Diccionario De Vocabulario De Borges

A DICTIONARY OF BORGES
Evelyn Fishburn & Psiche Hughes
Forewords by Mario Vargas Llosa & Anthony Burgess

Duckworth

iii

First published in 1990 by
Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.
The Old Piano Factory
43 Gloucester Crescent, London NW1 7DY
© 1990 by Evelyn Fishburn & Psiche Hughes
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, ortransmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN 0 7156 2154 8

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Fishburn, Evelyn
A dictionary of Borges.
1. Fiction in Spanish. Argentinian writers. Borges,
Jorge Luis, 1899-1986. Critical studies
I. Title II. Hughes, Psiche
863
ISBN0-7156-2154-8

Photoset in North Wales by
Derek Doyle & Associates, Mold, Clwyd.
Printed in Great Britain by
Redwood Press Ltd, Melksham.

iv

Contents
Maps

vi

Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa

ix

Foreword by Anthony Burgess

xi

Abbreviations

xiii

Introduction

1

DICTIONARY

3

Biographical summary

267

v

Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa

This is abook that would have been to Borges's taste. Although he used to pride himself on never
having read anything that was written about his life or his work, I am sure he would have read it
from beginning to end. This is because it is a book of imaginative erudition, or erudite fantasy, an
unusual combination which he used with greater originality than anyone else, so that the genre,
though of thegreatest antiquity, seems now almost to have been invented by him. Like the
strange sect of 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' which wished secretly to interpolate a fictitious
universe into the real one, Borges too, throughout his life as a writer, sought to distil beings, titles
and events which his fantasy had forged into the history and literature of reality. Now they are
part of them, asconsistent and truthful as those which existed in objective time and real life.
With true erudition, this dictionary organises, classifies, defines, collates the thousand and
one creatures of Borges's imagination, constructing a map, in the minutest detail, of its
geographies and constellations. It is an entertaining manual for exploring the vastness and
cohesion of the Borgesian oeuvre, anexcellent guide to prevent us from getting lost in the
labyrinth and to ensure that we always find the way out.
M.V.L.

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x

Foreword by Anthony Burgess
I had a strong personal affection for Jorge Luis Borges. This, I think, was reciprocated and
reinforced by the fact that we both had the same surname. At a party in the Argentine Embassy in
Washington DC, when he was dogged by spieslistening for words of disaffection, he and I spoke
in Anglo-Saxon. This baffled completely the polyglot agents of a repressive state; it was very
Borgesian. His life and his work tended to overlap: his work was magic and he had the face of a
magician. His blindness only made him see more. Compared with the blockbusting novelists of
our age, Borges must seem to have written practically nothing. Buthis ficciones, delicate,
enigmatic, metaphysical, represent some of the most exquisite probing into the reality that
twentieth-century literature has seen. He has created a whole world, and this dictionary serves to
indicate how large this world is: we need a gazetteer to find our way round it. It is primarily an
intellectual world, and it is built on the oldest of all intellectual dichotomies- the clash between
nominalism and idealism. If we are nominalists, we have to say that only particulars are real, and
that the universals are no more than words. A nominalist fiction-writer would have to have
separate words for all the tigers, oranges, dishwashers and prostitutes in the world, but such a
situation could never be handled. Fiction-writers have to use generalities, and this...