![]() ![]() Llama a Isidore Ducasse "el intolerable conde de Lautréamont" y afirma que Rimbaud fue "un artista en busca de experiencias que no logró". Si no vacila en ser neutro con Mae West, complaciente con un tal Alan Griffiths (título de su novela: Of Course, Vitelli! ), es implacable con Corneille, sangriento con Breton, desdeñoso con Baudelaire. As Saer puts it on pages 31-32 (ellipses added in the longer citation that follows), "una sola pasión puede compararse en intensidad a la anglofilia de Borges: su francofobia" : Second, I was equally amused by the way Saer links Borges' English-friendly literary preferences to Borges' intensely squeamish opposition to almost anything French. Among the recipients of Borges' often dubious English-language esteem, Saer cites Ellery Queen and Mae West-whom he claims Borges praised for her contributions to "modern literature" and not to the art of film. Wells, Chesterton, Leon Bloy) es complementada en esta antología por la exaltación o la mención de autores de tercero, de cuarto e incluso de ene-orden" (30-31). ![]() "Su inclinación conocida por ciertos escritores de segundo orden (H.G. First, I was tickled by Saer's almost trash-talking depiction of Borges' near "obsequious" Anglophilia. For our purposes, at least three points Saer makes about JLB are worth repeating for readers without any Spanish. Saer's "Borges francófobo", inspired by the 1986 publication of the Borges anthology Textos cautivos (a collection of book reviews and book talk Borges wrote from 1936-1939 as head of the "Foreign Books and Authors" section of the Buenos Aires-based "society" weekly El Hogar), is a short, smart, and often funny piece of essay writing that pleased me for the way it subverts the trusty book review format to draw attention to Borges' inordinate disdain for the giants of French literature (note: those who only know Saer from his excellent but abstruse novels may be surprised at how down to earth his literary criticism is). In anticipation of what I hope will prove to be a long-term commitment to bringing you more literary criticism and literary history to ooh and ah about here on Caravana de recuerdos, here's a quick, inaugural highlight reel of Juan José Saer's stupendous 1990 piece on fellow Argentine countryman Jorge Luis Borges. ![]()
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