Borges on Borges on Borges
Beginning in the mid-1960s, Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo, our beloved Borges, began dictating letters addressed to himself, and by the time he died in 1986 he had dictated 637 of them.
Beginning in the mid-1960s, Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo, our beloved Borges, began dictating to his assistants and readers letters addressed to himself, and by the time he died in 1986 he had dictated 637 of them. He was buried with a briefcase containing the letters, Dante’s Divina Commedia,1 and a box of good pencils. His eyesight returned posthumously, as he predicted it would, and so he began reading and annotating the letters. He saved the Dante for when he could figure out to which destination he had arrived.
The letters concern his literary legacy—in particular the mystery of how he is not the author of “the best Borges story of the 20th Century”: Knut Hamsun’s obituary for Adolph Hitler—and his corpus of unwritten works. Chief among the unwritten works is a long novel called Borges about a blind Argentinian writer who stops publishing new work in order to focus on writing commentaries on the old work and then commentaries on the commentaries and so on.
The commentary on the letters now dwarfs the letters themselves, but Borges is no closer today to solving the mystery of Hamsun’s Hitler obituary than he was in 1996 or 1992 or 2004. And he is running out of pencils.
As a guide for all three afterlife possibilities.