A Dream

In a deserted place in Iran there is a not very tall stone tower that has neither door nor window. In the only room (with a dirt floor and shaped like a circle) there is a wooden table and a bench. In that circular cell, a man who looks like me is writing in letters I cannot understand a long poem about a man who in another circular cell is writing a poem about a man who in another circular cell . . . The process never ends and no one will be able to read what the prisoners write.

(Translated, from the Spanish, by Suzanne Jill Levine.)

2666 - pg. 639

In 1920 Hans Reiter was born. He seemed less like a child than like a strand of seaweed. Canetti, and Borges, too, I think -- two very different men -- said that just as the sea was the symbol or mirror of the English, the forest was the metaphor the Germans inhabited. 

Ficciones - Opening

TLON, UQBAR,
ORBIS TERTIUS

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The unnerving mirror hung at the end of a corridor in a villa on Calle Goana, in Ramos Mejia; the misleading encyclopedia goes by the name of The AngloAmerican Cyclopedia (New York, 1917), and is a literal if inadequate reprint of the 1902 Encyclopaedia Britannica.


Copyright 1962 by Grove Press, Inc.
All Rights Reserved

Translated from the Spanish
1956 by Emcee Editores, S.A., Buenos Aires
First Printing
Manufactured in the United States of America.

To

Esther Zemborain de Torres

The Savage Detectives - pg. 72

Ernesto San Epifanio had said that all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn't say so.
Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butchers, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Ruben Dario was a freak, in fact, the queen freak, the prototypical freak..... Freaks, according to San Epifanio, were closer to madhouse flamboyance and naked halucination, while faggots and queers wandered in stagger-step from ethics to aesthetics and back again.

Spanish Lit. Galaxy. Systems of Prose, Lit. Engineering

Rulfo and Carpentier----> García Márquez, Fuentes, Roa Bastos, Vargas Llosa

Borges----> Arreola, Monterroso, Bioy Casares, Cortázar, Menen Desleal

Arlt (?)------> Bolaño, Aira, Cabrera Infante and all the folletinesque authors

Cela -for his character-(?) or Benet -for his prose-(?)-----> Javier Marías, Andrés Trapiello, Eduardo Lago

mucho gracias senhor Nihilo.