Borges and Money
blog.longreads.com
blog.longreads.com
If you haven't read anything of his I can only say read la biblioteca de Babel :)
https://thefloatinglibrary.com/2008/09/13/a-problem/
(dreamtigers): https://thefloatinglibrary.com/borges/
The essays are fantastic, but stressful if you came from first encountering him as a fiction-writer. The writing style is almost identical. You keep waiting for the shoe to drop.
That said, his essays on Dante are ... very powerful. Deeply moving.
Taking him at his word he shouldn't be able to write, and it would be most fitting if his story were just an internal monologue but the "footnote" about 14 meaning infinite disallows that possibility.
When you read the original story of Theseus and the Minotaur do you ask yourself the same question? Is the story less powerful because it couldn't be true as written?
The Apollodorus Bibliotecha is real compendium of Greek myths written in the 1st or 2nd century AD. The first section of the first book is the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. The House of Asterion is the same story told from the Minotaur's perspective.
The fact the the story itself includes the meta-fictional footnote implies this isn't the "original" and that the person writing this isn't the Minotaur himself. Borges like to play with this conceit in many of his stories, e.g., "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." Don Quixote itself uses the same conceit, i.e., that what you're reading is something found and transmitted (and possibly altered).
So, to start, it might be worth putting up this story and the story of Theseus and the Minotaur side-by-side. What are some differences?
For example, why does Borges have the Athenians sending nine people into the labyrinth rather than seven? Borges wrote extensively about Dante and the Minotaur is in Dante's inferno, so it wouldn't totally surprise me if there's some connection between the nine people who get sent in and the nine circles of Hell in the Inferno.
etc. etc. etc. Peeling back these onion layers is why a lot of people enjoy reading Borges.
A kind of analogous later Wikipedia edit war had to do with whether the article about Gadsby (the lipographic novel that doesn't use the letter E) should be written with the same constraint as the novel itself, and also whether the article on E-Prime (an approach to writing English without using the verb "to be") should be written in E-Prime or not. But I feel like the Tlön issue was the granddaddy of all of these controversies.
The one that has stuck with me is "The Immortal"
"It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books, setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them." [1]
Since I couldn't help but agree with this sentiment, I have gone and searched for other authors who did similarly. The book that stands out is Stanisław Lem's A Perfect Vacuum, which is actually a collection of reviews of imaginary books. Lem was primarily a Sci-Fi author, but many of these have a philosophical undertone. My favorites are Die Kultur als Fehler and Non Serviam.
[1] Introduction to The Garden of Forking Paths (1941)
He's long been seen as compromised because of his collaboration with the Argentinian dictatorship, and sort of swept under the carpet a bit. The more times passes, the more he's judged (and hence taught and promoted) on his works rather than his political choices.
I love him, although sometimes you really need context to appreciate his work... like his continuous use of literary references that are half-real and half-fiction, or his love of an Argentinian "far west" of old that is pretty unknown outside South America.
Sartor Resartus is in English.
Edit: But obviously this is still a small mistake by whoever wrote the "in the original" note.
Further coverage of the 30 year anniversary of Borges' passing here: