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.
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.
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„Ich habe mir das Paradies immer als eine Art Bibliothek vorgestellt.“
— Jorge Luis Borges
Blindheit, in: Die letzte Reise des Odysseus, Fischer-TB, 2. Aufl. 2001, Übers. Gisbert Haefs, S. 188
„Wir werden alle Augenblicke unseres Lebens wiedererlangen und sie kombinieren, wie es uns gefällt. Gott und unsere Freunde und Shakespeare werden unsere Mitarbeiter sein.“
— Jorge Luis Borges
Die Zeit und J. W. Dunne, 1940, aus: Borges, Eine neue Widerlegung der Zeit, Frankfurt am Main 2003
„Im Unterschied zu den Nordamerikanern und fast allen Europäern identifiziert sich der Argentinier nicht mit dem Staat.“
— Jorge Luis Borges
Unser armer Individualismus, in: Inquisitionen, Fischer-TB 1992, Übers. Gisbert Haefs, S. 43
„Lesen ist Denken mit fremdem Gehirn.“
— Jorge Luis Borges
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
„In meinem Gedicht spreche ich von Gottes glänzender Ironie, mir gleichzeitig achthunderttausend Bücher und Dunkelheit zu schenken.“
— Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges, Autobiographischer Essay, übersetzt aus dem Englischen von Christiane Meyer-Clason, in: Borges Lesen, Fischer-TB, 1991, S.61 (vgl. books. google).
„I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color.“
— Jorge Luis Borges
Context: 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.
"The Argentine Writer and Tradition", Fervor of Buenos Aires (1923)
„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.“
— Jorge Luis Borges
Source: 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.“
— Jorge Luis Borges
"The Threatened", The Book of Sand [El Libro de arena] (1975)
„Only one thing is more admirable than the admirable reply of the Saxon king: that an Icelander, a man of the lineage of the vanquished, has perpetuated the reply.“
— Jorge Luis Borges
Context: Only one thing is more admirable than the admirable reply of the Saxon king: that an Icelander, a man of the lineage of the vanquished, has perpetuated the reply. It is as if a Carthaginian had bequeathed to us the memory of the exploit of Regulus. Saxo Grammaticus wrote with justification in his Gesta Danorum: "The men of Thule [Iceland] are very fond of learning and of recording the history of all peoples and they are equally pleased to reveal the excellences of others or of themselves."
Not the day when the Saxon said the words, but the day when an enemy perpetuated them, was the historic date. A date that is a prophecy of something still in the future: the day when races and nations will be cast into oblivion, and the solidarity of all mankind will be established.
„In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.“
— Jorge Luis Borges
Context: In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.<!
On Exactitude in Science, as translated by Andrew Hurley, in Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (1999); first published in Los Anales de Buenos Aires, año 1, no. 3 (March 1946)
„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
Context: 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.
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.
