Re-working Borges is a legitimate experiment, not a crime

Fernando Sdrigotti

 

In the short story Pierre Menard: Author of Quixote, Jorge Luis Borges writes of an author’s quest to reproduce Cervantes’ masterpiece, word by word, comma after comma. “Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough – he wanted to compose the Quixote,” Borges writes.

More likely than not to be aware of this Borgesian playfulness, Argentine author Pablo Katchadjian decided in 2009 to remix one of Borges’s most renowned short stories The Aleph, keeping the original text but adding a considerable amount of his own writing. The result was the short experimental book called El Aleph engordado (The Fattened Aleph), published by a small underground press in a short run of 300 copies. An unfortunate consequence of Katchadjian’s literary experiments is an ongoing lawsuit initiated in 2011 by Maria Kodama, Borges’s widow and fervent guardian of his literary estate.

Too Much Memory? Remembering and Forgetting at the Crossroads of the Centenary of the Armenian Genocide

Sebouh David Aslanian

Indeed suffering in common unifies more than joy does. Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties and require a common effort.[1]

These words from Ernest Renan’s iconic essay of 1882, “Qu'est-ce qu’une Nation?” offer a piercing diagnosis of how some small nations, which have been historic targets of persecution and violence and therefore know that they can easily disappear, have managed to generate and maintain their collective identities during the violent period that was the twentieth century. Painful memory, usually in large doses, has provided a remarkably effective if unhealthy boundary maintenance mechanism and helped those who patrol those boundaries (intellectuals, politicians, activists, and so on) to define and often narrowly to focus the identity collectives.

Questions on the Raison d'Etre of an Armenian School Education

This letter to the editor appeared in the June 1999 issue of the now-defunct "AIM" magazine in response to an editorial, "Questions on the Raison d'Etre of an Armenian School Education." A whole decade went on, but some of the issues raised in the letter seem relevant to us and, we hope, will look relevant to the readers.