Borges’ Longwinded Catalog

‘We haven’t changed a bit, I thought.’ Jorge Luis Borges, whom William Gass described as ‘a man made civilised by the library’. I could spend a life in patient study of his stories. In The Other from The Book of Sand he offers a ‘longwinded catalog’. All his lists are enchanting. In the wardrobe closet in your room, there are two rows of books: the three volumes of Lane’s translation of the Thousand and One Nights—which Lane called The Arabian Nights Entertainment—with steel engravings and notes in fine print between the chapters, Quicherat’s Latin dictionary, Tacitus’ Germania in Latin and in Gordon’s English version, a Quixote in the Garnier edition, a copy of Rivera Indarte’s Tablas Sangre signed by the author, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, a biography of Amiel, and, hidden behind the others, a paperbound volume detailing the sexual customs of the Balkans. Also in his story: Dostoievsky’s* The Devils or The Possessed and The Double; Joseph Conrad; Rubén Darío’s Azul; Verlaine’s ‘Art…