Excerpt

From On Writing

Author Jorge Luis Borges

Introduction by Suzanne Jill Levine

Edited by Suzanne Jill Levine

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On Writing by Jorge Luis Borges

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On Writing

Contents

Introduction by Suzanne Jill Levine
A Note on the Translations

I. Becoming a Man of Letters
• Ultra Manifesto
• On Expressionism
• After Images
• Joyce’s Ulysses
• The Ballad of Reading Gaol

II. Word Music
• Verbiage for Poems
• An Investigation of the Word
• The Art of Verbal Abuse
• On Literary Description
• On Metaphor
• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

III. On Translation
• Two Ways to Translate
• The Homeric Versions

IV. Reading as Writing
• A Profession of Literary Faith
• Literary Pleasure
• The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader
• The Paradox of Apollinaire
• Kafka and his Precursors
• Flaubert and his Exemplary Destiny

V. The Critic at Work
• Virginia Woolf
• T. S. Eliot
• Paul Valéry
• William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
• Herman Mellville, Bartleby the Scrivener
• Henry James, The Abasement of the Northmores
• Marcel Schwob, Imaginary Lives
• H. G. Wells, The Time Machine; The, Invisible Man
• Julio Cortázar, Stories

VI. The Perfect Plot
• The Labyrinths of the Detective Story and Chesterton
• Ellery Queen, The Halfway House
• Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel
• Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
• The Detective Story

VII. Narrative Art
• Stories from Turkestan
• The Cinematograph, the Biograph
• Narrative Art and Magic
• Preface to the 1954 edition of A Universal History of Infamy
• When Fiction Lives in Fiction

Notes
Sources

Publisher Penguin Classics

Categories Essays & Literary Collections Classic Nonfiction Writing Literary Criticism Arts & Entertainment Non-Fiction Classics

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was an Argentine poet, essayist, and author of short stories. His most notable works as a key literary Spanish-language figure of the twentieth century include Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph). He received a BA from the College of Geneva. He was also appointed the director of the National Public Library and professor of English literature at the University of Buenos Aries in 1955. During his lifetime, Borges received the first Prix International Formentor Prize which he shared alongside Samuel Beckett in 1961. He also received the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society in 1971.