BORGES AND JOYCE AN INFINITE CONVERSATION
Legenda
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Editorial Board
Chairman
Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London
Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French)
Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish)
Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish)
Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret,
Queen Mary University of London (French)
Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian)
Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian)
Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics)
Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics)
Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese)
Professor Ritchie Robertson, The Queen’s College, Oxford (German)
Professor Lesley Sharpe, University of Exeter (German)
Professor David Shepherd, University of Sheffield (Russian)
Professor Michael Sheringham, All Soul’s College, Oxford (French)
Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish)
Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese)
Managing Editor
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STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
Editorial Committee
Professor Stephen Bann, University of Bristol (Chairman)
Professor Duncan Large, University of Swansea
Dr Elinor Shaffer, School of Advanced Study, London
Studies in Comparative Literature are produced in close collaboration with the British Comparative Literature Association, and range widely across comparative and theoretical topics in literary and translation studies, accommodating research at the interface between different artistic media and between the humanities and the sciences.
Published in This Series
Breeches and Metaphysics: Thackeray’s German Discourse, by S. S. Prawer
Hölderlin and the Dynamics of Translation, by Charlie Louth
Aeneas Takes the Metro: The Presence of Virgil in Twentieth-Century French Literature, by Fiona Cox
Metaphor and Materiality: German Literature and the World-View of Science 1780–1955, by Peter D. Smith
Marguerite Yourcenar: Reading the Visual, by Nigel Saint
Treny: The Laments of Kochanowski, translated by Adam Czerniawski and with an introduction by Donald Davie
Neither a Borrower: Forging Traditions in French, Chinese and Arabic Poetry, by Richard Serrano
The Anatomy of Laughter, edited by Toby Garfitt, Edith McMorran and Jane Taylor
Dilettantism and its Values: From Weimar Classicism to the fin de siècle, by Richard Hibbitt
The Fantastic in France and Russia in the Nineteenth Century: In Pursuit of Hesitation, by Claire Whitehead
Singing Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece, by Dimitris Papanikolaou
Wanderers Across Language: Exile in Irish and Polish Literature of the Twentieth Century, by Kinga Olszewska
Moving Scenes: The Aesthetics of German Travel Writing on England 1783–1830, by Alison E. Martin
Henry James and the Second Empire, by Angus Wrenn
Platonic Coleridge, by James Vigus
Imagining Jewish Art, by Aaron Rosen
Alienation and Theatricality: Diderot after Brecht, by Phoebe von Held
Turning into Sterne: Viktor Shklovskii and Literary Reception, by Emily Finer
Yeats and Pessoa: Parallel Poetic Styles, by Patricia Silva McNeill
Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death: Walter Pater and Post-Hegelianism, by Giles Whiteley
Blake, Lavater and Physiognomy, by Sibylle Erle
Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque: Crashaw, Baudelaire, Magritte, by Shun-Liang Chao
The Art of Comparison: How Novels and Critics Compare, by Catherine Brown
Borges and Joyce: An Infinite Conversation, by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán
Borges and Joyce
An Infinite Conversation
PATRICIA NOVILLO-CORVALÁN
Studies in Comparative Literature 24
Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
2011
First published 2011
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Towards Comparative Literature
1 Ulysses in Transit, from Paris to Buenos Aires: The Cross-Cultural Transactions of Larbaud, Borges, and Güiraldes
2 Borges’s Reception of Joyce in the Argentine Press
3 James Joyce, Author of ‘Funes the Memorious’
4 In Praise of Darkness: Homer, Joyce, Borges
5 Architects of Labyrinths: Dante, Joyce, Borges
6 Joyce’s and Borges’s Afterlives of Shakespeare
Conclusion: The Afterlives of James Joyce in Argentina
&nb
sp; Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
A book devoted to the study of two giants of Western literature requires, in turn, a colossal dedication and an even larger degree of help and personal and intellectual support. As a result, I owe a great deal of gratitude to my two doctoral supervisors, Joe Brooker and William Rowe, who enthusiastically accompanied me throughout this journey and patiently read several drafts of this study. I am also hugely indebted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for awarding me a doctoral scholarship and overseas research funding. My warm thanks also go to my two thesis examiners, Jason Wilson and Richard Brown, whose eye for detail and pertinent suggestions greatly improved this book. Muchas gracias también to Robin Fiddian, reader for Legenda, whose patient and exhaustive reading of the manuscript pruned from it numerous imperfections and added insightful remarks. I am grateful to Graham Nelson, editor of Legenda, for his unfaltering advice and support. My warm thanks also go the School of English & Humanities at Birkbeck College, which provided me with a friendly and intellectually stimulating learning environment, especially to Tom Healy, Sandra Clark, Aoife Monks, and the late, and much missed, Sally Ledger. I also gained enormously from the lively discussions with fellow Joyceans at the University of London ‘Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar’, superbly led by Andrew Gibson, where we would spend two hours on a Friday evening perusing just a few lines from Joyce’s modernist masterpiece (and later, in true Irish style, extend those discussions in the pub).
I am also grateful to Alejandro Vaccaro, who generously put at my disposal his vast Borges collection, and introduced me to the ‘Asociación Borgesiana’ in Buenos Aires. Cecilia Smyth, the director of the ‘Museo Güiraldes’ in San Antonio de Areco, Buenos Aires, kindly opened the doors of the museum to me and allowed me access to their rare first edition of the 1929 French translation of Ulysses. My parents, Sofanor Novillo-Corvalán and Patricia Doherty de Novillo-Corvalán, have been a continuous source of inspiration, and helped me find books and articles of extreme importance for this project. My final and largest thanks go to my husband, Adam Elston, for his encouragement, love, and dedication, and for helping me throughout all stages of my academic career. This book is dedicated to him.
Earlier versions of chapters in this study have been previously published in the following journals: sections of Chapter 1 in James Joyce Broadsheet, 79 (2008), 1; a shorter version of Chapter 3 appeared in Variaciones Borges, 26 (2008), 59–82; an earlier version of Chapter 6 in Comparative Literature, 60.3 (2008), 207–27. I am most grateful to the editors of these journals for their advice in the writing of these articles.
Abbreviations
OC Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas, 3 vols (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1990); vol. 4 (Barcelona: Emecé: 1996)
OCC Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas en colaboración (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1991)
IA Jorge Luis Borges, El idioma de los argentinos (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1994)
TE Jorge Luis Borges, El tamaño de mi esperanza (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1993)
Inq. Jorge Luis Borges, Inquisiciones (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1995)
TR Jorge Luis Borges, Textos recobrados, 3 vols (vol. 1, Barcelona: Emecé, 1997), (vol. 2, Bogotá: Emecé, 2001), (vol. 3, Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2003)
CF Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. by Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1999)
SNF Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. by Eliot Weinberger, trans. by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger (Viking: New York, 1999)
SP Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems, ed. by Alexander Coleman, trans. by Willis Barnstone, Alexander Coleman, Robert Fitzgerald, Stephen Kessler, Kenneth Krabbenhoft, Eric McHenry, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Hoyt Rogers, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, Alan S. Trueblood, John Updike (London: Penguin, 1999)
L Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. by Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby, preface by André Maurois, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 2000)
A Jorge Luis Borges, 'An Autobiograpliical Essay', in Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges, ed. by Jaime Alazraki (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall & Co, 1987), pp. 21-55.
U James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, afterword by Michael Groden, 4th edn (London: Bodley Head, 2002)
E James Joyce, Exiles, intro. by Conor McPherson (London: Nick Hern Books: 2006)
P James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. by Jeri Johnson (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)
FW James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, with an intro. by Seamus Deane, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 2000)
D James Joyce, Dubliners, with an intro. and notes by Terence Brown, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 2000)
JJI Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959)
JJII Richard Ellmann, James Joyce: New and Revised Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)
Letters James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1 ed. by Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking Press, 1957, reissued with corrections 1966); vols 2 and 3 ed. by Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1966)
SL James Joyce, Selected Letters, ed. by Richard Ellmann, 2nd edn (London: Faber & Faber, 1992)
Note: English translations of Borges’s works belonging to the editions quoted above are cited parenthetically within the body of the book. All other, unreferenced, translations of Borges’s works are my own.
INTRODUCTION Towards Comparative Literature
In 1993 Susan Bassnett concluded her book-length study Comparative Literature with the provocative assertion: ‘Comparative literature as a discipline has had its day. Crosscultural work in women’s studies, in post-colonial theory, in cultural studies has changed the face of literary studies generally. We should look upon translation studies as the principal discipline from now on, with comparative literature as a valued but subsidiary subject area.’1 On the one hand, Bassnett was trying to shake the deeply laid foundations of the nineteenth-century edifice which has long been associated with a type of comparative practice renowned for its restrictiveness and inescapable Eurocentric impulses. On the other, she was eager to offer her support to the emerging discipline of translation studies which she carefully presented as a substitutional discourse, a surrogate discipline born to replace a declining, almost extinct, comparative literature. But as Bassnett herself has been able to corroborate, in the last two decades comparative literature was not only able to survive her fatalistic scholarly oracles, but also managed to stay alive and well, despite the numerous challenges it had to face at the turn of the twentieth century. This challenging period has been characterized by a revaluation of its priorities, principles, methodologies and linguistic, cultural, and literary practices, particularly in the light of a much-needed shift from a localized European perspective to a broad-spectrum globalist approach. Moreover, the value, function, and future of comparative literature became the subject of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) collection of essays Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (1995),2 which gathered a fascinating range of responses from distinguished comparatists such as Jonathan Culler, Anthony Appiah, and Mary Louise Pratt. This momentous debate highlighted, above all, the important fact that comparative literature needed to become multicultural in its focus and interdisciplinary in its method, forging complex intersections with, for example, the critical discourses of gender studies, postcolonialism, cultural studies, translation studies, and a broad range of cross-cultural issues. Ten years down the line, the ACLA report extended — in a rather predictable move — its multiculturalist concerns onto the wider phenomenon of globalization, thus resulting in the much-awaited sequel, Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalisation, ed. by Haun Saussy (2006).3 At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Saussy victoriously proclaims: ‘Comparative literature has, in a sense, won its battles [...] The controversy is over. Comparative literature is not only legitimate: now, as often as
not, ours is the first violin that sets the tone for the whole orchestra’.4 The discipline has become a major paradigm in an increasingly globalized world, even if, admittedly, it usually fails to gain the recognition it deserves. The ubiquitousness of comparative literature ideas, Saussy argues, is evident in the way in which ‘what comparatists elaborated, argued, and propagated in the laboratories of their small, self-selecting profession has gone out into the world and won over people who have no particular loyalty to institutional bodies of comparative literature’.5 Indeed, Saussy teasingly suggests that comparative literature ought to levy a tax to English and History departments ‘every time they cited Auerbach, de Man, Said, Derrida, or Spivak’.6
But going back to the eschatological predictions of the demise of a discipline, we are now able to see, with hindsight, that rather than becoming a subsidiary or appendix to, say, translation studies — as Bassnett had announced — comparativism in general welcomed these decisive critical perspectives and used them as a resource to foster a wider, globally orientated twenty-first-century practice. In a recent essay published in the journal of the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA), Bassnett inevitably reconsidered her unjust death penalty and vindicated a renewed model of the old discipline: ‘Today, looking at that proposition, it appears fundamentally flawed: translation studies has not developed very far at all over three decades and comparison remains at the heart of much translation studies scholarship.’7 As Bassnett also justifiably argues regarding her 1993 claim: ‘The basis of my case was that debates about a so-called crisis in comparative literature stemmed from a legacy of nineteenth-century positivism and a failure to consider the political implications of intercultural transfer processes.’8 In this context, Bassnett aspired to reposition comparative literature as a pluralized, global forum which had to break free from the shackles of its Eurocentric heritage.
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