Editing Borges: How to Organize a Critical Edition of His Works
Guest lecture by Daniel Balderston, organized by the research area Literary and Cultural Studies. All interested are welcome to attend!
Abstract:
Borges published extensively from 1919 to 1986, almost always short texts in newspapers and magazines that were later collected in a rather haphazard fashion into books. In fact, I would argue that he only wrote one book as such, Evaristo Carriego in 1930. I will argue here that a critical edition of his works needs to present all of his some three thousand publications in strict chronological order with introductions on first publication and commentaries on sources, iterations, relations with other texts and so forth, more or less on the model that we adopted for Cuadernos & Conferencias (Borges Center, 2024, edited with Alfredo Alonso Estenoz, Mariela Blanco, Emron Esplin and María Celeste Martín).
I would also explore the ways in which a new reader's edition of Borges (in many volumes) would emerge from a digital project with numerous collaborators, along the lines that have been suggested in recent writings on digital textual editing (Shillingsburg, Eggert, van Hulle et al.). This edition would take into account the numerous manuscript materials that have come to light, and consider the relations between the published texts and Borges's oral performances (talks, courses, interviews), particularly after 1949.