián de Covarrubias to interpret it as specks of dust:
n. 52 átomos del sol: motas de polvo. Lo explica el Tesoro: Comúnmente llámamos átomos aquellas moticas que ...
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