The New Yorker:

“A man’s memory is not a summation; it is a chaos of vague possibilities.” The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges died thirty-six years ago yesterday.

By Jorge Luis Borges 

There are devotees of Goethe, of the Edda, of the late song of the Nibelungen; my fate has been Shakespeare. As it still is, though in a way that no one could have foreseen—no one save one man, Daniel Thorpe, who just recently died in Pretoria. There is another man, too, whose face I have never seen.

My name is Hermann Sörgel. The curious reader may have chanced to leaf through my “Shakespeare Chronology,” which I once considered essential to a proper understanding of the texts; it was translated into several languages, including Spanish. Nor is it beyond the realm of possibility that the reader will recall a protracted diatribe against an emendation Theobald inserted into his critical edition of 1734—an emendation which became from that moment on an unquestioned part of the canon. Today I am a little taken aback by the uncivil tone of those pages of mine, which I might almost say were written by another man. In 1914 I drafted, but did not publish, an article on the compound words that the Hellenist and dramatist George Chapman coined for his versions of Homer; in forging these terms, Chapman did not realize that he had carried English back to its Anglo-Saxon origins, the Ursprung of the language. It never occurred to me then that Chapman’s voice, which I have now forgotten, might one day be so familiar to me. . . . A scattering of critical and philological “notes,” as they are called, signed with my initials, complete, I believe, my literary biography. Although perhaps I might also be permitted to include an unpublished translation of “Macbeth,” which I began in order to distract my mind from the death of my brother, Otto Julius, who fell on the Western front in 1917. I never finished translating the play; I came to realize that English has (to its credit) two registers—the Germanic and the Latinate—while our own German, in spite of its greater musicality, must content itself with one.

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