Borges’s secret cycle in Mar del Plata which illuminates new keys to his work and thought

Between April and September 1966 Borges travels to Mar del Plata eleven times. He does this every fifteen days – except in July due to the winter holidays. Departure by train from Constitución. Homero Guglielmini – his colleague from the magazine Inicial Years (1923-1927) – goes to wait for him at the station in the Happy City. Once there, on Monday, He spoke on English and North American literature at the School of Santa Cecilia, then home of the Catholic University.

A crowd of people attends his lessons. Borges explains Beowulf and the origins of Old English; On the Christian faith of Thomas More and on the blindness of John Milton; About Shakespeare’s world and the sudden interruptions in Chaucer’s works.

Also in attendance was LHe graduates first in literature which the city will have. Layers It was carefully recorded and transcribed. We owe it to Celia Pérez Mathiassen to protect this collection. We know all this thanks to Mariela Blanco, editor of the exceptional new volume of Borges chapters and daughter of Graciella Mazzanti, one of the enthusiastic students who attended that course.

Guarded for years by its early recipients, it has now come to light in a fine edition with notes by Germán Alvarez in the book. Borges in Mar del Plata. English and North American Literature Course, by Jorge Luis Borges (south america).

For Mariela Blanco, the sixth and seventh grades – from June 27 to July 25, 1966, devoted to the eighteenth century and the origins of Romanticism – fell between The most original contributions to the entire series. In one of them he talks about Jonathan Swift and Gulliver’s Travels Borges points out the irony that one of the founders of pessimism also gave rise to a children’s book.

The oral nature of his classes, and the fact that he is used to improvisation, gave us that Borges who also points out the themes that fill his literature. Topics such as improving originals through translation or changing citations; The appearance of shame in the history of mankind or the wonderful passion for encyclopedias and dictionaries. These are just some of the many side topics that appear in the great speaker’s digressions.

reading English and North American Literature Course We can get a broader idea of ​​Anglo-Saxon literature. but also, We can understand the subtleties of Borges’s work.

Understand, for example, that “Axaxas” – that word that appears in expressions in some of his stories (“Axaxas (flow) of Mlu (moon)”, whose name occurs in “Telon, Ucpar, Orbis Tertius” and in “The Library of Babylon”) – is taken from the rhyme scheme of Achaxes. And that the object called “A” may not only be a glass ball – in the manner of the bubble that Citizen Kane holds in his hands in the Orson Welles film – but also something similar in shape to a river.

This is actually another source of the Alif: “Alif” is the name of the sacred river that flows through the palace of Xanadu in “Kublai Khan,” Coleridge’s poem. Coleridge’s poem is important. It represents one of the roots that connect Borges’s literature with dreams.

Borges’s lessons convey the magic of reading. But also astonishment at what Borges read, how he read it and in what ways he evokes it. Now that things like history or philosophy and even the future of the humanities are in question, the utility of literature is clear: as an inevitable re-creation that removes the past from its disappearance.

We see, contemplate and study the universe, because in it something of the meaning of existence itself is put to the test, beyond all dogma. In his chapters, Borges seems not so much fascinated by the possibilities of knowledgeRather, it is the same astonishment that exists in the act of knowing. In its associative way, everything finally takes shape. For him, the ages are the means by which history must continue its story.

An object in a miscellaneous cabinet is merely a pretext for the appearance of one era in another. The missing page on the library shelf explains that text is a means for text to produce more texts. Although Borges was a person deeply committed to individual freedoms, His sense of history does not prevent him from practicing Stoicism. The species is always more important than the individual.

To amplify this, Borges proposes his exercises in genealogy. We can think Don Fausto By Estanislao del Campo. Then think about it magnificence By Goethe. And even think magnificence By Marlowe. But for Borges, this would not be enough. Because magnificence Marlowe has a clear connection to Marlowe’s Tamerlane. Both Faust and Tamerlane sell their souls. They end up alone and crazy.

Why did Borges interrupt his lessons? For Mariela Blanco, a plausible hypothesis might be the anonymous letters addressed to the Dean of the University of Central Asia, appointing him A teacher who did not declare himself Catholic.

In A Class of 23 May 1966, Borges describes the martyrdom of Thomas More, whom Henry VIII took to the scaffold on 6 July 1535 for opposing the Reformation and accused of high treason for opposing the king’s second marriage – to Anne Boleyn -. This position did not prevent Borges, in a classroom on June 27, 1966, from rephrasing Edward Gibbon’s anti-Christian paradoxes.

On September 19, 1966, Borges taught his last class in Mar del Plata. Talking about Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Of Transcendentalism and the Origins of North American Literature. Without becoming the subject of their classes, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and the development of the American novel remain. Some of these themes can be reconstructed through other books. like Introduction to North American Literature (1967, Jorge Luis Borges with Esther Zemborin).

1966, year pistol From the Beatles and Consequences By Rolling Stone It’s also the year of Jorge Luis Borges’ travels to Mar del Plata. While Syd Barrett and Roger Waters shaped the psychedelic music of Pink Floyd, Borges embarks on a journey back to the 11th century, to an ancient world where two brothers – King Harold and Count Tostig – fight over the fate of the kingdom.

One night, after Harold kills Tostig, the Norman invasion will occur. It will change the fate of that island forever. Curiously, this happened in 1066. Nine hundred years later in Mar del Plata, as if celebrating a secret anniversary, Borges returns to the topic again.

Borges in Mar del Plata. English and North American Literature Course, Written by Jorge Luis Borges (South America).