Jorge Luis Borges: -- "I hope my books ... will be read as riddles, not as enigmas. ..."

[henh...@gmail.com]

Jorge Luis Borges:

"I hope my books will last a hundred years,
but I hope they will be read as riddles, not as enigmas. I hope my
readers will find in them the pleasure of guessing, not the
satisfaction of solving."


----------- this is a bit obscure in English

----------------- Does it make more sense in Spanish?

[Ed Cryer]

What's the Spanish?

That English version kind of suggests that he'd prefer not to be understood.

Ed

[henh...@gmail.com]

i can't find the quote in Spanish (just now) i'll keep looking

he's saying that ... (he's hoping that) his story is like a Chewing-Gum that never goes bland or flat...

[Ed Cryer]

This question has sparked a whole host of thoughts in me. I'd like to
try and give some kind of coherent word picture of them.

Gabriel García Márquez, with his magical realism, has always pleased me.
I find his books easy to understand; and appreciate. A phrase of T S
Eliot's runs through my head; mixing memory and desire, though Márquez
mixes memory, illusion, myth, and some other things in his cauldron. But
the main strand of truth underlies it all.

Jorge Luis Borges, with his garden of forking paths, labours relativism.
That's what echoes in my head when I read him; truth is a butterfly that
you can't catch. And science fiction thunders loudly; parallel
universes, time warps, the quantum microscopic world straying into the
macroscopic world of classical physics.

It's probably this way of looking at his books that he's unhappy with.
He'd like them to be appreciated in the same way that we view Márquez;
wherein the artistry hits you rather than a search for the underlying
explanation.

Ed

[Ed Cryer]

I have an unwritten Borges story; maybe a collaboration with Agatha
Christie and Isaac Asimov.

A village post-office mistress is murdered. The detective finds three
different perpetrators, but they all have different motives, different
ages, different sexes, and they live in different universes. The
detective (be it Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple) finds a place in his/her
village with a space-time warp, and goes tourist through its passages,
like Bill & Ted in their Excellent Adventure. She meets all three perps,
finds out all the details, motives and circumstances; and then waits for
the aligning of the planets (as in 2001 Space Odyssey) so that she can
get through to God the Creator. He will decide on the truth.
God holds court, bangs his gavel, and a million other worm-holes open
up; and a million other perps step into the frame.

Ed

[Btraven]

Hen, nothing like that found searching for "borges "espero que mis libros""
But Borges knew English very well........ but nothing there either.
Maybe he never said it. It would be better to have evidence for the attribution but I do admit that the quote whether true or not, does sound like something Borges may have said in some language.
I would at least seem to apply to the story "The House of Asterion" and even add the notion of 'labyrinth' to those of 'puzzle' and 'enigma.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_Asterion

I vaguely remember making or reading a Latin version of that story many months or a few years ago in the Grex. The lady from Madrid (Seville? Gibraltar?) who discussed the story left the Grex a while back. Is there anyone else here, besides Edus Britannus' who might post something there in Latin?

b.t.raven