Polyglot from childhood, fluent in English, French, German and, of course, Spanish, and having taught himself Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse in middle age, Borges finally embarked on the study of Classical Arabic with an Egyptian tutor whom he met in Geneva in the last year of his life. He was then eighty-six.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, December 19, 2011
Borges as Opsimath
Eric Ormsby, Facsimiles of Time: Essays on Poetry and Translation (Erin: The Porcupine's Quill, 2001), p. 162 (in "Jorge Luis Borges and the Plural I"):