Esther Allen | Borges & Borges

A curious feature of Jorge Luis Borges’s obra is the numerous books it includes that he didn’t write but spoke during various kinds of interaction with other people. Into this category fall the many volumes of interviews, as well as Borges Profesor (2000), transcribed from tapes recorded by Borges’s students. By far the most crucial item is Adolfo Bioy Casares’ Borges (2006), 1600 pages of diary entries spanning half a century. Borges may be the single most intimate, detailed, insightful, and sustained record of one writer’s life and thought ever made by another. Though sometimes, and not inaccurately, described as Bioy’s autobiography, Borges is about Borges and also, in large measure, by Borges, the oral Borges, whose words Bioy often transcribes.

The relationship of Bioy’s book to the writer whose name it takes as title problematizes and undermines legal concepts of originality, authorship, ownership, and selfhood. Intellectual property issues are rarely the focus of literary scholarship, but as David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu have recently argued, they are fundamental to any real understanding of how literature circulates globally, particularly during the decades since Borges’s passing. The ever-expanding legal framework that makes literature a heritable asset to be monopolized for nearly a century after a writer’s death has, in the case of the Borges estate, had “severe human ” and severe creative and scholarly costs (Chacoff).

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Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies

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