Borges, Jorge Luis. - Jun 23, 2010 | Bloomsbury Auctions In Ny
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BORGES, Jorge Luis.

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BORGES, Jorge Luis.
BORGES, Jorge Luis.
Item Details
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BORGES, Jorge Luis. ca. 1941. 12 pp. holograph manuscript in Spanish on 8vo vertically-lined 8vo notepaper written on rectos only (215 x 165 mm., 8 x 61/4 inches) with marginal corrections and amendments, signed by the author on the final page.Condition: very light age-toning to notepaper, small faint dampstain in extreme upper left corner of first page not affecting text, few tiny chips to left margin where the pages were carefully torn from the notebook, but in generally fine condition for a relatively fragile item. THE HOLOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT FOR A BORGES MASTERWORK AND ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL SHORT STORIES OF THE POSTWAR ERA Borges admiration of and influence by the genre of detective fiction is well known. Favorite authors from his youth (reading in the library of his English grandmother) included Poe, Chesterton and Doyle and he felt that the "classic form" of the detective tale held more promise for an innovative approach than the realist short story. By the late 1930s and early 1940 Borges along with his friend and long-time collaborator, Bioy Casares, had tried their hand at a series of parodies of the detective story, the adventures of Dr. Parodi, whose absurd and outlandish cases were eventually published as Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi. Borges has also written in 1933 an essay on the "laws" of detective fiction, which he later explained as being impossible to understand without "a beginning, a middle and an end." He fittingly later renamed this the "labyrinth of the detective genre" as the present tale realigned the idea of the temporal placement of the beginning, middle and end, opening up the fictive possibilities of simple narrative into a intersecting maze of story, essentially what many modern critics place as the introduction of the idea of the hypertext, the underlying concept of the world wide web. First published in Sur magazine in December, 1941, the present was an immediate sensation among members of the group who wrote regularly for the magazine. Bioy would claim it discovered "the literary possibilities of metaphysics" and "The Garden of Forking Paths" became the title story to Borges collection of his essay fictions. These gem-like tales, in all their facets were to provide the base of much of Borges' subsequent influence and included, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "The Circular Ruins," "The Lottery of Babylon" and "The Library of Babel." Set during World War I England, the story begins as the narrative of a Chinese spy under German employ, Yu Tsun, who pursued by British agent Richard Madden, must somehow relay to this masters the Allied plan to bomb the village of Albert in France. He picks as his method the "random" killing of a man named Albert, Stephen Albert and the climax of the tale, and its revolutionary ideas takes place at his house. Albert is a Sino-scholar whose specialty is the work of Yu Tsun's ancestor, Ts'ui Pên, a scholar who let his post as governor in order to complete two complex projects, the writing of a huge, complex novel, and to construct an equally large and intricate labyrinth, "in which all men would lose their way." Murdered before finishing the book, all that was found was a "contradictory jumble of irresolute drafts" that made no sense to readers; of the maze no trace was found. Albert has discovered that Ts'ui Pên in fact completed both projects. The novel is the labyrinth, "a garden of forking paths" which exists in time rather than the walls of physical space. The book suggests a simultaneous outcome of all possiblities, characters choices leading them and the narrative on divergent narrative paths or infinite possibilities (an idea whose currency has grown immensely with the advent of the internet and modern physics as Borges' idea is in fact a possible universal structure translated into text). While Yu Tsun is immensely grateful for Albert to explain and resurrect his anscestor's masterwork (explaining it to him as in one reality we are enemies, another friends, our roles reversed again in another) he still fulfills his mission and shoots Albert dead, secure in the knowledge that the German spymasters will read of the murder and know the message he was sending, another Borgesian conceit of action rendered or interpreted into text, with an outcome played into the real world. Obviously, Borges chose the most common genre for puzzles to introduce his innovative ideas, not only the crime story, but the spy thriller. A form already familiar with the double-cross and double-agent, it remained to the Argentine master to take it to heights never before attempted. It's influence has been immense. Reprinted in its entirety in Ficciones in 1944, it became the first of Borges stories translated into English with its publication in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1948. It further introduced Borges to a wider English readership when it was included in both the translation of Ficciones (1962) and Labyrinths (1962) (fittingly by two different translators). The ideas represented herein turn up in subsequent novels and films (The Name of the Rose, some works of Nabokov, much subsequent postmodern fiction and the cinematic explorations of Roeg and Goddard). Perhaps the most relevant for many modern media scholars however, is the idea of linked realities, each text or page a point of embarkation to the next, thus the internet. Such important Borges manuscripts are rare at auction, with the only real comparable being the $186,000 for the signed manusript of "EL Sur" at Christie's Paris, 20 June, 2002. More recently other manuscripts of works from Ficciones have traded hands at near double this estimate privately. A tale of immense cultural importance, and one the finest examples of the author's work extant. THE FIRST BORGES STORY TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH AND THE INTRODUCTION OF HYPERTEXT, OF SUPERLATIVE IMPORTANCE TO WORLD LITERATURE.

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BORGES, Jorge Luis.

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