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J. L. Borges on English

In 1977, Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most influential 20th century Spanish-language writers, told William F. Buckley his reasons for feeling, age 78, that English was 'far finer' than his native tongue. “Every writer creates his own precursors”, Borges wrote in an essay on Kafka. “His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.” Borges’ own influences range from Paul Valery to Arthur Schopenhauer, from Dante to Beowulf and the Kabballah. He translated Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, André Gide, Franz Kafka and epic poems from Old English and Old Norse. He admired Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, Joseph Conrad and the stories of Henry James and Ring Lardner. “What Borges did was the ultimate high-low fusion,” says critic Marcela Valdes, “mixing pulp material – detective stories, sci-fi scenarios – with architectural structures and philosophical preoccupations. He loved Buenos Aires, but the world he created in his fiction was essentially a world made out of a library.” Borges’ preoccupations and innovations are splendidly displayed in Ficciones. He was an early genre blender, for instance. The Garden of Forking Paths, framed as a 1916 deposition by Dr Yu Tsun, a Chinese spy descended from a Hunnan governor who “abandoned all to make a book and a labyrinth,” is “an enormous guessing game, or parable, in which the subject is time,” and a detective story. Its first US publication was in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.