94-11-11:  COLLECTION REFLECTS ENIGMATIC MIND OF BORGES
"Alderman's Holdings of Argentine Writer Are World's Finest"

     A growing treasure trove of rare books and manuscripts in
an alcove of Alderman Library's Special Collections stacks is
helping scholars gain a fuller understanding of one of the
greatest and most enigmatic figures of 20th-century
literature. 

The collection, equalled in scope at U.Va. only by the William
Faulkner section of the library's renowned American literature
holdings, has its roots in the other hemisphere of the
Americas. It is the world's finest set of literary materials
related to the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who died in
1986 and whose international reputation as a creator of
mind-teasing, fantastic short stories as well as memorable
poems and essays continues to spread.

With little fanfare since an initial acquisition of Borges
material in 1977 and with limited funding for purchases, the
library has continued to add rare and sometimes previously
unknown pieces to its collection of a writer who constantly
revised printed versions of his work, never republished
significant parts of it and routinely destroyed many of his
manuscript drafts. Though there are still gaps, the collection
is particularly strong in Borges's early works, which the
author actually sought later to suppress. 

"Anything related to Borges is immensely valuable," said
Donald L. Shaw, the Brown-Forman Professor of
Spanish-American literature and a leading Borges scholar.
"With this we can reconstruct how he actually wrote certain
things. It's particularly important for his early biography and
for tracing his intellectual evolution."

The collection has been built entirely with private funds and
without a special endowment by curator C. Jared Loewenstein,
who has been the library's Ibero-American bibliographer since
1972. His 250-page descriptive catalogue of the collection,
published by the University Press of Virginia last year,
recently received an international publishing prize for its
contribution to Latin-American studies. 

Drawing on an extensive network of contacts in the
Latin-American book trade and some literary detective work,
Mr. Loewenstein has managed to come up with rare first
edition books, manuscripts of works both published and
unpublished, numerous variant printings of material and
important letters and translations. There is also a wide
international selection of critical works about Borges, an
elusive figure who served as director of the Argentine National
Library and became blind in his later years. 

Among the manuscripts are such important documents as an
emotional unpublished poem, "To My Father," written when
Borges's father died and unlike anything else he wrote; a long
unpublished essay on Flaubert and fiction; and the original
hand-written manuscript of one of Borges's most famous tales,
"The House of Asterion," on his obsessive theme of the
labyrinth as a metaphor for the universe. There are also whole
sets of 1920s-era Argentine literary magazines where
Borges's first essays and poems were published, when he was
in his twenties and helping to establish an avant-garde
literary movement called Ultraism. 

The collection has been a basis for doctoral dissertations here
in fields as varying as English, Spanish, philosophy and
religious studies. And a recent week in October brought
scholars from as far away as Bogota, Colombia, and the Kiev
Academy of Sciences in Russia to pore over works in the
collection.

"It is the only institutional collection where you can examine a
Borges text from its manuscript stage to its first publication
in a magazine to variant printings in books," said Mr.
Loewenstein.

Like Mr. Shaw, who arranged for appearances by Borges at
Edinburgh and Brown universities, Mr. Loewenstein kept in
contact with the writer, both by phone and when Borges gave
lectures and readings in this country. He first met him in
1968, when Borges came to U.Va., just as his work was
garnering the same wide appreciation in the United States that
it had long had internationally.

A great fan of Poe, the brilliant, multilingual Borges recited
several of the University alumnus's poems to an overflow
crowd in Newcomb Hall Ballroom, Mr. Loewenstein recalled. In
another connection to U.Va.'s literary heritage, Borges also
was the first translator of Faulkner into Spanish; and the
Alderman collection includes an edition of his translation of
"The Wild Palms".

Some time after Borges visited here, Mr. Loewenstein told a
Latin-American antiquarian bookseller that he was interested
in building the library's collection of important Spanish
American writers, including Borges. One Sunday night in 1977,
he received a phone call at home from South America. The book
dealer wanted to know if the University would be interested in
a sizeable group of Borges editions, collected by a fellow
Argentine poet.

The asking price was low, partly because of economic
conditions in Argentina at the time and partly because the
market value for Borges material had not yet skyrocketed. Mr.
Loewenstein spent a sleepless night before gaining approval
from the library to buy the collection the next day.

When it arrived, "I could hardly think straight at first," he
recalled. In addition to the early works, some of which the
author had never had reprinted, there were some very rare
first editions, and many were autographed. There was a copy of
the author's scarcest book: his second volume of poetry, "Luna
de enfrente", existing in only a few known copies. And there
was a leather-bound proof copy of Borges's first book, "Fervor
de Buenos Aires", poetry which he had written upon returning
to his native city as a young man after living in Europe. It was
signed by the author, had handwritten revisions and was bound
with two early works that Borges never allowed to be
reprinted.

Borges obviously hadn't destroyed all his manuscripts because,
amazingly to Mr. Loewenstein, there was an unpublished poem,
"Villa Mazzini," intended for "Fervor de Buenos Aires" which
Borges had withheld. Mr. Loewenstein later coaxed from the
author, who professed hardly to remember the poem and didn't
want to hear it read to him, biographical information about its
composition.

With such material in hand, the library realized "we should
commit to a long-term project," said Mr. Loewenstein. "We had
to continue. If we tried to recreate this collection now, we
couldn't do it. But we still have tremendous needs. There are
many hard-to-find editions and out-of-print works we don't
have. There is a growing body of important Borges criticism
and scholarship. And we need to assure proper preservation of
the collection."

Since that time Mr. Loewenstein has added other important
items, tripling the size of the collection. One of Alderman
Library's prized possessions is one of two known copies of the
first issue of Prisma, an Ultraist poetry broadside manifesto,
dated December 1921, and signed by Borges, who at age 22 had
printed the poster containing one of his poems and tacked it on
kiosks and walls around Buenos Aires.

There are now more than two dozen Borges manuscripts here,
including some of the author's most important prose pieces:
"The Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires," "The Cabala," and "The
Dead Man," one of his short-story masterpieces, containing
extensive textual corrections. Borges's deteriorating
handwriting over time documents his failing eyesight.

Little of the unpublished work in the collection has appeared in
print because Borges's literary estate, which still owns the
rights, has been reluctant to grant permission, Mr. Loewenstein
said. When that time comes, Mr. Loewenstein hopes there can
also be an electronic edition of some of the material in the
U.Va. collection, so scholars around the world can analyze it
via computer.

One of Borges's ideas was that each new reader of a text helps
create it all over again. "He also used to say that all writers
were really one writer, and that his own work was continually
a work in progress," Mr. Loewenstein noted. "In some ways, a
hypertext edition would be the ultimate answer to his vision
of a text that is endless and variable." 

Another of Borges's almost mystical themes is that the
universe is like an infinite library, containing all facts and
knowledge, and he once said that he had always thought of
paradise "as a kind of library." Regardless of whether he
totally approved of the monument to his imagination _ a little
universe in itself _ that exists in the U.Va. library, "people
just light up when they see what's here," Mr. Loewenstein said.

Mr. Loewenstein and Mr. Shaw would also like to see a Borges
studies center here, and they plan to organize a major
symposium for 1999, in celebration of the 100th anniversary