Who is the better writer: Nabokov or Borges?

>Speak, Funes

Nabokov is stronger, more focused, more erotic, more careful, more of a craftsman.
Still I prefer Borges. Something about his Buenos Aires, his magic. His best stories are exactly what they are.

Kodama, night of my life, fire of my lamp. My vice, my void. Kaw-da-ma: the root of the tounge making a leap with three bumps through the palate to burst, at three, from the lips.

Apples are better than oranges fag.

Someone post an excerpt of both mens best for comparison!

Nabokov = Dionysian
Borges = Apollonian
Borges is better.

Damn, didn't mean to quote.

Judging by a short excerpt, Nabokov will always win!

borges by far

Childhood is idolizing Nabokov.
Adulthood is realizing that Borges makes more sense.

nabokov is rum

borges is whiskey

Nabokov is more enjoyable, Borges is more useful

Borges is more consistent in quality: Nabokovs early novels are not great. Nabokov is rightly praised for his prose style, but even on that level I prefer Borges. Perfectly lucid, where Nabokov often gets lost in metaphors, like in Speak, Memory. Overall, I would take Borges over Nabokov.

Have you read early Borges?
I'm a Borgesfag, but even I think that his early essay notebooks are the pinnacle of pseud autism.

How do I write like them?

Focus intently when reading them. Take notes of their sentence structure, use of language. Emulate by making fanfiction.

Check if it's close. And wala.

Borges was a polyglot too...

*apples to oysters

Both failed to get a Nobel, who cares

Borges' failure to ever win the Nobel Prize merely revealed it to be a meme and a joke, decades before Bob fucking Dylan won one.

lay lady lay
lay across my big blue balls

PASITO PASITO SUAVE SUAVECITO.

An Aleph is precisely what Ada could have used to save it from the boring last half.

ESTITO

Huh, Borges spoke Spanish, English, German and French fluidly, was able to understand Italian and Portuguese, and eventually learned Old English when he went blind. He was more of a polygot than Nabokov ever was.

He also had his first translation publish a age 10.
He said he was learning icelandic in 1976, ut i don't know if he ever became fluent

VOY POR EL LABERINTO
ALGO BIEN METAFÍSICO

VOY POR TU CUERPO COMO POR EL MUNDO

(not the user youre responding to)

i dont really think polyglot is the best word here. nabokov's mastery of english prose as a native russian speaker is what is so impressive, and something that borges did not do.p

Who would win in a fight? Nabokov has his lepidopterologist set but Borges has his aged and infirm mother.

For what concerns his early essays, you are right, I primarily meant fiction and poetry. His essay on Ulysses is cringeworthy, could have been written by a Veeky Forums poser. His early poems and stories are fine, Nabokov took much longer to reach the level of Lolita and Pale Fire.

he spoke english for basically as long as he was been able to speak at all. his governess taught him english and his father struggled to have him speak primarily in russian.
no biographical details make his prose any more astounding though.

I love how Borges didn't give a fuck
He always said he thought his work was garbage. In every interview he remarks something thats wrong in a sentence or verse of some classic author. Created his iconic working-only-with-short-stories style just because he was lazy, creating a whole metanarrative-based literature influence in contemporary literature. He literally took the crazy ideas and concepts of his works from much older literature and openly admited it. Translated chaging stuff from the original works because he belived the original had errors and he corrected them, sometimes changing a lot from the original. Openly said Black people were awful and had done nothing of value after they stopped being slaves.
What the fuck
Nabokov has good banter too but Borges was just savage

Borges was really really autistic.
I mean, he openly supported dictatorships for the lelz and hated every single political movement that wasn't based on Proudhon.

>openly supported dictatorships for the lelz
I don't think you understand how argie politics work. Borges was constantly criticized for not having a specific set of beliefs, for not saying the right things and not being a part of the Cause. To this day politics in this country are fucking unbearable and they were much worse in his time; it was basically impossible to be an intellectual or be relatively well off without catching heat. By the time Pinochet came around Borges was an old and well known, but people were still expecting him to believe what they wanted.

Thank dog I am not argentinian.
t. chilean

As much as I love Nabokov, Borges is way better as writer in all aspects maybe except for prose aesthetics

>it's a "who was the better writer" thread

The answers are really interesting. Consensus is: Nabokov may the best, but we prefer Borges anyway so Borges wins.

What is it that defines Nabokov's prose? I read Laughter in the Dark recently, which was a very relaxed read, but the prose didn't necessarily stand out. Is it not characteristic of his style?

I'll probably read Pale Fire or Lolita next, then go by taste.

as if pseud autism is not the pinnacle...

Lolita is probably Nabokov's peak, as far as prose goes. And that's what most people have ever read by him. You have to understand that he took extra care with Lolita's prose because he's writing a story about a man so consumed with the sensuality of this girl that he's unable to resist her temptation. He's unable to "put his feelings down," so to speak, in a similar way a reader can not "put the book down." The words had to reflect that so the reader felt the same way about reading the book as Humbert Humbert felt about Lolita.

And it HAD to be that way or else it never would have worked. I mean, Humbert Humbert is a man who falls desperately in love with a 12 year old girl and begins a sexual relationship with her as her stepfather. This is not exactly a character that you, the reader, is supposed to relate to and it is not a book that you're supposed to want to continue. Have to continue. Need to continue if only because you need to see what he does with the next sentence.

The prose of Lolita is as vital to the aesthetic experience of Lolita as Lolita the character. It simply would not have worked if it wasn't. The reader never would have been able to empathize or somewhat understand what was happening to Humbert if the words weren't as inexplicably beautiful as they are.

I don't love everything Nabokov ever did, but if there's one thing I've always given him credit for it's that he had the insight to understand that the way you tell a story is nearly as important as the story itself. It's the same reason a story is "scarier" when told late at night around a campfire than it is told on a Sunday morning in your busy local coffee shop.

To add, many writers don't understand this or forget this or spend so much time on their work they simply feel they need to go all out and overboard with their prose or their ideas that they lose sight of what they're doing. Telling a story. Entertaining people. Trying to communicate an emotion or an idea by using simple tools called words and having the reader recreate it in themselves.

It's why Shakespeare was so good, as another example. He had people from all walks of life coming to his shows and he was as much a businessman as he was a writer. He wrote to entertain as much as he did for infamy. He wrote for the dirtiest and the dumbest to the most well born and best educated of society. He was successful because he could tell fart jokes and dick jokes and rile the place up and then turn to a different member of the audience and have an actor deliver a devastatingly beautiful soliloquy on life and death. These things are universal to everyone. Everyone can understand all aspects of life. Where writers, and people, in general often go wrong is that they play toward a specific reader (often themselves) and forget that everyone, everywhere can relate to anything they want to say as long as they don't treat them like they're something they want them to be rather than treating them like themselves.

It's the same reason why kids, particularly teenagers, usually like the adults who don't necessarily treat them like kids all the time. That's not to say you shouldn't have boundaries with kids/teenagers, just saying they generally like adults who talk to them closer to equals better than those who can't/refuse to even try and relate to them.

It's another reason why, for the life of me, I can't understand why no damn editor ever sat someone like Wallace down, slapped him in the face, and said, "you can't possibly think all of these footnotes are a good idea, dude..." Wallace got by on his natural talent, but he would have been infinitely better (hehe...) if someone in his life would have just told him no instead of constant, "oh you're really good David!"

Now I'm rambling.

Fucking kek'd

This post gave me an early morning laugh.

Thanks for the info!

Borges taught himself German, talked french, Latin, english and italian.

Talking about the topic of the thread, I think that Nabokob is definetly the better stylist while Borges the better achiever in content and structural composition. So... none.

He never became fluent in icelandic, but he did understood Saxon and could read the runic alphabet. Also, he studied Icelandic until he died.

I agree, but Borges mastered his own toungue. While not writing the most impressive spanish prose he wrote some of most well thought and clean prose. He also was a great poet, I wasn't impressed with his first poems such as cuaderno San Martín or Fervor de Buenos Aires but after El Hacedor he started writting some amazing poems, both in free verse and traditional metric.

He also translated the Divine Comedy.

Well, when you get a lot of Peronists making a riot in your classes your conservative views are kinda justified. That said, Borges did claim and wrote with the idea of Literature as apolitical.

Worth reading to be fair

The garden of forking paths by Borges is a simple story but the execution is oh so good.

This is a dumb comparison. Cortázar vs. Nabokov would make much more sense.

That being said, Borges.

Nabokov was the best stylist, but Borges had a bigger scope.

I love both, tbqh fampai

>This is not exactly a character that you, the reader, is supposed to relate to and it is not a book that you're supposed to want to continue.
Hmm? Oh! Oh. Yeah. Yeah! Totally... Absolutely.

No, that's wise, user. I agree, and as an author it's probably my major fear to fall into that mistake. It seems easy to do, but when you're driven to something or someone it's really not, specially when you're the one telling the story.

Sorry I had to fall asleep last night. Don't get me wrong, I do it, too. It's a constant challenge. I read writers all the time who over write. And I'm not even talking about purple prose which is so ridiculously overwritten it's becomes comical. I'm talking about having the talent and the foresight to understand when a story needs it and when it doesn't. Knowing when to pull back and when to really lay it down.

The easiest example to relate to is music. Music is horrible without dynamics. It's one of the simplest concepts and yet many still get it wrong. Without pianissimo, fortissimo is dull. Meaningless. Without the whole note, the staccato is numb.

This is another example of why Joyce was such a talent. He understood this at a very early age. Hell, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is written from the perspective of himself at different ages. I mean, the fact that he was talented enough to pull it off so well, let alone at such a young age, is the type of thing that separates him from others. He continued this through his entire oeuvre. Yes, including Finnigans Wake. But Finnegans Wake is a conversation for a different time.

Faulkner.

>The easiest example to relate to is music. Music is horrible without dynamics. It's one of the simplest concepts and yet many still get it wrong. Without pianissimo, fortissimo is dull. Meaningless. Without the whole note, the staccato is numb.
Yup. You gotta be able to know when to put in the right moods in things and the right levels of textual density, when you know what is coming, and you're the one that's gonna make it come because the situation doesn't even really exist. You have to fight the idea you have of the story in order for it to be effective and so it can be what it aims to be. Gotta hone those subconscious senses of it-fits and it-fits-not when literature is all exposure; gotta pray the audiences gets it as well and you're not just deluded.

Nowadays what I'm going for when I reread my stuff is a sense of clarity or ataraxia, more of a "I didn't do anything wrong" than making an impact.

good post