Enjoying the view from Limbo
I humbly offer here my own new translation of “Mirrors,” a poem by Jorge Luis Borges. The poem has existed in English translation for decades, and in more than one version, perhaps most popularly the translation of Alistair Reid, which is the one through which I first discovered this wonderful work. However, for reasons I will discuss below, I believe this new attempt...
Art and non-art.— Every drama worthy of the name has some sort of implied agenda. The difference between dramatic hackery and dramatic art is that the hack begins with the agenda, and manipulates his characters and scenario around as needed to “prove” it, whereas the artist begins with characters and scenario, and allows these to unfold as feels natural to him until, willy-nilly...
Life imitates art.– When fiction is transformed by circumstances and attentive subjectivity into the reader’s own self-revelation, it effectively ceases to be fiction, and becomes something more like figurative memoir. Hence, I may say without any hint of hubris or exaggeration that as of this moment, Brave New World is my autobiography, The Trial my last few diary entries, and Invasion of the...
Allan Bloom was a great teacher. A great teacher is a man whose manner of framing the important questions continues to inform his students’ thoughts long after they have left the teacher behind. A great teacher’s lasting impression is not his “personality,” that collection of idiosyncrasies which make him memorable in the way of a good vacation, but his mind—the way his reasoning...
Follow: