"Borges and Joyce stand as two of the most revolutionary writers of the twentieth-century. Both are renowned for their polyglot abilities, prodigious memories, cyclical conception of time, labyrinthine creations, and for their shared condition as European emigres and blind bards of Dublin and Buenos Aires. Yet at the same time, Borges and Joyce differ in relation to the central aesthetic of their creative projects: the epic scale of the Irishman contrasts with the compressed fictions of the Argentine. In this comprehensive and engaging study, Patricia Novillo-Corvalan demonstrates that Borges created a version of Joyce refracted through the prism of his art, thus encapsulating the colossal magnitude of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake within the confines of a nutshell. Separate chapters triangulate Borges and Joyce with the canonical legacy of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare using as a point of departure Walter Benjamin's notion of the afterlife of a text. This ambitious, interdisciplinary study offers a model for Comparative Literature in the twenty-first century."

This book studies how Borges constructs a theory of translation that plays a fundamental role in the development of Argentine literature, and which, in turn, expands the potential for writers in Latin America to create new and innovative literatures through processes of re-reading, rewriting, and mis-translation. The book analyzes Borges's texts in both an Argentine and a transnational context, thus incorporating Borges's ideas into contemporary debates about translation and its relationship to language and aesthetics, Latin American culture and identity, tradition and originality, and center-periphery dichotomies. Furthermore, a central objective of this book is to show that the study of the importance of translation in Borges and of the importance of Borges for translation studies need not be separated. Furthermore, translation studies has much to gain by the inclusion of Latin American thinkers such as Borges, while literary studies has much to gain by in-depth considerations of the role of translation in Latin American literatures. Sergio Waisman is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at The George Washington University.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is Argentina's most celebrated author. This volume brings together for the first time the numerous contexts in which he lived and worked; from the history of the Borges family and that of modern Argentina, through two world wars, to events including the Cuban Revolution, military dictatorship, and the Falklands War. Borges' distinctive responses to the Western tradition, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Kafka, and the European avant garde are explored, along with his appraisals of Sarmiento, gauchesque literature and other strands of the Argentine cultural tradition. Borges' polemical stance on Catholic integralism in early twentieth-century Argentina is accounted for, whilst chapters on Buddhism, Judaism and landmarks of Persian literature illustrate Borges's engagement with the East. Finally, his legacy is visible in the literatures of the Americas, in European countries such as Italy and Portugal, and in the novels of J. M. Coetzee, representing the Global South.

The complete sonnets of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—in English and Spanish This landmark collection brings together for the first time in any language all of the sonnets of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. More intimate and personally revealing than his fiction, and more classical in form than the inventive metafictions that are his hallmark, the sonnets reflect Borges in full maturity, paying homage to many of his literary and philosophical paragons—Cervantes, Milton, Whitman, Emerson, Joyce, Spinoza—while at the same time engaging the mysteries immanent in the quotidian. A distinguished team of translators—Edith Grossman, Willis Barnstone, John Updike, Mark Strand, Robert Fitzgerald, Alastair Reid, Charles Tomlinson, and Stephen Kessler—lend their gifts to these sonnets, many of which appear here in English for the first time, and all of which accompany their Spanish originals on facing pages.