Borges Audio – Commentary
- At August 14, 2019
- By Great Quail
- In Borges
0
Borges Audio: Audio Commentary
This section profiles Borges audiobooks and YouTube clips that are about Borges, or make extensive mention of Borges. The audiobooks are listed in chronological order of recording date:
Jorge Luis Borges: Más allá del tiempo y la eternidad (2015)
Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonia Express (2017)
Paul Strathern, Borges In 90 Minutes (2019)
Ilan Stavans, Infinity According to Jorge Luis Borges (2019)
Jay Parini, Borges and Me: An Encounter (2020)
Mario Vargas Llosa, Medio siglo con Borges (2020)
William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels (2023)
Most offsite links take you to Amazon. From there you can browse reviews, listen to a 5-minute sample of the book, and purchase the “aax” file for your Audible-enabled device. You can also go directly to Audible by following the appropriate links. (Amazon owns Audible.)
Jorge Luis Borges: Más allá del tiempo y la eternidad
Jorge Luis Borges: Beyond Time and Eternity
Jorge Luis Borges: Más allá del tiempo y la eternidad
Online Studio Productions, 2015
Length: 36 minutes
Also available at: Audible
Available on Audible, this Spanish-language audiobook is a short biography of Jorge Luis Borges. The narrator is not credited, and the only commentary is in Spanish:
La singular vida de uno de los escritores más destacados de la literatura del siglo XX. Dueño de una grandiosa imaginación, Borges expuso su mundo interior a lo largo de sus obras, las cuales constituyen un gran aporte a la literatura y al pensamiento humano. Su exigente educación, su temprano amor por las letras, su prolífica producción literaria y su genialidad creativa hicieron de él un artista e intelectual incomparable.
Translated with some help from Google:
The unique life of one of the most outstanding writers of twentieth-century literature. Possessing a prodigious imagination, Borges revealed his inner world through his works, which constitute a monumental contribution to literature and human thought. His demanding education, his early love for letters, his prolific literary production, and his creative genius made him an incomparable artist and intellectual.
If any visitor would like to contribute a review, please contact the Garden!
Old Patagonian Express
The Old Patagonian Express
By Paul Theroux
Read by Norman Dietz
F.W. Howes, 2017
Unabridged; 16 hours, 43 minutes
Paul Theroux’s 1979 travelogue contains an anecdote of meeting Borges in Argentina. The original audiobook came out on twelve 90-minute cassettes in 1986 through “Books on Tape.” It is read by Norman Dietz, named by AudioFile as one of the “Best Voices of the Century.”
Publisher’s Description: In The Old Patagonian Express, Theroux rides the more or less continuous track from his home in Boston to the Great Plain of Patagonia in southern Argentina. His writer’s eye misses no detail, and he serves up delights such as the brawling soccer fans of El Salvador, a bogus priest in Cali, and a desperate American woman searching for her lover in Veracruz. To this he adds an extraordinary account of his meeting with author Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina.
Borges, Pinochet y el Premio Nobel
Borges, Pinochet, and the Nobel Prize
Borges, Pinochet y el Premio Nobel
By Alejandro Drollness
Narrated by Edgar Garcia
Alejandro Droznes, 2017
Length: 47 minutes
The Spanish-language audiobook appeared on Audible for several years, but has mysteriously vanished. The summary was in Spanish, and was copyrighted by the author:
El hecho de que Borges no haya recibido el Premio Nobel puede interpretarse como una mera circunstancia histórica en la que primó la injusticia. Este libro sostiene una idea opuesta: Borges rechazó el Premio Nobel, y ese rechazo representa un eslabón más dentro de la obra borgiana. Según Alejandro Droznes, la estrategia de Borges para que no le dieran el Nobel es la coronación de su actitud fundamental ante la vida: la defensa de la individualidad. Borges, desde este punto de vista, se transformó, en ese momento, en un personaje de Borges. ¿O no son los héroes borgianos, siempre y en todos los casos, férreos defensores de la individualidad? ¡Descargue ahora este libro y acceda a la información que quizás resuelva este enigma!
Translated with some help from Google:
The fact that Borges had not received the Nobel Prize can be interpreted as a mere historical circumstance in which injustice prevailed. This book supports an opposite idea: Borges rejected the Nobel Prize, and that rejection represents one more link within the Borgesian canon. According to Alejandro Droznes, Borges’ strategy for not being awarded the Nobel Prize is the coronation of his fundamental attitude towards life: the defense of individuality. Borges, from this point of view, became, at that time, a character of Borges. Or are not the Borgesian heroes, always and in all cases, strong defenders of individuality? Download this book now and access the information that may solve this puzzle!
Based on his summary, I’m pretty certain Mr. Droznes had a unique viewpoint on this issue! If any visitor would like to contribute a review, please contact the Garden!
Borges in 90 Minutes
Borges in 90 Minutes
By Paul Strathern
Read by Simon Vance
Blackstone Audio, 2019
Unabridged; 1 hour, 49 minutes
Also available at: Audible
Borges in 90 Minutes is part of Paul Strathern’s “90 Minutes” series, a collection of slim books intended to introduce an author to a famous writer.
Publisher’s Description: Weaving fiction with fact, fantastic matter with historical figures, Borges’ frequent theme of a world where time, culture, and place converge is not only timely but pertinent in our advance toward globalization. Drawing from his multi-ethnic and -lingual upbringing in Argentina, Borges’ focus on universal themes early on came to belittle the sentiments of racism and communism, earning him widespread recognition. His work is both timeless and touching, a product of deep suffering and incorrigible innocence. Borges in 90 Minutes offers a concise, expert account of Borges’ life and ideas and explains their influence on literature and on man’s struggle to understand his place in the world. The book also includes a list of Borges’ chief works, a chronology of his life and times, and recommended reading for those who wish to delve deeper.
Infinity According to Jorge Luis Borges
A Lesson on “Funes the Memorious”
Written and read by Ilan Stavans
TED Talks, 2019
Listen at: YouTube
An elementary lesson on Jorge Luis Borges with animations and music. Uploaded in 2019 by TED Talks, the description is as follows:
What would it be like to have a limitless memory? Can the meaning of life be found in an infinite library? Is time a labyrinth or a single moment? Jorge Luis Borges explored these questions of infinity in his many works. His body of essays, poems and stories pioneered the literary style known as magical realism—and each was just a few pages long. Ilan Stavans dives into the world of Borges.
Borges and Me: An Encounter
Borges and Me: An Encounter
By Jay Parini
Read by Fred Sanders
Random House Audio, 2020
Unabridged; 8 hour, 51 minutes
Also available at: Audible
Publisher’s Description: In this evocative work of what the author in his afterword calls “a kind of novelistic memoir,” Jay Parini takes us back 50 years, when he fled the United States for Scotland—in flight from the Vietnam War and desperately in search of his adult life. There, through unlikely circumstances, he meets the famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. Borges—visiting his translator in Scotland—is in his 70s, blind and frail. When Borges hears that Parini owns a 1957 Morris Minor, he declares a long-held wish to visit the Highlands, where he hopes to meet a man in Inverness who is interested in Anglo-Saxon riddles. As they travel, stopping at various sites of historical interest, the charmingly garrulous Borges takes Parini on a grand tour of Western literature and ideas, while promising to teach him about love and poetry. As Borges’s idiosyncratic world of labyrinths, mirrors, and doubles shimmers into being, their escapades take a surreal turn. Borges and Me is a classic road novel, based on true events. It’s also a magical mystery tour of an era, like our own, in which uncertainties abound, and when—as ever—it’s the young and the old who hear voices and dream dreams.
Medio siglo con Borges
Medio siglo con Borges
By Mario Vargas Llosa
Read by Gerardo Prat & Julio García
Penguin, 2020
Unabridged; 2hours, 23 minutes
Also available at: Audible
This is an audiobook of Mario Vargas Llosa’s 2020 book Medio siglo con Borges (“Half a century with Borges.”) According to Vargas Llosa’s introduction:
This collection of articles, conference notes, and reviews bears witness to more than half a century of reading by an author who has been for me, since I read his first stories and essays in Lima in the 1950s, an inexhaustible source of intellectual pleasure. I have reread Borges many times and, unlike what happens to me with other writers who marked my adolescence, he never disappointed me. On the contrary, each new reading renews my enthusiasm and happiness, revealing new secrets and subtleties of that very Borgesian world; unusual in its themes and so diaphanous and elegant in its expression.
The book has yet to be translated into English, and the audiobook is Spanish only.
The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality
The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality
By William Egginton
Read by David Glass
Random House Audio, 2023
Unabridged; 10 hour, 14 minutes
Also available at: Audible
Publisher’s Description: Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth—that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany—that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant pushed the assumptions of human reason to their mind-bending conclusions, but emerged with an idea that crowned a towering philosophical system—that the human mind has fundamental limits, and those limits undergird both our greatest achievements as well as our missteps. Through fiction, science, and philosophy, the work of these three thinkers coalesced around the powerful, haunting fact that there is an irreconcilable difference between reality “out there” and reality as we experience it. Out of this profound truth comes a multitude of galvanizing ideas: the notion of selfhood, free will, and purpose in human life; the roots of morality, aesthetics, and reason; and the origins and nature of the cosmos itself. As each of these thinkers shows, every one of us has a fundamentally incomplete picture of the world. But this is to be expected. Only as mortal, finite beings are we able to experience the world in all its richness and breathtaking majesty. We are stranded in a gulf of vast extremes, between the astronomical and the quantum, an abyss of freedom and absolute determinism, and it is in that center where we must make our home. A soaring and lucid reflection on the lives and work of Borges, Heisenberg, and Kant, The Rigor of Angels movingly demonstrates that the mysteries of our place in the world may always loom over us—not as a threat, but as a reminder of our humble humanity.
Borges on Audio
Main Page — Return to the “Borges on Audio” main page and index.
Borges in His Own Voice — Poems, stories, and lectures read by Borges himself.
Audiobooks — Selections of Borges’ short stories and poetry made available through Audible and other sources.
YouTube Readings — Readings of Borges set to music, video, or animations and placed online.
Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 30 August 2024
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