Zitate von Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Geburtstag: 24. August 1899
Todesdatum: 14. Juni 1986
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo [ˈxorxe ˈlwis ˈβorxes] war ein argentinischer Schriftsteller und Bibliothekar. Borges verfasste eine Vielzahl phantastischer Erzählungen und Gedichte und gilt als Mitbegründer des Magischen Realismus.
Literarisch beeinflusst wurde Borges vor allem von Macedonio Fernández, Rafael Cansinos Assens, englischsprachiger Literatur , Franz Kafka und dem Daoismus. Seine philosophischen Anschauungen, die dem erkenntnistheoretischen Idealismus verpflichtet sind und sich in seinen Erzählungen und Essays wiederfinden, bezog Borges vornehmlich von George Berkeley, David Hume und Arthur Schopenhauer. Mit dem argentinischen Schriftsteller Adolfo Bioy Casares verband ihn eine lebenslange Freundschaft. Borges war Mitbegründer der „lateinamerikanischen Phantastik“ und einer der zentralen Autoren der von Victoria Ocampo und ihrer Schwester Silvina 1931 gegründeten Zeitschrift Sur, die sich dem kulturellen Austausch zwischen Lateinamerika und Europa widmete.
Zitate Jorge Luis Borges
„Im Unterschied zu den Nordamerikanern und fast allen Europäern identifiziert sich der Argentinier nicht mit dem Staat.“
Unser armer Individualismus, in: Inquisitionen, Fischer-TB 1992, Übers. Gisbert Haefs, S. 43
„Ich habe mir das Paradies immer als eine Art Bibliothek vorgestellt.“
Blindheit, in: Die letzte Reise des Odysseus, Fischer-TB, 2. Aufl. 2001, Übers. Gisbert Haefs, S. 188
"Siempre imaginé que el Paraíso sería algún tipo de biblioteca."
„In meinem Gedicht spreche ich von Gottes glänzender Ironie, mir gleichzeitig achthunderttausend Bücher und Dunkelheit zu schenken.“
Jorge Luis Borges, Autobiographischer Essay, übersetzt aus dem Englischen von Christiane Meyer-Clason, in: Borges Lesen, Fischer-TB, 1991, S.61 (vgl. books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=nQRJAAAAYAAJ&q=achthunderttausend).
Es handelt sich um Borges' "Gedicht von den Gaben", in: J.L. Borges, Borges und ich, Fischer-TB, 1993, S.49:
"[...] von Gottes planendem Genie, // da er mir, groß in seiner Ironie // die Bücher und die Nacht zum Leben gab." - volltext.online-merkur.de http://volltext.online-merkur.de/?m=v&link=/daten/www.online-merkur.de/mr_1962_04_0321-0324.pdf&session=747297512D84F4D43B9A529E7132943E
"esta declaración de la maestría // de Dios, que con magnífica ironía // me dio a la vez los libros y la noche." - Poema de los dones (1960)
„Lesen ist Denken mit fremdem Gehirn.“
zitiert in: Borges, J.L. und Osvaldo Ferrari: Lesen ist Denken mit fremdem Gehirn - Gespräche über Bücher & Borges, Arche 1990, Übers. Gisbert Haefs, S.84. Paraphrase eines Ausspruchs von Schopenhauer: "LESEN heißt mit einem fremden Kopfe, statt des eigenen, denken." Parerga und Paralipomena II, HaffmansTaschenBuch 1991, S.438
„Wir werden alle Augenblicke unseres Lebens wiedererlangen und sie kombinieren, wie es uns gefällt. Gott und unsere Freunde und Shakespeare werden unsere Mitarbeiter sein.“
Die Zeit und J.W. Dunne, 1940, aus: Borges, Eine neue Widerlegung der Zeit, Frankfurt am Main 2003
„I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color.“
"The Argentine Writer and Tradition", Fervor of Buenos Aires (1923)
Kontext: Some days past I have found a curious confirmation of the fact that what is truly native can and often does dispense with local color; I found this confirmation in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels. I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color.
„I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.“
No estoy seguro de que yo exista, en realidad. Soy todos los autores que he leído, toda la gente que he conocido, todas las mujeres que he amado. Todas las ciudades que he visitado, todos mis antepasados...
Quelle: El Pais, 1981 http://elpais.com/diario/1981/09/26/ultima/370303206_850215.html; translation: The Guardian, 2008 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/10/jorgeluisborges
„Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.“
"The Threatened", The Book of Sand [El Libro de arena] (1975)
„To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.“
— Jorge Luis Borges, buch Other Inquisitions
"The Meeting in a Dream"
Other Inquisitions (1952)
„A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.“
Twenty-four Conversations with Borges, Including a Selection of Poems: Interviews by Roberto Alifano, 1981–1983 (1984)
„Time carries him as the river carries
A leaf in the downstream water.
No matter. The enchanted one insists
And shapes God with delicate geometry.“
"Baruch Spinoza", as translated in Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason (1989) by Yirmiyahu Yovel
Kontext: Time carries him as the river carries
A leaf in the downstream water.
No matter. The enchanted one insists
And shapes God with delicate geometry.
Since his illness, since his birth,
He goes on constructing God with the word.
The mightiest love was granted him
Love that does not expect to be loved.
„Who are the inventors of Tlön? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor — an infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly — has been unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers… directed by an obscure man of genius. Individuals mastering these diverse disciplines are abundant, but not so those capable of inventiveness and less so those capable of subordinating that inventiveness to a rigorous and systematic plan.“
— Jorge Luis Borges, buch Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
Kontext: Who are the inventors of Tlön? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor — an infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly — has been unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers... directed by an obscure man of genius. Individuals mastering these diverse disciplines are abundant, but not so those capable of inventiveness and less so those capable of subordinating that inventiveness to a rigorous and systematic plan. This plan is so vast that each writer's contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, and irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally. Let it suffice for me to recall that the apparent contradictions of the Eleventh Volume are the fundamental basis for the proof that the other volumes exist, so lucid and exact is the order observed in it.
„Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.“
The Garden of Forking Paths (1942), The Garden of Forking Paths
Kontext: Ts'ui Pe must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.
„These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.“
— Jorge Luis Borges, buch The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
Other Inquisitions (1952), The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
Kontext: These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
„One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory.“
— Jorge Luis Borges, buch Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Variants: One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that past is no more than present memory . . . Another maintains that the universe is comparable to those code systems in which not all the symbols have meaning, and in which only that which happens every three hundredth night is true...
The history of the universe... is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a demon.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
Kontext: One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.
„Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction.“
— Jorge Luis Borges, buch Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
Kontext: Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlön. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language — religion, letters, metaphysics — all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial.
