LITERATURE-ARGENTINA: Borges’ Works to Tour the World

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jan 12 1999 (IPS) - If Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges were still alive, he might feel overwhelmed by the homage that his devotees worldwide will render him in honour of the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Not even his limitless imagination, his dreams or his fantasies would have helped him imagine that in December 1998 his face would grace postage stamps. The tribute will spread so widely throughout the world that those not yet familiar with the works of one of Latin America’s greatest writers will almost surely find out in 1999.

The legendary poet and writer was born in Buenos Aires on Aug. 24, 1899, and died in Geneva in 1986.

A two-storey maze that introduces visitors to the world of Borges will tour the Americas, Asia and Europe. The exposition, which will have “forking paths” – as in one of his short stories (The Garden of Forking Paths) – will be inaugurated in Venice in February and wind up in Tokyo in mid-2000.

The travelling mazes, which will be accompanied by Maria Kodama, Borges’ widow, will also visit Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, France, Germany, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland and the United States. It will offer a range of choices of tours through the poet’s life and work.

The first floor of the labyrinth will be reserved for video projections and conferences aimed at linking the life and works of the author of ‘Fictions’, Irma Sangara, vice-president of the Borges International Foundation, told IPS. The second storey will present the writer’s manuscripts, books, walking sticks and magazine collections.

A showcase will exhibit Borges’ references to the countries hosting the exposition – their cities, writers, painters or philosophers.

Seminars, debates, literary and architecture contests, photo exhibitions, fresh editions of books, conferences, essays, new translations of Borges’ works and even an exposition of the furnishings he used while serving as director of the National Library in Argentina, will take place in a number of countries.

An international seminar on Borges’ works will be held in March at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Participants will include Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, a close friend of Borges – with whom he co-authored a number of short stories – and a winner, like Borges, of the Cervantes literature award.

The University of Aarhus, in Denmark – which has a Borges Centre reknowned among his enthusiasts – is preparing two special editions (totalling more than 600 pages) of its magazine ‘Borges Variations’.

Denmark’s Borges Centre has a professorship in the name of the great Argentine writer and a library with more than 3,000 books on his life and his work: a fitting compensation for Borges’ well- known passion for Scandinavia, its poetry and legends. The University of Oslo in Norway is also preparing to pay him homage through seminars and colloquiums.

In June, Brazil’s University of Sao Paulo will analyse Borges’ influence on Brazilian authors while Horacio Salas, Borges’ biographer, will give a course on the writer’s works at the National Library in Madrid. Salas signed a contract this month for his biography of Borges to be translated into Japanese and published by the Suiseisha publishing house in July.

In July, the Casa de las Americas in Cuba will organise a symposium, while the Fondo de Cultura Economica (Economic Culture Fund) in Mexico will publish a volume of essays on Borges in August. In Guatemala, the centennial of Borges’ birth will be commemorated along with that of Guatemalan Nobel laureate Miguel Angel Asturias.

The University of London’s King’s College will also pay tribute to the Latin American author, who had a level of familiarity with English culture obtained by few foreigners, and wrote as well in English as he did in Spanish.

October and November will be months of intense activity among lovers of Borges’ literature in the United States.

The University of Maryland is announcing a seminar on the impact of the author’s works on U.S. literature, and will sponsor a gathering of Latin American writers in Buenos Aires. The University of Pennsylvania will also render him homage.

The travelling maze will pass through Buenos Aires in August. And the Emecé publishing house will compile, in one volume, the articles Borges wrote for the literary magazine Sur, and in another, his contributions to another publication, El Hogar, written over the space of 22 years.

New editions of his complete works and the interviews he granted journalists will also be published, as well as a book with accounts of his life as director of the National Library from 1955 to 1973.

Emecé will also celebrate the centennial of Borges’ birth with an unique version of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince’ – a translation into Spanish by a 10-year-old Borges.

Argentina’s Secretariat of Culture will organise a competition of short stories and poetry, in which it will award the ‘Gran Premio (Grand Prize) Jorge Luis Borges’, and produce a compact disc with Borges’ poetry recited by the late writer himself.

The National Library will also exhibit the first publications of his works, magazines to which he contributed and even the office where he carried out his duties as director.