Overview

A distinguished poet and essayist and one of the finest writers of short stories in world letters, Jorge Luis Borges deliberately and regularly altered his work by extensive revision. In this volume, renowned Borges scholar Daniel Balderston undertakes to piece together Borges's creative process through the marks he left on paper. Balderston has consulted over 170 manuscripts and primary documents to reconstruct the creative process by which Borges arrived at his final published texts. How Borges Wrote is organized around the stages of the his writing process, from notes on his reading and brainstorming sessions to his compositional notebooks, revisions to various drafts, and even corrections in already-published works. The book includes hundreds of reproductions of Borges’s manuscripts, allowing the reader to see clearly how he revised and """"thought"""" on paper. The manuscripts studied include many of Borges’s most celebrated stories and essays-""""The Aleph,"""" """"Kafka and His Precursors,"""" """"The Cult of the Phoenix,"""" """"The Garden of Forking Paths,"""" """"Emma Zunz,"""" and many others-as well as lesser known but important works such as his 1930 biography of the poet Evaristo Carriego. As the first and only attempt at a systematic and comprehensive study of the trajectory of Borges's creative process, this will become a definitive work for all scholars who wish to trace how Borges wrote.

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Daniel Balderston is one of the leading Borges scholars of our time, internationally respected both for the depth and extent of his knowledge and for his meticulous scholarship. How Borges Wrote is the first comprehensive book published on Borges's composition techniques and promises to be the definitive study for the foreseeable future. A monumental work.--Evelyn Fishburn, University College London, author of Hidden Pleasures in Borges's Fiction and coauthor of A Dictionary of Borges

In this superb study, Balderston draws attention to Borges's manuscripts and marginalia to highlight why Borges's writing process merits critical attention. Borges did not believe in a final text, and Balderston points out how the prolific writer obsessively edited his own texts, even after publication.... Of special interest are the facsimiles with transcriptions. At the end of this study readers will be reminded of Borges's words quoted in the introduction: Lo marginal es lo m s bello (What is marginal is what is most beautiful). Balderston includes an extensive bibliography. Summing Up: Essential. --CHOICE With How Borges Wrote, Daniel Balderston positions himself yet again as the ultimate Borges scholar. In a sophisticated and probing study of hundreds of manuscripts and notebooks, Balderston sheds light on Borges's creative process by analyzing how the Argentine author used marginal annotations, textual excisions and insertions, and mathematical symbols to produce some of the most original pieces of literature in the twentieth century. As he did with Out of Context, Balderston's extraordinary erudition and refined critical skills dramatically transform our understanding of Borges's work--and shape the way it will be read in the future. --Fernando Degiovanni, The Graduate Center, CUNY In a sophisticated and probing study of hundreds of manuscripts and notebooks, Daniel Balderston sheds light on Borges's creative process by analyzing how the Argentine author used marginal annotations, textual excisions and insertions, and mathematical symbols to produce some of the most original pieces of literature in the twentieth century. Balderston's extraordinary erudition and refined critical skills dramatically transform our understanding of Borges's work--and shape the way it will be read in the future. --Fernando Degiovanni, The Graduate Center, CUNY, author of Los textos de la patria: Nacionalismo, pol ticas culturales y canon en Argentina Daniel Balderston is one of the leading Borges scholars of our time, internationally respected both for the depth and extent of his knowledge and for his meticulous scholarship. How Borges Wrote is the first comprehensive book published on Borges's composition techniques and promises to be the definitive study for the foreseeable future. A monumental work. --Evelyn Fishburn, University College London, author of Hidden Pleasures in Borges's Fiction and coauthor of A Dictionary of Borges

Daniel Balderston is one of the leading Borges scholars of our time, internationally respected both for the depth and extent of his knowledge and for his meticulous scholarship. How Borges Wrote is the first comprehensive book published on Borges's composition techniques and promises to be the definitive study for the foreseeable future. A monumental work. --Evelyn Fishburn, University College London, author of Hidden Pleasures in Borges's Fiction and coauthor of A Dictionary of Borges

Author Information

Daniel Balderston is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges.

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