Very admired, dear Jorge Luis Borges:
The first thing of all, I should be to declare how much, very much, I have enjoyed, that I enjoy, your books, your texts. How much, very much, that I have learned, that I learn, with them, and how whenever I have returned to your works I find happiness. A happiness that, although it may seem like a lie, grows, because I am living and reading and learning, and my background is increasing, and this is why I believe that I understand what you say better and better, I go deeper into it. In short, every time I return to your books I enjoy them even more.
Precisely to write this letter I have returned to your works, your stories, your essays, poems… and reading was taking me from one text to another, as if hand in hand, and it seemed like I was not going to stop. The pleasure I felt reading you, rereading you, was so much that in the end the objective of writing this letter was blurred, and the true goal was to read your pages.. In the end I had to stop, to start writing, because it seemed like I was never going to do it, but I do not rule out, of course, reading you again, for whatever reason, reading you, in fact, over and over again. You are one of those writers to read for a lifetime, constant, eternal friends.
“In essence, ours was a conversation that I started at a very young age, perhaps at the age of fourteen, when I discovered that in my father’s office there were some precious volumes, certainly precious to me.”
Basically ours was a conversation that I started very young, perhaps at fourteen years old, when I discovered that in my father’s office there were some precious volumes, certainly precious to me; They were some pocket volumes, in Bruguera and Emecé, with your complete prose, four volumes. They were practically new. Then I started reading the second volume, which included what I had read were your most famous works, Fictions y El aleph. Specifically, I started reading Fictions.
However, I seem to remember that I had previously bought in a bookstore in Pontedeume, my father’s town – in A Coruña -, El alephdriven, guided, by the story “The Immortal”, which for perhaps strange reasons attracted me a lot, and that is that there was a film with Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery about immortals, The immortalswhich I really liked, and I think my generation liked it, because it was a movie that other friends also liked a lot.
Well, the story, Your story and the film have points of contact, and I remember that I studied them in a work I did in college. —subject “The Hispanic American Story” with Professor Ana Valenciano, at the Complutense—, about three of your stories. I look back and realize that I have written about you several times over the years, the last time in an article, a small article, in the magazine Go Which I think was quite successful. Because I get the feeling that everything that is written about you arouses interest and attention.
“There are always books, but for a long time I thought I had read everything you had written, or everything you had published. Obviously I have not read everything, but this is very good news”
It doesn’t surprise me, because you are one of my favorite writers, a model of a writer, and your teaching is permanent. For me, you are a great wise man who expressed himself in writing, and I believe that although blindness must have greatly limited your steps and your ability to move, it is possible that as a writer it benefited you, and that it made you see what others did not. They could see, and express you in a new, or different way. They say that Homer was also blind, that is the tradition; They will say it for a reason. The clairvoyance of those who cannot see, but perhaps that is why they see more or see further.
There are always books left, but for a long time I thought I had read everything you had written, or everything you had published. Obviously I haven’t read everything, but this is very good news. Even better news is that I can reread what I have already read, which are your most important works, because in some way it is as if I were reading them new. However, since I am the one who has changed over the years, much more, in principle, than the books, my great happiness is to face your texts once again, to let them speak, to dialogue with me, with what I have read by other authors. and I have in my head, with what I have learned.
You valued more, much more, what you had read than what you had written, and this has been a bit difficult for me to understand. Perhaps, it occurs to me now, what you wanted to say is that what you wrote did not have the capacity to surprise you, or was not new to you, while what you read did have that new value, of something that could enrich you. deeply, for your own life and for writing. In any case, I think that all of us who have read you will agree that you were a reader, above all, perhaps, and that as Arturo Pérez-Reverte often says of himself, you wrote as a reader.
“Your texts appear saturated with culture, with wisdom. They are full. They are bookish, but the bookish is perfectly assimilated”
In this world in which everyone wants to be a writer, in which the important thing is to be a writer, those who declare reading and the reader essential have great importance for me, and also great credibility. On the other hand, many writers—and I’m not saying all because the opposite seems to be fashionable now—we know what impact reading has on what we write. If we did not do so, I believe, our writings would lose almost all of their strength, their effectiveness, their power of conviction. His power, in general. And I think that they would be less fun, entertaining, interesting, and that they would contribute much less to readers. They would be hollower, emptier.
But it is the complete opposite of what happens in your work, Jorge Luis. Your texts appear saturated with culture, with wisdom. They are full. They are bookish, but the bookish is perfectly assimilated, and to the deepest point, which is part of your soul, and which already belongs to the soul of the text, of all your texts. The bookish, bookish knowledge, to put it simply, becomes the protagonist of what you write, whether it is a detective story or a fantastic story., whether it is an essay about an author, whether it is a poem on any topic, any topic with literary, mythological, or philosophical roots… Everything starts from the books and goes to the book, yours, which the reader holds in his or her hands, grateful and with all his senses alert. Now your prose, your verse, your writing, also leads to this letter.
“I am a book lover, I consider myself a vocational writer, and I find it magnificent, unbeatable, sublime, to have your books, open them, read them, highlight them”
I didn’t know you, and I think I’m glad of that. I recently wrote this letter to Umberto Eco, who admired you so much and learned from you, and he said the same thing. I consider, and I say this perhaps at the age I am, that you don’t have to know the people you admire: writers, artists, etc. Daily life is too wrapped up in turbidities, let’s put it that way, for them to harm us more than necessary in our contact with the men and women we admire the most.
I am a book lover, I consider myself a vocational writer, and it seems magnificent, unbeatable, sublime to have your books, open them, read them, underline them, let what you put in them, which was so much, and what I also put in them —readers, as you know better than anyone, put a lot into what we read—it sinks in, it grows on me inside, until today, until these words that I’m spinning with a pen that, by the way, is already running out of ink. .
Admired Jorge Luis Borges, dear Jorge Luis, we are friends in a very peculiar, very special way. When you died I had not yet read any of your books, I was ten years old, but I sense that we are united for eternity. The word gracias It is too small to express what I want to say when I read your pages, which is a form of happiness, as I think you would say.
4.4/5 (21 Ratings. Rate this article, please)
2023-10-12 06:46:50
#Letter #Jorge #Luis #Borges #Zenda
