Abstract
This review article oers a detailed analysis of Lisa Block de Behar's Borges: The Passion of an Endless Quotation (2003), an innovative and erudite study that bridges the passions of the semiotician and the literary critic. The Uruguayan scholar offers illuminating insights into Borges' oeuvre and takes a new step in delineating similarities between specific questions of semiotics and his imagination. Inspired by her perceptive observation that Borges has oered a new dimension in the use of quotations by demonstrating the impossibility of not quoting, I analyze his story ‘A Weary's Man Utopia,’ which enters into an implicit dialogue with such classical texts as Thomas More's Utopia, H. G. Wells' The Time Machine and Henry James' The Sense of the Past to comment on the notion of language as a system of quotes. Furthering Block de Behar's insight into the creative process of Borges as writer, in the course of which he uses his earlier written texts to fashion new works, I discuss Borges' creative version of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass to suggest that Borges' translations are also informed by his own fiction and poetry.
About the author
Nataly Tcherepashenets (b. 1971) is Assistant Professor and Area Coordinator for Languages and Communication at the State University of New York, Empire State College. Her research interests are Latin American literature, comparative literature and semiotics, translation studies, and transatlantic studies. Her publications include ‘Place in Borges’ “El Aleph”: The irony of revelation' (2003); ‘Heidegger's concept of poetry in Garci'a Lorca's Poema del cante jondo’ (2003); ‘Dos visiones a través del puente: ¿Apocalipsis o la creación de un mito nuevo?’ (2005); and ‘Borges on poetry and translation in theory and practice’ (2005).
© Walter de Gruyter
