Jorge Luis Borges speaks Hebrew!
Jorge Luis Borges — the universal recipient of the common love of everyone who’s ever been 15 and loved poking at the fabric of the world to see if it held tight together — wrote the amazing short story collection Labyrinths, and possibly the best version of the Golem mythos ever.
And there’s a lost interview with him in the new issue of Habitus magazine.
RÚSSOVICH: We begin. What can we say about…?
BORGES: In the beginning, b’reshit bara elohim, no?
Well, it’s semi-lost. It took place in 1984 in Buenos Aires, and has only now just been translated into English….and comes to us courtesy of the new Habitus, the most beautiful magazine about arbitrarily-chosen cities that exists.
it’s pretty commonly known that borges was a student of the kabbalah, which he studied in the original.
and his amazing fiction is hardly typified by teenage explorations in literature. his work remains relevant even for scholarship, eg yerushalmi’s zakhor, in which the value of forgetting is explained.
—invisible_hand · February 8th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Karl Rove is also apparently a big fan.
—Mobius · February 10th, 2008 at 1:45 pm