« This book is my will »: For the first time in Bulgarian came out « Seven Dinners » by Borges

In the beginning of May for the first time in Bulgarian, the collection « Seven evenings » by Jorge Luis Borges was released, one of the acknowledged geniuses of world literature, reported the Hummingbird Publishing House. The publication brings together the conversations that the writer exported in 1977 at the Colossey Theater in Buenos Aires. The translator is Kalin Koev and the artist of the cover is Stefan Kasarov.

The publisher states that in Seven evenings, Borges, like Cervantes, is a reader who tells, comments, summarizes foreign texts. As in many other cases, reading here becomes an act of creation, recreation, interpretation, promotion, controversy and pleasure.

Horhe Luis Borges (1899-1986) was born in Buenos Aires, but only fifteen years left for Geneva. There he becomes acquainted with the ideas of Schopenhauer, the work of Walt Whitman, and the French symbolists Rambo, Verlelene and Malarme, and in Spain, where he settles himself, falls within the circle of local writers ultrastists. In 1921 he returned to Argentina and took part in the founding of several literary and philosophical magazines. Borges owes her worldwide fame to his short stories and literary essays. His unauthorized creative labyrinths combine fictions, philosophy and history, bring the reader into unsolved dreams and insomnia, introduce him to imaginary encyclopedias and ontological studies, turning all the concepts of the uses of the language. And the poetic collection « Praise of Darkness », also published in our country with the logo of « Hummingbirds », is a magical testimony that Borges is unattainable in his ability to contemplate and rearrange reality, regardless of the genre in which he creates.

Dnevnik publishes an excerpt from Seven Evenings, provided to the editorial office by the Hummingbird Publishing House.

Jorge Luis Borges –

From the « evening »

Divine comedy

Ladies, gentlemen! Paul Claudel has written a page unworthy of Paul Claudel. She states that the spectacles that await us beyond the bodily death will certainly not look like those described by Dante in « AD », « Purgatory » and « Paradise ». This curious observation of clodel in an otherwise delightful article can be commented in two ways.

First of all, we see in this observation proof of the intensity of the lace text. As we read or even after we have read the poem, we tend to think that he imagines the other world just as he depicts it. We tend to be fatally wrong, believing that Dante really thinks how, when he dies, he will find herself in the inverted mountain of hell, in the terraces of purgatory or in the concentric heaven of paradise. And he will talk to the shadows (shadows of classical antiquity) and some of them will talk to him in Terzi in Italian.

This is obviously absurd. Claudel’s observation corresponds not to what readers think (because if they think, they will understand that it is absurd), but of what they feel and which can be away from the pleasure, from the great pleasure in reading this work.

In order to reject the thesis, evidence is full. One is the statement that is attributed to Dante’s son. He says that his father has set himself the task of showing the life of sinners through the idea of ​​hell, the life of the people who quit through the idea of ​​purgatory and the life of the righteous through the idea of ​​Paradise. He doesn’t read literally. We also have a Dante testimony in the message dedicated to Kaggrande Della Rock.

The message is considered apocryphal, but anyway, it cannot be created long after Dante and in any case corresponds to the era. It claims that « divine comedy » can be read in four ways, one being literal and the other – the allegorical one. According to the second, Dante is a symbol of man, Beatrice is of faith, and Virgil – of reason.

The idea of ​​a text that may have different interpretations is characteristic of the Middle Ages – this Middle Ages, so slandered and complex, gave us the Gothic architecture, Icelandic sagas and scholastic philosophy in which everything is questioned. However, it has given us first and foremost a « divine comedy », which we continue to read, which continues to amaze us, which will remain after us beyond our insomnia, which will be enriched by every generation of readers.

We should recall Scott Eriugena, who claims that the Bible is a text that hides endless interpretations and can be compared to the peacock’s multi -base tail. The Jewish Kabbalists claim that the Bible is written for each believer individually.

This is not incredible if we think that the creator of the text and the creator of the reader is the same – God. Dante had no reason to suggest that his story responds to a real idea of ​​the world of the dead. This was impossible. Dante couldn’t think so.

However, I believe in the need for a naive understanding that we are reading a true story. In this way, we let the story carry us. For my part, I can say that I am a reader for the pleasure: I have never read a book because it is ancient. I read books because of the aesthetic pleasure they bring me and put off the comments and criticism. When I first read « Divine Comedy », I left the story to carry me. I read it like the others, not so well known books. Now that I am among friends and talking not with everyone, but with each of you individually, I want to share the story of my personal connection with this work.

It all started shortly before the dictatorship. I worked in a library in the Almagro neighborhood.

I lived in Buenos Aires on Erasa and Pueiredon, I had to travel in slow and lonely trams for the long distance from this northern neighborhood to the library in South Almagro, located on La Plata Boulevard and Carlos Kalvo. Coincidence (unless there is a coincidence and we call « coincidence » that we do not know the complex mechanism of conditionality) wants to find three small volumes in the Mitchell Bookstore, today non -existent, but bearing me so many memories. These three volumes (today I had to bring at least one for a mascot) were « hell », « purgatory » and « paradise », translated into English by Carlisle, but not by Thomas Carlisle, which will be discussed further.

They were very comfortable books published by Dent. I could carry them in my pocket. On the one hand was the Italian text and on the other – the text in English, literally translated.

I used the following approach: I first read a three -way, a terrace in English in prose: then I read the same three -family, the same terrace in Italian; I went on until I reached the end of the song. Then I read everything in English and then everything in Italian. In this first reading, I realized that translations could not be a substitute for the original text. The translation may be, in any case, a means and an incentive to approach the reader to the original; First of all, in the case of Spanish.

I think Cervantes somewhere in Don Quixote says that he can be understood by two octaves in Tuscany.

Well, these two octaves in Tuscany were provided to me by the kinship between Italian and Spanish. Even then, I realized that the poems, above all, Dante’s big poems, are much more than what they mean. The verse, apart from so many other things, is intonation, accentuation, in many cases, both untranslated. I noticed this from the beginning. When I reached the subliminal point of Paradise, to the Desert of Paradise, there, at the moment when Dante was abandoned by Vergil, he is lonely and shouting it, I felt that I could read straightforward the Italian text and only look from time to time English. I read these three volumes during those slow tram trips. Then I read other publications.

I have read many times « Divine Comedy ». The truth is, I don’t know Italian, I don’t know any other Italian, other than the one that Dante taught me and which he showed me later arryo when I read the « furious Orlando ». And then, of course, the easier cross. I have read almost all the books of Croca and I do not always agree with him, but I feel his charm. The charm is, as Stevenson says, one of the basic qualities that the writer must possess. Without the charm, everything else is useless.