Homage to Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract

WE HAVE COME TOGETHER this evening to celebrate the memory of Jorge Luis Borges, who was one of the great writers of this century, and who has long been recognized as such. By the end of the fifties, his fame had begun to spread beyond the circles of the devotees of difficult literature, and he was soon to know a glory that our era accords but rarely to those whose only activity is writing. He has been the object of widespread critical attention in many countries; the kind of man he was aroused considerable sympathy; his death was followed by an uncommon degree of emotion. In short, the response to Borges has been so general and so seemingly attentive a phenomenon that, as I speak of him this evening, I should perhaps resign myself to the idea that I will be able to do little more than to recall a few of the things that everybody knows, adding to them only those slight nuances permitted by a necessarily personal reading, or by the memories I have of the times we met. And yet, this is not at all the way I feel, and I think, on the contrary, that Borges has been rather misunderstood--in France at