I spent three times as much money acquiring permissions to create this book as I got paid to do it. First there was Penguin U.S.A., which owned the rights to the mystical Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges' stories in English. Then there were Penguin, Canada, and Penguin, U.K., who owned the rights to these stories' republication in those realms. And then there was the Borges Estate itself, which owned the rights to everything else: Borges' previously untranslated essays, the records of Borges' lectures, Borges' untranslated essays and poems. Finally, there was the Folger Shakespeare Library, which appeared (they weren't sure) to own rights to an untranscribed tape of one of Borges' late lectures. But everyone finally graciously agreed to sign off -- the Folger did so for free, and a nice man at Penguin U.S.A. who liked the project gave me a permissions deal -- and now there exists this book:
Borges on Shakespeare. It presents in one volume, in English, pretty much everything the great Latin American author (of famous, paradoxical short stories like "The Library of Babel," "The Circular Ruins," and "The Zahir") had to say about Shakespeare in Spanish. And a few things which he said in English, because I did listen to that untranscribed, very rough tape about twenty-five times until I was sure I had understood and transcribed 95% of what it said.
That tape is the only record of a talk Borges gave in Washington, D.C., on the occasion of Shakespeare's 412th birthday, in 1976. Borges himself was 77, and mostly blind. He was helped to the microphone, but, unfortunately, not helped close enough to the microphone. According to one eyewitness, the audience was too
