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Reviewed by:
  • How Borges Wrote by Daniel Balderston
  • José J. Álvarez
Balderston, Daniel. How Borges Wrote. U of Virginia P, 2018. 392 pp.

How Borges Wrote is an ambitious and exhaustive scholarly endeavor that brings together "strands of different and apparently unrelated projects from [Balderston's] whole scholarly career" (6). The book is the result of the study of over 180 manuscripts organized and analyzed with the precision and care of a seasoned scholar who has devoted almost forty years to studying Borges's work and who has authored, co-authored, and edited numerous essential books, essays, indexes, and bibliographies on the Argentine writer. How Borges Wrote is also remarkably transparent and direct in its methods and objectives: in it, Balderston applies strategies extrapolated from genetic criticism to the study of Borges's marginalia, outlines, and drafts with the goal of shedding light on his compositional practices. Drawing general conclusions about Borges's writing process presents at least two major challenges. It demands extensive knowledge of his oeuvre and requires access to numerous manuscripts that (in Borges's case) are scattered throughout libraries and private collections. Successfully navigating both challenges, Balderston offers the reader an exemplary volume divided into eight content chapters plus three very useful appendices featuring a chronological list of manuscripts consulted and nearly 100 pages of facsimiles and transcriptions (both diplomatic and linear) that make the book an essential tool for future Borges scholarship.

Balderston's book is interesting, engaging, and, at times, surprising. His clear, dynamic prose—which is generally divested of jargon—takes the reader through different stages in the composition of short stories, essays, and poems included in Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), Evaristo Carriego (1930), El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1941), and Otras inquisiciones (1952), to name a few. The analysis of variants, corrections, interpolations, and quotes throughout various drafts affords Balderston the space to display his knowledge of the subject while identifying and explaining references that speak to the internal cohesion of Borges's work as well as to his ample knowledge of philosophy, history, art, literature, Buddhism, and mathematics. To share the experience of approaching Borges's manuscripts, Balderston devotes significant space to discussing their materiality, accounting for the disposition of the text on the page, contextualizing deletions, additions, and revisions, and elaborating on Borges's idiosyncratic notation system, as well as on the [End Page 295] different handwriting styles and rubrics he used throughout the years. Balderston's interest in the manuscripts' materiality also dictates the organization of the volume, which favors drafting practices, notation strategies, and medium over a more rigid chronological configuration.

The first three chapters of the book—"Readings," "Jottings," and "Note-books"—look at the copious notes, fragments, and drafts with which Borges crowded the books he was reading. After analyzing drafts of "Sobre el 'Vathek' de William Beckford," "Kafka y sus precursores," "La secta del Fénix," "El hombre en el umbral," "La espera," and "El escritor argentino y la tradición"—drafted in copies of Aulus Gelliu's Noctes atticae and Lisandro Segovia's Diccionario de argentinismos, as well as on two composition notebooks—Balderston concludes that Borges's library was essential to his creative process and observes that bibliographical references for his essays and lectures are usually documented with a rigor uncommon in his short stories. Chapters four and five—"Possibilities" and "Copies"—focus on two distinct composition strategies: interpolation and accretion. Looking at several drafts of each "A Francisco López Merino," "La muralla y los libros," "La lotería en Babilonia," and "El Aleph," Balderston determines that Borges used brackets to record the multiple alternatives he was considering at different stages. This becomes particularly clear in the section devoted to the study of the ineffable experience depicted in "El Aleph." Balderston's examination of the surviving drafts shows that Borges carefully revised sentence structure and word choice, reordered clauses multiple times, and expanded the text. In fact, the six clauses included in the first draft became thirty-seven in the published version.

"Typescripts" and "Revisions" (chapters six and seven) are also closely related. Balderston shows that Borges—who did not know how to type—revised by hand a...

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