Reminder that Borges was not that well read or cultured

I find it hard to believe anyone hasn't set foot in some sort of museum

Do you live in early 20th century South America?

I don't think It's possible to sound more French than Ibarra here.

Pleb version of Bruckner desu

>reads no newspapers
>bad

Lmao

he listens to the Virgin

Borges? more like Boorges

>visual arts
>music
Pleb shite

Ibarra is clearly just buttdevastated that Borges blew off his dumb frenchie "literature."

Pretentious versions of Drum and Bass, you fucking tryhards.

I see nothing that proves that he wasn't well read except in French literature

Gives me confidence in myself actually. And it humanizes Borges which makes his achievements even more amazing.

So what

Same

Kek. He’s got that infuriating smugness that only the French have truly mastered.

Based, pure autism

>Veeky Forums gets this taken in by a neo-con pseud
>m'agical realism
Borges is as reddit as it gets. If you like Borges, you probably think House of Leaves is a masterpiece.

Borges is good but his stories aren't memorable. I only remember his prose style.

bait

>his stories aren't memorable.
i read Labyrinths a decade ago and still think of some of those stories to this day

>Visual arts

What's wrong with the visual arte?

Well, that's interesting, but I don't think it detracts from B's achievement in literature.

Talent is a funny thing. Ask Salieri whether such an uncultured and unserious man as Mozart deserved to have the talent he had.

More than a small few strong and evocative references to visual or fine arts in a work of literature can't help but seem contrived, unless you're really a member of a declining aristocratic family and your whole life has been spent in drawing rooms, concert and theatre halls and have now departed to Munich to share an apartment with a self-proclaimed bohemian artist of dubious ancestry next to a salon run by the mother of a world-celebrated abstract painter and third cousin of Wagner.

Newspaper-reading is for peons, poseurs and dried up businessmen.

Should I be surprised that 4 cerebral peasants agreed with this comment?

There's little special about Borges but I hadn't read this about him before so thanks OP.

>Newspaper-reading is for peons, poseurs and dried up businessmen.
r. subscribed to multiple podcasts

No? I spent about an hour lying in bed watching "cardiac arrest captured on camera" "sudden heart attack on camera" videos on YouTube today though.

>Ask Salieri whether such an uncultured and unserious man as Mozart deserved to have the talent he had.
Mozart was neither uncultured nor unserious outside of close friends, neither was Salieri ill disposed towards the man. Amadeus is interesting but hardly an accurate work of history.

he was the first Spanish language reviewer of Ulysses

So he was too busy reading Divine Comedy in Italian to read some shitty pretentious French drivel? Ok, whatever.

>Caring about visual and sonic "art"

have you considered trying Shame?

If that's true it only makes his body of work that much more impressive

Borges is basically the Erik Satie of literature. Shows that you can make your mark in a field without being very technically skilled (or even committed lol) just by dint of sheer creativity. This kind of shit inspires me

This makes a lot of sense. Thanks OP.

This is a reductio of being cultured though, isn't it? If you can be Borges without being cultured, then it can't be very important.

There's a little Gallic resentment here. French intellectuals are continually surprised and offended that the rest of the world isn't as obsessed with them as they are with themselves.

Didn't Borges lecture/write about Ulysses quite extensively? Is this person claiming he'd never read it?!?!?!

isn't that just basically a french guy mad that borges didn't care about frenchies? also who cares about scribbles in a canvas or people blowing on metal tubes

Makes Pierre Menard Stronger, gives more sense to The Library of Babel, and turns Borges into a based man.

French literature isn't worth exploring anyway, newspapers are poorly written propaganda for the masses, and visual arts and music have no bearing on your writing unless you're trying to reference obscure pieces to create a perception of belonging to high-society.

France is a world unto itself, culturally. The rest of the world is interested Proust, Flaubert, Hugo, Zola, a few others...but they have dozens of novelists/poets that they consider titans of world literature that the rest of the world has never heard of.

What did he mean by this

Well obviously, OP. Stories like Pierre Menard and the Library of Babel and him constantly inventing obscure references and books in his work as well as his constant blurring of fact and fiction is him showing that being well-read or cultured is an arbitrary construct; a meme, if you will.

Balzac and Stendhal are breddy gud, but yeah, the french think many of their writers are classics but nobody knows about them once you cross the frontier, they are still stuck to the times where they were the center of culture but the world has advanced without them

frenchman here, and genuinely curious. please tell me which one of these you would consider to be relatively unknown outside of France: Apollinaire Mallarmé Cendrars Gauthier Lautreamont Chateaubriand Char Huysmans Corbière Weil Péguy Gary

>Néstor Ibarra
You really think he's french ?

>listening to Wagner-lite

so he is basically a french-weeb, even worse

All of them

Borges was blind

then it's a shame, really. Apollinaire is the greatest thing to come out of France

I got bad news for you Piere...

Does he have any English translations? I might read something from him to try him out. Anything you recommend?

yeah, all of them don't even ring a bell

most ignorant comment ever made on Veeky Forums

I think almost everything would be lost in translation, most of it is in strict verse. maybe look up Zone on the internet

man it must suck not to speak french

Borges' review of Ulysses (from 1925) is actually pretty good, though of course he didn't read all of it. You can find it in Selected Non-Fictions p.12.

>I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes.

>ywn unironically say or write something like this
feels bad man

Also french but I can answer that better than these illiterates. Huysmans rings bells now but mainly because Houellebecq's latest novel referenced him; Lautreamont is niche but far from obscure due to the surrealists. All others are relatively unknown, though Mallarmé is frequently namedropped as an example of something untranslatable.

bait

c'est vraiment triste quand t'y penses

all tbqh

everything except Mallarme

>french
>Cendrars Gauthier Weil Péguy Gary are relatively unknown
> I can answer that better than these illiterates

mdr mon gars

Ever notice how the best 20th century French lit were Catholic? Bernanos, Bloy, Claudel, Huysmans, Mauriac, Peguy, Proust.

>maeks me laik Borges evne moar

I know all of them except Char, Gary and Corbière and have read most .
I'm surprised I'm being surrounded by fucking illiterate people.

I mean, the general population isn't going to know any of those, but I've either read or know of people who've read Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Lautreamont, Chateaubriand and Huysmans. I guess you can call them cult authors.

Cendrars and Gauthier just ring a bell tenuously (even though I majored in lit). Everyone else is unheard of.

Not saying that those aren't great authors but : Yourcenar, Genet, Ionesco, Artaud...

>implying Cendrars Gauthier Weil Péguy Gary are known outside of France
>when even Chateaubriand isn't
no

and they were either jews (Proust) or jew-lovers (Peguy and Bloy)

They are called oui-aboos