This Craft of Verse

In a series of incandescent lectures given at Harvard in 1967–1968, Jorge Luis Borges explores poetic meaning, prose forms, literary history, translation theory, and philosophical aspects of communication writ large, offering a priceless window into the Argentinian master’s lifelong love affair with the English language.

“A wondrously limpid testament to the pleasures of reading.” —Steven Poole, The Guardian

Six incandescent lectures on literature from the patron saint of mirrors, metafiction, and infinite libraries.

For more than thirty years, Jorge Luis Borges’s Norton Lectures went unpublished. Recorded at Harvard in 1967 and 1968, the tapes gathered dust in a library vault until their discovery after his death. It was a twist that the author of Labyrinths would have relished. This volume assembles the recovered materials, offering a priceless window into the Argentinian master’s lifelong love affair with the English language.

This Craft of Verse captures the cadences, candor, wit, and erudition of one of the twentieth century’s enduring literary voices. Though his avowed topic is poetry, Borges explores subjects ranging from prose forms—especially the novel—to literary history, translation theory, and philosophical aspects of communication writ large. Borges here draws on a wide range of literary examples—modern and medieval English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese. He brings characteristic eloquence and inexhaustible enthusiasm to readings of Plato, the Old Norse kenningar, Byron, Poe, Chesterton, Joyce, and Frost, as well as translations of Homer, the Bible, and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

Whether discussing metaphor, the origins of verse, or his own “poetic creed,” Borges gives a performance as entertaining as it is intellectually engaging. A lesson in the love of literature and the making of a unique artistic sensibility, This Craft of Verse is a sustained encounter with one of the writers whose place in the twentieth century will be forever remembered.

Contributor: Viet Thanh Nguyen (Foreword by), Calin-Andrei Mihailescu (Edited by)

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