Xul Solar And Jorge Luis Borges

"The face of Borges most widely known is that of the blind, patrician man of letters in whose writings emotion is subjected to the play of ideas. Yet Borges, born in Buenos Aires in 1899, did not become virtually blind until the 1950s, and in the decades before this affliction and before his books were widely translated and internationally celebrated, he wrote, loved and engage in local polemics with adventurous passion." "In Jorge Luis Borges, Jason Wilson explores Borges' tumultuous early life in the streets and cafes of Buenos Aires and charts his literary friendships, love affairs and travels. Borges claimed never to have invented a character: 'It's always me, subtly disguised.' Illuminating the connections running between the biography and the fictions, Wilson reminds us that Borges was always a poet whose life was recreated in his work - but never in confessional ways - and restores his Argentine roots. This book will be an invaluable resource for all who treasure the modern master."--BOOK JACKET.

These wide-ranging conversations have an exceptionally open and intimate tone, giving us a personal glimpse of one of the most fascinating figures in contemporary world literature. Interviewer Fernando Sorrentino, an Argentinian writer and anthologist, is endowed with literary acumen, sensitivity, urbanity, and an encyclopedic memory of Jorge Luis Borges' work (in his prologue, Borges jokes that Sorrentino knows his work "much better than I do"). Borges wanders from nostalgic reminiscence to literary criticism, and from philosophical speculation to political pronouncements. His thoughts on literature alone run the gamut from the Bible and Homer to Ernest Hemingway and Julio Cortázar. We learn that Dante is the writer who has impressed Borges most, that Borges considers Federico García Lorca to be a "second-rate poet," and that he feels Adolfo Bioy Casares is one of the most important authors of this century. Borges dwells lovingly on Buenos Aires, too. From the preface: For seven afternoons, the teller of tales preceded me, opening tall doors which revealed unsuspected spiral staircases, through the National Library's pleasant maze of corridors, in search of a secluded little room where we would not be interrupted by the telephone…The Borges who speaks to us in this book is a courteous, easy-going gentleman who verifies no quotations, who does not look back to correct mistakes, who pretends to have a poor memory; he is not the terse Jorge Luis Borges of the printed page, that Borges who calculates and measures each comma and each parenthesis. Sorrentino and translator Clark M. Zlotchew have included an appendix on the Latin American writers mentioned by Borges

Brings together approximately 150 works of art, books, documents, and manuscripts from Xul Solar's personal archive as well as from public and private collections. This book provides an in-depth study of this artist, one of the most influential in Latin American avant-garde art. It also includes an artistic and biographical chronology.

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.

This is the first full-scale study of the life and work of Argentine artist Xul Solar (1887-1963), who was born Oscar Agustin Alejandro Schulz Solari in Buenos Aires. A gregarious eccentric, Xul Solar played a prominent role in the Argentine avant-garde of the 1920s, which included Jorge Luis Borges and such visiting luminaries as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Italian Futurist leader. Xul Solar went on to create a number of interrelated verbal and visual languages that expressed his identity as an Argentine/Latin American artist as well as a utopian desire for universal brotherhood. Xul Solar left Argentina in 1911 on his way to the Far East, but he went only as far as Europe, where he remained for twelve years. There he absorbed modernist ideas - Symbolism, Expressionism, and Constructivism - and distilled them in a mixture of wit and whimsy. Xul Solar's first exhibition in Europe was held in Milan in 1910; he returned to Buenos Aires in 1924. By 1918 he had formulated a system of pictorial writing called neocriollo (Neo-Creole), designed to be understood all over Latin America. Xul Solar continued to study languages throughout his life, along with philosophy, astrology, Asian religions, and mysticism, and all of these were reflected in his art. His later works included visionary architectural projects and paintings composed mainly of messages.

"This book narrates exchanges between English- and Spanish-language poets in the American hemisphere from the late 1930s through the rise of the 1960s. It doing so, it contributes to a crucial current of humanistic inquiry: the effort to write a cosmopolitan literary history adequate to the age of globalization. Building on correspondence and manuscripts from collections in Europe and the Americas, the book first traces the material contours of an evolving literary network that exceeds the conventional model of "the two Americas." These relations depend on changing contexts: an era of state-sponsored transnationalism, from the wartime intensification of Good Neighbor diplomacy, to the Cold War cultural policy programs of the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s; a prosperous market for translations of Latin American poetry in the US; and a growing alternative print sphere of bilingual vanguard journals such as El Corno Emplumado (Mexico City, 1962-1969). As the book articulates these histories of exchange, it also theorizes how poets employ the resources of language to transform popular images of the hemisphere from a locus of political conflict into a venue of supranational cultural citizenship. Feinsod describes how inter-Americanism was enacted through diplomatic structures of literary address, multilingual writing, and appeals to a shared indigenous heritage through the genre of the meditation on ruins. By tracing the coevolution of midcentury poetry with the geopolitics of the hemisphere, the book expands existing literary histories of the period through revelatory comparative readings supported by archival findings"--