Monday, January 29, 2007

Borgesque Blurb

My 1981 King Penguin paperback edition of Borges' Labyrinths has the following remark on the back cover.

The twenty-three stories in Labyrinths include Borges's classic 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', a new world where external objects are whatever each person wants; and 'Pierre Menard', the man who re-wrote Don Quixote word for word without ever reading the original.

I find such inaccuracies enormously depressing for some reason. It is no consolation that Borges himself, in 'Partial Magic in the Quixote', tells us that Shakespeare 'include[d] on the stage of Hamlet another stage where a tragedy more or less like that of Hamlet is presented.'

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