No Nobel for Borges

This page intends to present a cruel but objective assessment of the work of Jorge Luis Borges (JLB for his fans). I'm sure it fails in the second dimension, as it leaves a number of potential counter-arguments unexplored.

There is an idea which, thanks to insistent propaganda, seems to be taking root, the idea that Borges should have won a Nobel Prize in Literature. The accepted thesis is that the Nobel committee bypassed him for political reasons. This page argues that the Nobel committee had far better reasons to discard Borges as a candidate. One of these is that Jorge Luis Borges was just a bad writer — a thesis which the page will try to prove.

Is the Nobel Prize in Literature an infallible seal of quality? I didn't research the question, so I have no opinion on the matter. If I had to take a guess, I'd probably extrapolate from my valuation of the Nobel Peace Prize. But all of that is entirely outside the scope of this discussion, which is: meaningful or not, ¿should the Nobel Prize in Literature have been awarded to Jorge Luis Borges?

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Why Borges did not deserve the Nobel: Index

✽ Supposing Borges should have won, for which genre?
✽ The Precedence Problem
✽ The Volume Problem: few stories, no novels
✽ Some bad reasons why Borges "should" have won a Nobel
✽ Borges: An immature writer
✽ Borges keeps reusing the same themes
✽ Borges copied himself
✽ Borges keeps using the same words
✽ Borges can be unspeakably boring
✽ Pedantic Word Choice
✽ Lexical Bugs in Borges
✽ The Political Red Herring
✽ Miscellaneous Quotes

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Supposing Borges should have won, for which genre?

To win the Nobel prize for literature, you have to distinguish yourself in one or several genres. Borges wrote in several: poetry, essays and short stories. He didn't write any novels.

By the time of his death in 1986, fourteen people had won the Prize solely for their work in poetry. Is anyone saying that Borges should have won the Nobel for his poetry? I don't think so. By 1986, three people had won the Prize for the combination of their work in poetry and essays (1901, 1979, 1980), but again I doubt anyone is arguing that this is where Borges deserved a Nobel. Maybe I'm wrong.

What's left? Short stories. My impression is that those who feel that Borges should have won the Nobel feel that way primarily on account of his short stories. There are three problems with that: precedence, volume, and quality.

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The Precedence Problem

The first problem is that while Borges was alive there was no precedent of anyone ever having won the Nobel Prize in Literature solely for his short stories. The first time this happened was in 2013, with Alice Munro.

Precedents matter. Could this be a matter of bad timing, then? Well, you have to consider that when Alice Munro did win the Nobel, her body of written short stories (measured by word count) was as long as that of Borges… and then another eight times over. Which brings us to the volume problem.

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The Volume Problem: few stories, no novels

The second problem is quantity. In a spare moment, I counted the number of words in the complete collection of Borges's short stories, Cuentos Completos. The result: a hair over 150,000 words.

What do 150,000 words represent? A little less than two average novels.

In the following table, I compiled the number of words of a few well-known Spanish-language novels more or less contemporary with Borges.

CCAuthorTitleWords

AR	Julio Cortázar	Rayuela	171,800
CL	Isabel Allende	La casa de los espíritus	165,740
PE	Mario Vargas Llosa	La fiesta del chivo	152,584
CO	Gabriel García Márquez	Cien años de soledad	137,800
SP	Javier Marías	Corazón tan blanco	97,978
SP	Carmen Laforet	Nada	72,631

For me, this single table is enough to defeat the "Borges should have won" argument, but in later sections we'll also look at other aspects.

At 152,443 words, the entire sum of Borges's short stories comes a little shy (by ten lines!) of the 152,584 words in a single novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, La fiesta del chivo.
As you can see, in some cases, a single novel exceeds the total number of words in the entire short stories of Borges.

You may remember from the section about the precedence problem that the first person to ever win the Nobel Prize in Literature for that person's work in short stories was Alice Munro (2013). I've never read a single line of Alice Munro's in my life. (That's part of my long-standing boycott of Canada its relentless attempt to dominate world politics.) One thing I did do is to count the number of words in all of Alice Munro's short stories, and according to my machine it tallies at 1,365,114. That is 8.95 times the 152,443 words of Borges' short stories.

Now I'm sure a careful reader will have understood that it's in no way my intention to state that a writer's quality should be judged by the kilo. To this day, no Barbara Catland book has passed through my hands. For those of you who are wondering, a kilo is about two pounds plus ten percent.

(If your heartrate is at 120, your palms are sweating and you're mentally composing a flame letter aimed at the author of this page, go re-read the last paragraph and ask yourself whether you include yourself in the category of careful readers. In doubt, leave this page and go do something that gives you pleasure — I'm not going to insult you by suggesting cat videos.)

With that out of the way, do the numbers mean mean something? Sure they do. For now, please don't worry about quantity vs. quality, we'll concern ourselves with that later. For me, the incredibly low volume (the equivalent of one or two novels!) of fiction written by Borges breaks what I take to be an unshakable premise:

To win a Nobel Prize in Literature for fiction writing, you need to have written a significant body of work. Preferably, you should have written a lot.

Borges himself said he was lazy

One of the recurring devices in the short stories of Borges is to mention imaginary books, giving a summary of their plot. In part, he saw that as a shortcut to writing entire books. In the introduction to Ficciones, he writes (the quote below includes a translation):

The translation is mine: I wanted to render the pesadez (heaviness) of the original, lost in versions such as that shown on the English Wikipedia page, to give a better sense of what Borges's writing really feels like, unembellished by the translator. The Wikipedia version, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books, discards the ugly noun clause (the writing of) in favor of the vivid verb (to write).

I'm sure there are similar quotes where Jorge Luis boasts about how little he writes. This leads me to this inevitable conclusion:

Did Borges even want a Nobel Prize in Literature?
Apparently, he gave it some thought. I found this quote:

That doesn't answer the question of whether Borges wanted the Nobel which Sartre rejected, but the intellectual dishonesty of that quip suggests that it was on his mind.

When you read that quote, did you also catch what I mean by intellectual dishonesty? Borges makes it sound as though some committee keeps nominating him then failing to award him the prize. In reality, the they doing the nominating (his fan club) is not the same people as the they doing the giving (some erudite Swedes)!

This leads us to…

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Some bad reasons why Borges "should" have won a Nobel

Before we get into the sections about "quality", I thought I'd quickly review some bad reasons that probably influence people's ideas about Borges and the Nobel.

He repeatedly got nominated over a period of thirty years
The "repeated nomination argument" is often heard, as though it had any relevance over whether one should win. My view:

Being nominated repeatedly for a Nobel Prize means nothing. Who nominated him? Prominent people in Argentinian literary circles?

These are indeed exactly the kinds of people who get consulted during the nomination process.

He was incredibly erudite
Not a reason. Perhaps the opposite. You have to write fiction that has literary merit, not a collage of erudite facts. Otherwise every scholar in the field of Old-English Letters deserves a Nobel.

He was an endearing character — and humble
Partly because his existence was monk-like in several respects, partly because of his sense of humor and amicable temper, Borges earned himself a soft spot in many people's hearts. It's natural to want to reward someone who appears to be "such a nice guy". Here we're talking about a Nobel Prize in Literature, though, and character isn't the main requirement.

One of the traits that endeared Borges to people was his "humility". He often put his own work down, especially his earlier work. Was that humility, or an objective assessment of his production with a bit of distance? I think the latter.

In a 1980 interview, he said:

Should we take that at face value? I think so. Maybe the man was a bit embarrassed with the enthusiasm which his juvenile prose had awoken in some, and really wished for the hoopla to die down. That quote suggests a man who is conscious of his writings' flaws, who, deep down, probably doesn't believe he deserves the literary crowning of a Nobel Prize.

He was blind
That's sad. Not a good reason.

He's the most famous writer from Argentina
You don't get a Nobel Prize just for showing up as a country. At some level I'm sorry that Argentina doesn't have a Nobel Prize in Literature to boast about — as do Chile (two of them, that must hurt), Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico. At another level, for me it just suggests that Argentinian writers have to try a bit harder. I feel somewhat qualified to make this statement as I've sacrificed myself in reading all of Rayuela in the black Alfaguara edition (including the introduction) and done my time reading Argentinian classics in search of something that would sweep me off my feet.

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Borges: An immature writer

A whole thesis could be written on the subject of Borges's immaturity, but this single quote should be enough to make the point and close the debate:

Es el crematorio —dijo alguien—. Adentro está la cámara letal. Dicen que la inventó un filántropo cuyo nombre, creo, era Adolfo Hitler.

[translation]
(Utopía de un hombre que está cansado, in El Aleph)

Who but a thirteen-year-old would think there is any literary or intellectual value in describing a world where Hitler is seen as a philanthropist? Did Borges smirk at his teenage "cleverness", relishing the "shock value" of that narrative discovery? And that's the guy who supposedly was passed over for a Nobel Prize?

Immature themes
It is my view — a highly subjective one, not one that I intend to defend or demonstrate to support the thesis of this page — that most of the themes that attract people to Borges are the kinds of themes that tend to awaken the greatest interest in bookish thirteen year-old boys.

Labyrinths, immortals, infinity… Such themes spark an intellectual curiosity that is later put aside once the boy has been exposed to much greater intellectual wonders — be it in mathematics, computer science, philosophy, anthropology, or indeed pretty much any field in which one can spend years in deep study, with the exception of "wrong paths", but we won't get into that.

Heck, if I'd read Borges as a thirteen-year-old, he'd probably have blown my mind!

Certainly some of these topics can be the object of a deep treatment (e.g. infinity in mathematics) but at the level of Borges's short stories they are either cheap tricks or intellectual glitter fit only to enrapture developing minds.

I'll give you that: as I write, a significant portion of the adult population of the Western world seems fascinated by movies that present characters who possess some kind of superpower (be it physical or intellectual, financial or spiritual), and a good number of these contemporary adults dedicate themselves to creating for themselves some kind of "superpower" that distinguishes them from the mass: a particular physical feat, a particular intellectual skill, and so on. Some would say that far from weakening the argument about Borges's immaturity, this speaks of widespread immaturity among contemporary adults.

I wonder how many Borges fans are middle-aged men who remember the rapture of reading Ficciones as a boy without ever revisiting those pages.

Again, the "immaturity of Borges's pet themes" is just my opinion, just my taste. It's subjective. What isn't subjective (and here we'll call numbers to our rescue) is the repetitiveness of Borges's prose.

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Borges keeps reusing the same themes

The short stories of Borges may be short in the sum of their words, but to me they feel longer because of the recurrence of certain themes and words, which creates a certain tedium. Here are some of the main themes, presented in the form of tags — just because it's fun:

labyrinths fictional books fictional authors
dreams nightmares nature of reality
gods theology sects
secret societies conspiracies stratagems
chance fate bad luck
treason revenge
memory aging immortality infinity
doppelgangers imaginary beings supernatural objects

There are also many minor "characters" among these themes, recurrent visitors such as Arabian Nights, Christianity and Islam, Martín Fierro, Shakespeare or certain obscure historical figures.

Some might argue that this very repetition of a few key themes defines Borges's originality, that it is precisely that which justified his winning the Nobel. But if having a pet theme were enough to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, they would award it to the most prolific author of books about birdwatching.

Instead of tackling directly the recurrence of themes, which after all does not invalidate Borges's literature, I'm going to look at two other kinds of repetitions — which, indirectly, will also shine some light on the question of themes: (i) the repetition of phrases or ideas, and (ii) the reliance on the same key words. These two types of repetition, to my mind, are so awkward in such a short body of work as to constitute a literary sin.

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Borges copied himself

When a writer reuses the same description of a character, or the same grouping of words, careful readers notice. And it is not the kind of discovery that brings delight, but rather one that lowers the reader's view of the writer's abilities.

Here are two examples.

The scar that crossed his face
Across the short stories, one finds:

✽ Le rayaba la frente una cicatriz: (…)
✽ Le cruzaba la cara una cicatriz rencorosa: (…)
✽ la cicatriz que le atraviesa la cara es un adorno más, (…)
✽ Le cruzaba la cara una cicatriz.

The incomplete copy of Arabian Nights
✽ Dahlmann había conseguido, esa tarde, un ejemplar descabalado de Las mil y una noches de Weil;
✽ (…) opté al fin por esconderlo detrás de unos volúmenes descabalados de Las mil y una noches.

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Borges keeps using the same words

If you're endlessly rehashing the same themes, it stands to reason that your vocabulary would show it. As a reader, the constant recurrence of certain words or even bits of phrases rubs me the wrong way. To others that same repetition might be hypnotic.

The recurrence of words is something that can be quantified and compared, and I had a glance at Borges's vocabulary, comparing him to the words found in a "pocket corpus" of well-regarded Spanish-language writers who were more or less contemporary of Borges, a corpus which I assembled and that contains about ten times as many words as those found in all the short stories of Jorge Luis. Here are some of the results.

Borges, words about dream states and the Devil
First I compiled a list of words related to dream states. Not just sueño and soñar, but also onírico, pesadilla, ensoñación, soñaste (and all other conjugated forms of soñar) and more: 136 words in all, and I'm sure I missed some.

These 136 words are present 229 times in the Cuentos, which means that one of these words appears on every second or third page of Borges's short stories. (Their 152,443 words represent 500 to 600 pages.) That's three times as many as the occurrence in an "average" book as measured by the corpus.

An interesting fact is that if you divide 152,443 by 229, you discover that a term about dream states appears in the short stories of Borges every 666 words. Actually, you have to round up from 665.69. But if you use 152,518 instead, which is the number of words if you count hyphenated words (such as judeo-irlandesa) as two, which actually makes sense looking at the list of hyphenated words in the text, the same operation yields 666.01… Which is to say exactly 666, given that 229 times 666 is 152,514 and that the four-word difference (over 152,518!) can be explained away by a tallying error or difference in method. Was Borges trying to communicate with the Devil? I'll leave it to Kabbalists to figure out this cipher.

Word frequency analysis: the results
Instead of continuing to craft regular expressions and doing calculations by hand, I then took the easy route and ran a word frequency analysis of Borges's short stories, as compared to my "pocket Spanish corpus", by using the computer program AntConc. I then transformed the results into a table, from which I zapped words that would have no particular relevance (e.g. Dahlmann), then selected rows that stood out for me.

The keyness value of a word is a statistical measure of whether that term is present with an unusually high frequency in a text, in comparison with a chosen standard. For the particular computation method I selected, a keyness value of about five is statistically significant (less than one percent chance of error); in the table below all the words have keyness values of twenty and up, which is extremely significant (significance grows exponentially in relation to keyness).

Read this table and you will have read Borges
The table is a bit long, but it reads fast if you skip the values. I thought it would be fun to show it here. For me, reading it produces the same numbing effect as though I'd read Borges once again — a noxious blend of empacho (indigestion) and letargía.

WordKeyness

laberinto	303.25
hombre	251.52
libro	234.19
hombres	206.92
universo	179.13
historia	173.07
infinito	169.43
quijote	134.34
biblioteca	133.63
obra	133.05
nombre	111.08
tierra	101.16
siglo	100.03
secta	97.78
dios	97.46
inmortales	93.23
destino	93.07
rasgos	92.64
letras	91.07
palabras	88.57
escritura	84.9
siglos	84.07
arena	82.18
páginas	82.05
divinidad	80.14
símbolo	79.74
planeta	78.55
hechos	74.45
libros	72.96
doctrina	70.8
autor	69.96
conjetura	68.51
recuerdo	67.18
secreto	64.87
manuscrito	64.81
temor	63.43
esclavo	63.19
circular	62.51
símbolos	62.51
poema	61.52
sectarios	60.66
volúmenes	60.2
tesoro	59.75
azar	59.71
batalla	59.41
dioses	58.45
idioma	58.02
monedas	56.69
noches	54.29
inmortal	54.27
tiniebla	54.27
volumen	51.81
porvenir	51.63
sentencia	47.78
poeta	47.49
página	46.4
circulares	45.5
cobarde	44.64
infinita	44.19
moneda	43.54
palabra	43.11
secreta	42.54
capítulo	41.76
tigres	40.98
cautiva	40.44
monografía	40.44
ajedrez	39.32
dictamen	38.87
crimen	38.67
tigre	38.17
laberintos	36.82
shakespeare	36.82
templo	36.69
desierto	36.52
memoria	36.46
cruz	35.94
letra	35.58
muerte	35.15
griego	35.07
infinitamente	33.35
enigma	32.71
eternidad	31.84
sorteo	30.77
islam	30.33
sorteos	30.33
bibliotecario	30.11
fuego	29.93
muerto	29.61
cifra	29.58
texto	28.56
mago	28.05
enciclopedia	28.03
espejos	27.86
sagrado	26.94
escribir	26.79
espejo	26.62
brújula	26.3
vertiginoso	26.3
sanatorio	26.18
desiertos	25.83
innumerable	25.28
jaguar	25.28
porvenires	25.28
sustantivos	25.28
noche	24.77
poetas	24.67
guerras	22.45
forastero	22.23
oscura	21.77
ruinas	21.77

Borges and books, labyrinths, gods and… ¡hombres! (men)
What stands out in this table? Well, everything. By definition, these are all words that stand out in the short stories of Borges in comparison with the corpus.

Unlike my calculation with words related to dream states, this time the table does not aggregate words by theme: the table shows different rows for book, books, library, page and so on, which shows how prevalent the entire theme of books is. To drive this home even further I could have transformed the original files, replacing each instance of a keyword by its key theme (e.g. library → book), but the results were already striking enough and frankly I didn't have the time — this is not a doctoral thesis.

As an entry point, let's just pick out three keywords:

✽ The table shows that Borges's fascination for labyrinths is off the charts — but we knew that.

✽ Second, Borges's obsession with anything related to books jumps out. As a reader, for me his constant mention of books — real or imaginary — was close to sickening.

✽ Third, and I'm not sure this is often discussed, the table brings to light the unusual frequency of the word man (hombre) in Borges. This is something I had noticed while reading the Cuentos: such and such man came in… he was a man of this type or the other… Men, men, always men!

But what about women — and family?
Borges writes about men… A lot about men, and very little about women. In fact, the word mujer (woman) has a negative keyness of 25, which means that it is significantly less frequent in Borges than in the corpus!

Other family-related terms which appear significantly infrequently in Borges are:

✽ hija (daughter), -36
✽ niños (children), -46
✽ padre (father), -50
✽ madre (mother), -54
✽ niña (girl), -60
✽ familia (family), -64

I'll leave the analysis to a psychologist.

What's missing from this table: Las mil y una noches and other sequences
The table above highlights words that Borges repeats to an unusual degree. What it fails to show is repeated sequences of words. I didn't have time to look deeply into this question of word groups, but one sequence that struck me in Borges was his constant references to Arabian Nights — Las mil y una noches in the Spanish text. The tally: 17 mentions. Once every thirty pages might not sound like a lot, but believe me, it really stands out.

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Borges can be unspeakably boring

At times, Borges invents a scholarly character who rambles on about erudite themes (or supposedly erudite, when imaginary). Doing so, he manages to write pages or entire short stories which are so awkward or boring that their inclusion in a work of fiction defies comprehension. Here are some of the worst offenders.

✽ Three Versions of Judas (Tres versiones de Judas). For me, the inclusion of this short story (a fake scholarly article about a fictitious writer) in Artificios (part of the Ficciones meta-collection) is a bug. It's as tedious to read as a doctoral thesis about some arcane topic you know nothing about. Did Borges not have an editor to help him cut? Does anyone really enjoy reading this kind of trash?

✽ The Theologians (Los teólogos). Indigestible pseudo-scholarly article about fictional Christian sects.

✽ Averroës's Search (La busca de Averroes). Silly and turgid story about an Islamic scholar who cannot grasp the concepts of comedy and tragedy.

✽ special mention for The Aleph (El Aleph), the short story: pompousness to the square, and an exercise in ruining an already weak short story in the fantastic genre with a horrendous postscript.

✽ The Sect of the Thirty (La secta de los treinta), an ancient scholarly manuscript about a heretical Christian sect, much in the vein of The theologians — of no interest to anyone who isn't fascinated by Christian things.

Is Borges's fascination with Christianity shared by all readers?
I wonder if all the people who tirelessly argue the case of Borges's supposedly lost Nobel are all either Christians or recovering Christians. What makes me wonder this is that some of his most appalling stories labor in the worst kind of theological quagmire.

Maybe the nauseous soup found in stories such as The theologians and The sect of the thirty happens to stimulate the minds of some once-brainwashed people who haven't quite managed to cut the umbilical cord with their erstwhile sect.

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Pedantic Word Choice

Useless and out-of-the-way erudition: the man said it himself! That's a great way to characterize much of the material in the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, whether in the way of references to books and events, quotes, or simply word choice. This section is concerned with word choice.

When I launched on the task I'd set for myself to read what I thought were the main collections of short stories of Borges (Ficciones, El Aleph, El libro de arena, and El hacedor, about which I was wrong since it turned out not to contain a single short story), I was quickly struck by his appalling word choice.

The problem was not that there were a number of words I didn't know. This happens to me in novels by authors as distant as García Márquez and Juan José Millás, and I normally relish seeing such words as each one gives me a chance to enrich my Spanish. These two particular writers use a vocabulary that is alive, vivid, and useful — Márquez a little less so than Millás, partly because of the interference of terms native to Colombia.

In contrast, when I looked up unknown words in Borges, in many cases I found (with the help of the Diccionario de la Lengua Española, the normative dictionary of the Spanish language) that Jorge Luis had used an obscure variation of a word in far more regular use, if oftentimes fairly formal as well. This, to me, is a hallmark of poor writing: a writer who selects words that are pedantic, when another would have done, in a register that is already uncommonly formal.

Said a contemporary and compatriot:

That kind of captures it. The language of Borges evolved over his writing career (he sinned less towards the end), but the first impression that Ficciones (1944) gave me, from the standpoint of word choice and sentence structure, was that of a lawyer trained to write legal briefs taking his pinitos (his first steps) in the field of fiction. Later works did little to change that, although El libro de arena (1975) is considerably lighter in the big word department, perhaps because by that time Borges was blind, which gave him less chance to exhaust the dictionary.

Why say un ejemplar descabalado de Las mil y una noches when you could say incompleto — the meaning Borges was giving the word there, a bit at odds with the DLE? The word descabalado appears twice in the short stories: once in Ficciones and once in El libro de arena, and the second time the context is almost identical (see the "Borges is repetitive" section), although the writer seems to take the opportunity to correct his somewhat improper prior use of the word: unos volúmenes descabalados de Las mil y una noches.

That word, by the way, does not appear once in my "pocket corpus" of contemporary Spanish literature, which contains ten times more words than the Cuentos completos. But that is the case of countless terms which Borges chose to use.

And why use invernáculo for greenhouse (twice in El Aleph) when you can use invernadero, which is a hundred times more frequent? Unless you think any word with culo at the back of it is intrinsically funny, in which case I'm guessing you're a teenager. Among the forty-odd nouns that fit the bill in the Spanish language, I'm surprised Borges never used sustentáculo, which is right up his alley on the pedantic scale — so much so that I already forgot what it means.

An example, for example
When I started reading Borges, I wrote down some the most offending words I came across, but quickly left the idea of making a list as there were just too many. The two above are just one pair in a multitude.

However, I can't resist leaving you without one last example, given the circular and perhaps Borgesian nature doing so: the word verbigracia — which means "an example" or "for example", and sometimes pops up in academic texts. That word, which has a legal ring to it, does not appear once in my "pocket corpus" of well-known Spanish-language fiction. But it is found four times in the short stories, and all four times in the same volume, Ficciones. (Granted, that volume was originally two: there are three verbigracia in the first, one in the second.)

In my view, the four verbigracia in a single volume was by itself quite enough to disqualify Jorge Luis Borges from winning the Nobel Prize in literature — one of many such bungles. To use that term in a work of fiction is already clumsy. To use it four times in the same book (a tiny book, at forty thousand words) is an unforgivable sin for any writer worth his salt — breaking, as it does, the cardinal rules of not stopping the reader in her tracks, of not making her pause to notice the writer's craft behind the printed words.

How was Borges translated?
I ask myself this question:

Is it just possible that the turgid legalese that constitutes the Spanish-language prose of Borges just happened to be exquisitely translated into English?

I didn't investigate this question very far, but the theory has merit. While many Argentines probably defend Borges's prose for patriotic reasons, independently of its jerigonza, it's entirely possible that many of his enthusiasts in the English-speaking world (to mention only one language) are actually infatuated with the work of the translator, not having experienced the nausea occasioned by the original page.

I didn't take the time to thoroughly check this hypothesis, but I'm convinced there is something to it. I did check that all four verbigracia are translated as "for example" or "e.g."; the two invernáculo, as "greenhouse"; and ejemplar or volumen descabalado, once as "a copy from which some pages were missing", the second time as "imperfect". A good start for this theory.

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Lexical Bugs in Borges

I've come across a few phrases that don't sound quite right to my ear. Perhaps it's because I'm not an Argentine. Thought I'd collect a few here.
Coming from an old man near the end of his life, the he visto sounds out of place in this sentence's time frame, referring to the beginning of his life now long behind him — vi should have imposed itself. Native speakers I've asked about this are divided.

(…) una comprobación que luego lo abisma en otros laberintos más inextricables (…)

(Tema del traidor y del héroe in Ficciones)

For me, inextricable does not admit levels: it either is so or isn't so. The DLE doesn't contradict that impression: adj. Que no se puede desenredar, muy intrincado y confuso.

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The Political Red Herring

This page is not interested in countering the fallacious argument according to which the reason Borges didn't win was his politics — his support of the Argentinian dictatorship and his handshake with Pinochet in nextdoor Chile. As I have amply shown, there were reasons de sobra, reasons para dar y regalar (i.e., a plethora of them). But I can't resist offering two tidbits on this topic.

First, if the theory were true that Borges's conservatism had been an impediment, he has since been avenged by the Nobel victory of Mario Vargas Llosa (2010). This man, a rabid neo-con who froths at the mouth with right-wing propaganda, has a tremendous influence throughout the Spanish-speaking world, where his turgid peroratas are reprinted, digested, amplified.

Second, comments by members of the Nobel committee itself are illuminating. Its president Anders Osterling once stated (my translation) that Borges was too "exclusive or artificial", with works that revolved too much around the theme of literature.

One of the members of the committee, Artur Lundkvist, stated in 1982 (translation mine):

There is great pressure on the Academy for us to give Borges the prize. (…) Many say that I don't want the prize for Borges because of his reactionary political position. That is false. It has nothing to do with politics. What really happens is that Borges hasn't written anything of importance in the past 25 years. (…) I consider him basically a poet. (…) But nowadays that is not enough for the Nobel.

Some words by contemporary critics, not that these should have any relevance:

I didn't manage to get my hands on the books Contra Borges and Anti Borges (in essence, "Borges sucks"), but I imagine they abound with arguments and juicy quotes in the same direction.

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Miscellaneous Quotes

En fin: Borges era un pésimo escritor. But after all that, Borges remains an endearing character. Whoever reads his books is bound to find something that awakens his curiosity.

I meant to collect quotes by Borges where he indicates which of his own stories he believed to be his best, but this is the only one I found.

And maybe some day I'll have time to investigate whether this quote has something:

Smiles,

Andy