Borges at Eighty: Conversations

by Jorge Luis Borges, Willis Barnstone (Editor)

Overview

A collection of interviews now available from New Directions for the first time

The words of a genius: Borges at Eighty transcends our expectations of ordinary conversation. In these interviews with Barnstone, Dick Cavett, and Alastair Reid, Borges touches on favorite writers (Whitman, Poe, Emerson) and familiar themes — labyrinths, mystic experiences, and death — and always with great, throw-away humor. For example, discussing nightmares, he concludes,“When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811223249
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	11/30/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jorge Luis Borges (1890-1982), Argentine poet, critic, and short-story writer, revolutionized modern literature. He was completely blind when appointed the head of Argentina’s National Library.
Willis Barnstone, professor, poet, and scholar, is the author of eighty volumes, including The Restored New Testament, The Gnostic Bible, The Poems of Jesus Christ, The Poetics of Translation, and Mexico in My Heart: New and Selected Poems. He lives in Oakland, California, and Paris.

Date of Birth:

August 24, 1899

Date of Death:

June 14, 1986

Place of Birth:

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Place of Death:

Geneva, Switzerland

Education:

B.A., Collège Calvin de Genève, 1914

Editorial Reviews

One of the collection’s most interesting aspects is the interaction of these incompatible elements: the obvious pleasure Borges takes in the opportunity to present himself for public consumption, and his reflexive skepticism about the necessary fraudulence of the writer as personality... The man we see in these eleven interviews is a person made of books, a librarian who often remarked that his idea of paradise was an endless library — a sort of eternal busman’s holiday.

The New Yorker