Artigo muito interessante de Michael Greenberg na NYReview of Books, a propósito de Professor Borges, um livro com transcrições das aulas do escritor feitas por alunos.
Aqui ficam os excertos:
According to his biographer, Edwin Williamson,1 Borges’s father handed him a dagger when he was a boy, with instructions to overcome his poor eyesight and “generally defeated” demeanor and let the boys who were bullying him know that he was a man.
Swords, daggers—weapons with a blade—retained a mysterious, talismanic significance for Borges, imbued with predetermined codes of conduct and honor. The short dagger had particular power, because it required the fighters to draw death close, in a final embrace. As a young man, in the 1920s, Borges prowled the obscure barrios of Buenos Aires, seeking the company of cuchilleros, knife fighters, who represented to him a form of authentic criollo nativism that he wished to know and absorb.
With its harsh consonants and open vowels, and its unambiguous vocabulary of things that “correspond to fire, metals, man, trees,” Anglo-Saxon was perfectly suited to the poetry of battle.
Borges had been reading English translations of the epics throughout his life, but when he was fifty-nine, he set out to teach himself Anglo-Saxon, a process he called “the pure contemplation of a language at its dawn.” The epics provided him with a kind of literary ideal: concrete, precise, and suffused with the glow of the sword as a magical object.
When he was in his late seventies, he still lived in the modest Buenos Aires apartment he had shared with his mother until she died. His biographer, Edwin Williamson, describes his bedroom as resembling “a monk’s cell with its narrow iron bed, single chair, and two small bookcases where he kept his collection of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian books.” Those ancient books were an integral part of the ethos that sustained this most modern of writers.
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