He is amazing. I want to re-read "The Aleph," especially the short story "The Two Kings and their Two Labyrinths". His short stories are amazing and part of what helped to establish the genre of magical realism, which, as far as I can tell, is basically fiction for pagans. His poetry is also quite beautiful, even in English translation.
Also, I see there is a relatively new collection of poems by Sappho. Definately on my list of things to read after Friday.
Borges was one of my early loves. His story "The Garden of Forking Paths" had a huge impact on how I experience choices, think about divination, etc. It's weird, too, that it should have affected me that way. It's not so much the events in the story as the image left in the mind years later after the story's fallen away.
If you find you like Borges, you'll probably also like Italo Calvino. His Invisible Cities is one of my favorite novels of all time, though it's not really very novel-like. It's a huge influence on how I think about setting in the book I'm writing. And The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a book that might as well have been written just for us--the premise is that a bunch of travelers with no common language among them are trapped in a ruin during a storm, and they pass the time by trying to tell their stories to one another with no means but a deck of Tarot cards for pictograms.
If you mean the Anne Carson translation of Sappho, I have a spare copy for lending. So good! When I first got it, I gave my vestigial memory of Greek a workout, marking up the original and seeing how my laborious one-word-at-a-time parsing might help me understand Carson's lovely versions on the facing page. (My goofy brag: I caught Carson fudging the line breaks! Okay, only once. It seems to be the only thing she fudged, but hey, I caught her. I haven't lost the moxie altogether!) One of the cool things about the Carson version is, it includes absolutely every scrap of Sappho we've got, even the fragments so small they're only one word long, and even the fragments from parchments torn lengthwise leaving not a single line intact. There they are, all the damage showing, translated broken, because sometimes that's as close as we can get. The book as a physical object is beautiful in this edition--heavy, sexy paper, with the Greek in red and the English in black, good type struck deep into thick pages. Luscious to hold in your hand.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2004-10-26 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-26 02:51 pm (UTC)Also, I see there is a relatively new collection of poems by Sappho. Definately on my list of things to read after Friday.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-26 08:03 pm (UTC)If you find you like Borges, you'll probably also like Italo Calvino. His Invisible Cities is one of my favorite novels of all time, though it's not really very novel-like. It's a huge influence on how I think about setting in the book I'm writing. And The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a book that might as well have been written just for us--the premise is that a bunch of travelers with no common language among them are trapped in a ruin during a storm, and they pass the time by trying to tell their stories to one another with no means but a deck of Tarot cards for pictograms.
If you mean the Anne Carson translation of Sappho, I have a spare copy for lending. So good! When I first got it, I gave my vestigial memory of Greek a workout, marking up the original and seeing how my laborious one-word-at-a-time parsing might help me understand Carson's lovely versions on the facing page. (My goofy brag: I caught Carson fudging the line breaks! Okay, only once. It seems to be the only thing she fudged, but hey, I caught her. I haven't lost the moxie altogether!) One of the cool things about the Carson version is, it includes absolutely every scrap of Sappho we've got, even the fragments so small they're only one word long, and even the fragments from parchments torn lengthwise leaving not a single line intact. There they are, all the damage showing, translated broken, because sometimes that's as close as we can get. The book as a physical object is beautiful in this edition--heavy, sexy paper, with the Greek in red and the English in black, good type struck deep into thick pages. Luscious to hold in your hand.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-27 06:23 am (UTC)Woooooooooow.
Sarah, you rock.