Abstract
‘Borges’s admiration for George Bernard Shaw’ explores Borges’s long dialogue and identification with Shaw. Borges first mentioned Shaw in 1926 in his avant-garde phase, against the Argentinian tendency to praise French culture. He shared Shaw’s Irish outsider position as an outsider in Argentina, before Shaw was translated into Spanish. Borges’s emphasis on the ‘reader’ and Shaw’s witty comment ‘I am nobody’ in Borges’s war with Romantic ego writing are studied. The philosophic context in Argentina in the 1940s and the fascism of Peronism explain Borges’s choice of Shaw and his quest for ‘individualism’. Finally, I look at the roles of Quevedo and John Scots Erigena, the notion of individuality and ‘talking’. I end with a brief review of the criticism on Shaw and Borges.
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Notes
- 1.
Quoted by Ronald J Christ, The Narrow Act. Borges’ Art of Allusion (New York: New York University Press, 1969), an excellent, early study of Borges’s debt to English and American literature, 13. Daniel Balderston compiled a list of Borges’s writings about Shaw under “Shaw” in his The Literary Universe of Jorge Luis Borges. An Index to References and Allusions to Persons, Titles and Places in his Writing (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986) and again under “Shaw” in Borges, Una Enciclopedia, with Gastón Grillo and Nicolás Helft (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1999).
- 2.
Seamus Heaney and Richard Kearney, interview with Borges in The Crane Bag 6 (1982): 71–78.
- 3.
Jorge Luis Borges, Inquisiciones (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1994), 24.
- 4.
I would like to thank Professor Gustavo Rodríguez Martín for recommending Shaw’s essay on “How to Make Plays Readable” from E. J. West, ed., Shaw on Theatre (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1958), 90–95.
- 5.
Jorge Luis Borges, En Sur, 1931–1980 (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1999), 132–135.
- 6.
See T. S. Eliot’s compilation of Paul Valéry, The Art of Poetry (London: Faber, 1958).
- 7.
See John King, Sur. A Study of the Argentine Literary Journal and its role in the Development of a culture, 1931–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). See also Patricia Willson, La constelación del Sur. Traductores y traducciones en la literatura argentina del siglo XX (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2004).
- 8.
Jorge Luis Borges, En Sur, 1931–1980, 132–135.
- 9.
“El escritor argentino y la tradición,” given in 1951, published in Sur in 1955, and then added to his 1932 Discusión in his 1974 Obras completas. It shows how Borges mocked chronology.
- 10.
Borges, with Alicia Jurado, “Qué es el budismo?,” Obras completas en colaboración (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1979), 719–781.
- 11.
See my Borges (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 14–18.
- 12.
Borges en Revista Multicolor, 1933–1934 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Atlántida, 1995), 205.
- 13.
Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974), 747–749 and translated by James E. Irby in Labyrinths. Selected Stories and Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970).
- 14.
“Introducción a la literatura inglesa,” in Obras completas en colaboración, 847–848.
- 15.
Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, the One-Volume Definitive Edition (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 531 and 788.
- 16.
Heaney and Kearney, 77.
- 17.
Jorge Luis Borges, Biblioteca personal (prólogos) (Buenos Aries: Alianza Literatura, 1988), 71–2.
- 18.
Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari, Reencuentro. Diálogos inéditos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1999), 161-166.
- 19.
Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 75.
- 20.
Evelyn Fishburn and Psiche Hughes, A Dictionary of Borges (London: Duckworth, 1990), 221–222.
- 21.
Richard Church, British Authors: A Twentieth-Century Gallery, with 53 Portraits (London: Longmans, 1948), 28.
- 22.
Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 56.
- 23.
Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges, edición de Daniel Martino (Buenos Aires: Destino, 2006), 1592, 664, 1131.
- 24.
Jorge Luis Borges and Ernesto Sabato, Diálogos (Madrid: Emecé, 1976), 125; Estela Canto, Borges a contraluz (Madrid: Colección Austral, 1989), 27–28.
- 25.
Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas, 533–544.
- 26.
See Christ in endnote 1, Evelyn Fishburn & Psiche Hughes, 221–2; Gene H. Bell-Villada, Borges and his Fiction. A Guide to his Mind and Art (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 39.
- 27.
Leonard A. Cheever, “Jorge Luis Borges and George Bernard Shaw,” Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 6, no. 1 (1980): 52–62. I would like to thank Professor Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín for drawing my attention to his article.
- 28.
Fernando Sorrentino, Siete conversaciones con Jorge Luis Borges (Buenos Aires: Casa Pardo, 2001), 145.
References
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Wilson, Jason. 2006. Jorge Luis Borges. London: Reaktion Books.
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Wilson, J. (2022). Borges’s Admiration for George Bernard Shaw. In: Rodríguez Martín, G.A. (eds) Bernard Shaw and the Spanish-Speaking World. Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97423-7_11
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