All that is Solid Melts into Air: Borgesian Variations on Translation, Fidelity, Citation and Plagiarism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers Borges’s central role in the Argentine literary tradition of misattribution and false citations. It reassesses his subversion of normative perceptions of traditional literary values and practices such as originality and plagiarism and contextualizes his now familiar views on the relative merits of translation and ‘creative’ writing (reminiscent of his elevation of the reader above the writer) and investigates his preference for collaborative production over individual authorship. The essay reminds the reader of Borges’s joyful view of literature and ends by considering two contemporary Argentine writers (Tomás Eloy Martínez and Ricardo Piglia) whose largely divergent outputs find some common ground in their gravitation towards distinctively Borgesian motifs and techniques.