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

Argentine writer Pablo Katchadjian could face jail for remixing Jorge Luis Borges’s story The Aleph – but his is a thoroughly Borgesian experimentIn 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. Related: Virtual Library of Babel makes Borges's infinite store of books a reality – almost Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2015-06-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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