In 1947, the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares started keeping a journal of the many lunch and dinner conversations that Borges had at his home. Somewhat like Boswell in his Life of Johnson, he wrote down things as they were said so they wouldn’t get lost. Both writers often quoted Johnson’s sentences. The one most often mentioned was recorded March 25, 1776: “A man should be careful never to tell tales of himself to his own disadvantage. People may be amused and laugh at the time but they will be remembered and brought out against him upon some subsequent occasion.”

Bioy dated all his entries carefully—day, month, year—and many start with the sentence: Come en casa Borges. After Bioy’s death, these journals that cover almost forty years were compiled under the logical title of Borges.

The first time the book Borges was in my hands, despite its weight, I immediately knew wonderful days were ahead. Its 1,663 pages assured me weeks, perhaps months, of intense pleasure as a reader. On any page, I would find not only Borges’ erudition but also his sense of humor, his way of saying the sharpest things under the appearance of being an excessively polite gentleman . . .

On a man who talked and talked without paying attention to his audience’s boredom, Borges reflected in passing:

On the word “incredible”:

On writing:

On failed writers:

On boredom:

On offenses:

On the word “melancholia”:

On a biography that an American writer was writing about him:

Furthermore, the book offers an incredible amount of knowledgeable and original reflections on literature and style. Talking about Don Quixote, Borges noted that Cervantes carefully avoided a chapter:

Talking about Milton and Paradise Regained, Borges pointed out that Christ is not only an image or a philosophy, but he is also a style, and then in the dialogue between Christ and the devil (IV, passim) Christ talks like a lawyer or a theologian, with abstract words. In that conversation, to give a tone of antiquity, it would have been enough to use concrete words. Instead, Christ and the devil talk like gentlemen of the seventeenth century:

When Borges lamented what he interpreted as stylistic bad choices in Shakespeare—“an amateur, the divine amateur, compared with Dante”—he refers to “O, my prophetic soul! My uncle!” from Hamlet, Act I Scene 5:

Talking about how tired he was of giving lectures on Shakespeare, he reflected:

Bioy and Borges met for the first time in 1932 at a lunch at Victoria Ocampo’s house. It was summer in Buenos Aires and Bioy wasn’t married yet to Silvina Ocampo, Victoria’s youngest sister. A few days earlier, Borges had published an article, “Nuestras imposibilidades” (“Our Impossibilities”), in issue Number 4 of Sur. The title referred to the lack of logic and coherence in Argentina’s political decisions and Bioy had read it. Lost in their discussion on the subject, they didn’t pay attention to the honored guest, a French writer, and an angry Victoria scolded them. Borges never confessed openly his dislike for how authoritarian she was. Despite her many intellectual merits—her ownership of a publishing house and of the magazine Sur that lasted 40 years, and her writing of some ten volumes of memoirs that she called Testimonios—he did not have much respect for her. Forced to join the French guest of honor, his eyesight already failing, Borges knocked into a lamp that fell to the floor. Victoria reacted with irritation (she was easily irritated) and Bioy would say later that this was the beginning of his long complicity with Borges. At that time Borges was thirty-two and Bioy eighteen.

The two wrote their first collaboration in 1937, when they concocted a commercial ad with a pseudo-scientific tone on the virtues of yoghurt, produced by the company La Martona owned by Bioy’s family. Bioy would say that the experience was a very useful apprenticeship for his future writing. In the following years, they started a literary magazine and a publishing house, both called Destiempo. Both enterprises were short-lived. The name suggested that when it came to literary quality or originality there was no fashion, no literary movement, no belonging to groups.

In 1940, Bioy Casares married Silvina Ocampo in a country church with only three other people present. One of them was Borges serving as witness. From then until 1983, he would dine (and sometimes lunch) at their house almost every day, except when travelling or ill.

These dinners or lunches were also searches and discoveries of literary endeavors they could work on together. The list of what they managed to accomplish is impressive. One of their first anthologies, dating from 1941 and in collaboration with Silvina Ocampo, was the Anthology of Fantastic Literature. They translated Kipling, Beerbohm, Saki, Wells, May Sinclair, Kafka, Swedenborg, Akutagawa, and Chuang Tzu (these last three probably from English translations). For both men translating meant being faithful to the soul of the text more than to its content, and a bad translator was one who translated sentence by sentence. Bioy would always marvel at the privilege of having accomplished this with Borges, who was completely invested in turning into the best Spanish the foreign literature he revered. His range of memory and language, his energy for searching for the right word or expression, his lack of any literary snobbism or conventionality, made of him a dream partner for this kind of work.

Besides this anthology, they created for an established publishing house a successful series of crime novels that Borges called El Séptimo Círculo, The Seventh Circle, referring to the circle of the violent ones in Dante’s Inferno. Under the pen name of Honorio Bustos Domecq, they invented a detective character and published four books about him: Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi (1942), Un modelo para la muerte (1946), Crónicas de Bustos Domecq (1967), and Nuevos cuentos de Bustos Domecq (1977). Even if these books were collaborations, Borges commented jokingly that readers didn’t like two writers writing together because they didn’t know which one to admire.

Silvina Ocampo remembered that many late nights, while they were writing, she could hear them laughing for hours.

When they tired, they listened to tangos, finding their appeal in their lyrics more than in the music. “Ivette” seems to have been one of Borges’s favorites. Its subject, as in many tangos, is about the abandoned man who reproaches the abandoning woman with all the loving he had given her to no avail.

In another anthology that they assembled, Cuentos breves y extraordinarios, they directly invented very brief short stories attributing their authorship to others: “La sombra de las jugadas” from Cabotaje en Mozambique (Porto Alegre, sine data) by Celestino Palomeque—apparently the real Palomeque was a lawyer who had defrauded Bioy’s father—or a short story by a certain T. Chang taken from his imaginary book A Grove of Leisure (Shanghai, 1882).

They wrote also two film scripts that became two movies: Invasión and Les autres.

Bioy would say that among the best memories of his life were the nights when they annotated Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, Christian Morals, and Religio Medici, or Gracián’s Agudeza y arte de ingenio.

Often the conversations recorded in Borges have the charm of the mundane. While eating, they talked on the subject of food in novels. “Are descriptions of what characters eat in novels necessary?” asked the poet Wilcock. His dining companions reflected on this question. Dickens, Borges noted, liked beer and meat, and his characters constantly drink beer and eat meat.

The conversations can also have an uncommon intimacy, as for example the question was posed to all those at the table: What did they feel when peeing in the middle of the night or at dawn? All of the four guests involved felt something different.

There will probably never be a full translation of this book into English. An abridged version, also in Spanish, would not adequately represent the richness and range of the complete book, but at least it offers an insight. Perhaps editors can imagine tailoring an edition by making their selection with a mind for specific foreign audiences (though such renderings would have to always be thought of as inadequate). For example, since Borges’s favorite literature was English, a British version would be easy to compile.

For the American version, there would be appreciations and criticism of many American writers including Hemingway, Faulkner, Twain, and Whitman, but also observations on the academic literary world and its members who amazed Borges with their exhaustive specialization in only one subject with, simultaneously, a surprising ignorance in any other.

In an American abridged edition, there would be Borges’s description of Robert Lowell’s visit to his apartment when Lowell threw himself on the floor and asked Borges’s mother, a pious Catholic widow who had never been with any man but her husband, where he could find the most beautiful Argentine women to make love to. For a description of Borges’s mother, it suffices to mention her answer when Bioy praised her on how well she looked at 96: “I’m not so well as you say. Now I know what people feel when they complain they are tired. Before I was always wondering what do they feel?”

Leaving aside the destructive possibility of such abridged versions, Borges is probably one of the greatest works of Argentine literature written in the 20th century. It is the erudite recounting, day by day and year after year, of two lives given over to the passion for words, and to the conviction that everything in life is accessory besides reading and writing. I consider it a sort of counterpart to Balzac’s Comédie humaine where each character is constructed with the literary detail of fiction, but is too real to come from any writer’s imagination.

This is how Borges provides Argentines with the endless pleasure of looking at their society through the eyes of two intellectually unforgiving persons. Borges and Bioy enjoyed any story or anecdote that showed stupidity, feelings of grandeur, disappointed ambitions, or vanity, and they had no lack of material among writers.

Both were crueler with women than with men. One of their favorite victims was Beatriz Bibiloni de Bullrich, who said so much wonderful nonsense that her comments became the favorites of many readers. They are literary without the intention of being literature (she became so famous among Borges’s readers that persons online created a Wikipedia entry about her, mentioning how Borges dedicated to her his only two English poems, but at the time of writing this essay that article seems to have been removed).

One of the apparently first entries in Bioy’s journal about her, but without name, dates to 1950. Borges said that he had just met a woman with whom he was in love thirty years ago. In their encounter on the street she praised herself for looking so young that no one recognized her.

Once, this same woman had told Bioy that she had indeed read Don Quixote, “but the real one, not the one that everyone reads.” Was this comment Borges’s inspiration for “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote”?

Beatriz Bibiloni is a perfect example of how a character can be defined by the way she talks. Evidently Borges had a fascination with reporting her words. The only time he asks Bioy to write down in his notebook what he is saying is when he defines the word “understatement” and exemplifies it through how Beatriz Bibiloni conveyed her sister’s suicide: “My sister is so exaggerated that she took those things for sleeping.”

Noticeable among these thousands of pages is the absence of writer Silvina Ocampo, Bioy’s wife, even if most of the time she was sitting at the same table with them (once, Borges was resentful for the bad dinner her cook served). Based on some of Bioy’s entries about her, it’s evident that one recurrent point of discussion was her admiration for Baudelaire. Both Bioy and Borges, especially Borges, despised his poetry, insisting that Paul Jean Toulet was a much better poet. This opinion infuriated her, and perhaps was his way of teasing her.

One of the undercurrent sadnesses of the book is Borges’s miserable love life since youth to old age. In his memoirs, Bioy says: “Borges spent his life in love, but seriously in love, and he suffered many times.” When Silvina Ocampo reflected on the women he had loved, she exclaimed: “He has seen the horrors.”

When Silvina’s words are mentioned they seem to come from an explosion of impatience after long silences. At the same time, her absence reflects who she was: a person who preferred to remain unseen, removed from the lives of others, and who, with the passage of time, would almost never participate in any social event.

Through the turning of pages and the repetition of days in different years, inevitably the moment approaches when the two friends, still friends, still alive, would part. It started happening a few years before Borges died in Geneva of liver cancer, before he was buried in Geneva’s Cimetière de Plainpalais instead of where he had wanted to be laid to rest, in La Recoleta, with his ancestors.

In 1995 I had tea with Bioy at his home. To a question I asked about María Kodama, his second wife, he answered he had no interest in gossiping about her. She had been Borges’ last love, and if she had imposed on a sick, weak, and blind Borges—the final circumstance of death removed from his family, from his best friend, and from Buenos Aires, the city he loved—the answer to that question was already irrelevant. “What can I say to those who tell me that his gravestone is kitsch?”

There were enough pains in life to remember and to forget; two years earlier Bioy had lost his wife and daughter both in less than one month. Then, perhaps regretting his answer, he added that often in the darkness of night, remembering that Borges before dying had recited the Lord’s Prayer in Anglo-Saxon, English, French, and Spanish, he wondered how it had been possible that his friend had died so alone and so far away. He learned the news of Borges’s death on the street from an unknown man he described as having the face of a bird of ill omen.

Recommended reading:

• Ilan Stavans, "Beyond Translation: Borges and Faulkner"
• Huw Nesbitt, "Jorge Luis Borges's lost translations" ("A dispute with Borges's estate has left works he produced with the translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni in publishing limbo")
• Norman Thomas di Giovanni introduces "The Borges Papers"
• Brendon MacKeen, "The Author, The Book, The Story, The History" and "The Translator’s Note"