13 Jorge Luis Borges Quotes on Literature

Jorge Luis Borges quotes on literature

12. El original es infiel a la traduccion.

15. There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.

41. Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.

42. The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to contruct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.

63. Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

81. That history should have imitated history was already sufficiently marvellous; that history should imitate literature is inconceivable....

88. Toward dawn, he dreamed that he was in hiding, in one of the naves of the Clementine Library. What are you looking for? a librarian wearing dark glasses asked him. I'm looking for God, Hladik replied. God, the librarian said, is in one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the four hundred thousand volumes in the Clementine. My parents and my parents' parents searched for that letter; I myself have gone blind searching for it.

97. 'Wakefield' prefigures Franz Kafka, but the latter modifies, and sharpens, the reading of 'Wakefield.' The debt is mutual; a great writer creates his or her precursors. He or she creates them and in some fashion justifies them.

100. Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

103. In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

113. Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

118. Of course, like all young men, I tried to be as unhappy as I could - a kind of Hamlet and Raskolnikov rolled into one.

148. Extremes of fantastic hope and skepticism paradoxically coexist in Borges' thought. In 'Pascal's Sphere' he examines an image which is not only paradoxical in itself - the universe as an infinite sphere, in other words, a boundless form perfectly circumscribed - but which has also served to express diametrically opposite emotions: Bruno's elation and Pascal's anguish. But the other basic symmetry to note here is Borges' history of the metaphor. Not only paradoxes are found throughout this collection, but also various listings of ideas or themes or images which though diverse in origin and detail are essentially the same. In 'The Flower of Coleridge' the coincidence of Valery's, Emerson's, and Shelley's conceptions of all literature as the product of one Author seems itself to bear out that conception. At the beginning of the essay on Hawthorne, Borges again briefly traces the history of a metaphor - the likening of our dreams to a theatrical performance - and adds that true metaphors cannot be invented, since they have always existed. Such 'avatars' point beyond the flux and diversity of history to a realm of eternal archetypes, which, though limited in number, 'can be all things for all people, like the Apostle.' While the paradox upsets our common notions of reality and suggests that irreducible elements are actually one, recurrence negates history and the separateness of individuals. Of course, this too is a paradox, as 'New Refutation of Time' shows: time must exist in order to provide the successive identities with which it is to be 'refuted.' The two symmetries noted above, if we pursue their implications far enough, finally coalesce, with something of the same dizzying sense, so frequent in Borges' stories, of infinite permutations lurking at every turn. Both are uses of what he calls a pantheist extension of the principle of identity - God is all things: a suitably heterogeneous selection of these may allude to Totality - which has, as he notes in the essay on Whitman, unlimited rhetorical possibilities.