Seven Nights

Jorge Luis Borges’s fictions blur the distinctions between fact and fantasy, scholarship and imagination. Behind his playful cerebrations lies an impressive erudition amassed over a lifetime of study, in spite of failing eyesight and eventual blindness. Allusive motifs run through his writings in amazing diversity, and in Seven Nights they are distilled into the form of public lectures, originally given in Buenos Aires in 1977, and now made available for the first time in English translation. The Divine Comedy; Nightmare; The Thousand and One Nights; Buddhism; Poetry; The Kabbalah; Blindness – the relevance of these lectures to Borges’s oeuvre is thoughtfully explored in an introduction by Alastair Reid, who as a translator has in the past himself worked closely with the author. The texts themselves have been rendered into English by Eliot Weinberger, translator of the poetry of Octavio Paz and Homero Aridjis.
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