Disclaimer: I’ve Been Accused of Borges
The Watchman stories, I am told, carry the faint whiff of Borges. Some readers have even gone so far as to suggest plagiarism; that my labyrinths of memory, forgotten manuscripts, and ambiguous merchants are merely reheated Argentine leftovers. To which I must reply: guilty… but only by accident. Because here’s the truth: until now, I had never read Borges. Honest to God. I knew of him, mostly through Umberto Eco (my literary idol), who spoke of him with reverence. I knew he was supposed to be the high priest of mirrors, labyrinths, and infinite libraries. But - to my chagrin and utter embarrassment - I had never opened his pages. Not once.
And yet somehow, in the privacy of my own scribbling, I too arrived at labyrinths, mirrors, manuscripts, watchmen, cloisters. Not out of theft, but instinct. It seems Borges and I were merely fishing the same waters. He with more elegance, of course; me with a sarcastic shopkeeper and later on, with an unfortunate monk whose brewing habits should have been forbidden by canon law.
So yes: I have been accused of Borges. It is an accusation I accept, and even cherish. But if it is plagiarism, then it is a plagiarism of the unconscious, a theft committed in ignorance. And since ignorance is no excuse, I now set myself the task of reading Borges at last. At least then, when the next accusation arrives, I can respond with footnotes. Only there’s a catch: try doing that in Romanian. It is, frankly, a nightmare.
Where is the consolidated volume?! Where is our Labyrinths? Why must I wander through Aleph here, a volume of Essays there, a scattering of Poems somewhere else, instead of finding the whole glorious maze bound together in one tome?
The French, of course, managed it: Œuvres complètes in the Pléiade edition - all of Borges in one elegant, onion-paper brick, with scholarly notes. The Germans did it too: Gesammelte Werke, unified and annotated. Even the Anglo world had the courtesy to publish Labyrinths, a tidy anthology that gives you the essence of Borges without requiring a scavenger hunt.
And here we are in Romania, supposedly heirs to a culture of poetry and language. My ass. And yet our Borges lies scattered, fragmented, half-hidden. It feels less like reading him than like piecing together a riddle - and not in a good way.
So yes, I have been accused of Borges. And perhaps, once I’ve finally worked my way through his scattered Romanian footprints, or, more likely, taken refuge in the English editions, I will be guilty at last in the proper sense. But until then, I plead innocence, with a sentence of required reading.
PS: The accompanying image was generated after I found myself writing the unlikely sentence, “Eco scolding me at St. Gallen.” The absurdity seemed too perfect to waste, so I decided it was too good not to see. So there we have it: immaculate wool suit, Baroque library, raised hand, immortalised not by oil on canvas, but by a prompt and a machine. A fitting Borges-esque twist, if ever there was one.
