The book ‘Cuadernos y conferencias’ gathers texts by the Argentine writer dated between 1949 and 1954. The edition allows us to know how Borges worked and reveals themes that are not often dealt with in the rest of his work.
When Jorge Luis Borges became blind, around 1955, “his capacity for style was destroyed. Because he could not read. He could not read his own manuscripts," observed critic and writer Ricardo Piglia. When comparing “any Borges text from the 1960s onwards” with his earlier texts, he added, "you have to be an extraterrestrial not to realize how one thing is different from another.
The sentence, elaborated by Piglia in his classes on the great Argentine writer, assumes that reading was at the heart of Borges' writing and, in a way, suggests that the icon of the blind genius that would make him famous was the first image of the writer who was no longer a writer. The publication in Argentina of the book ‘Cuadernos y conferencias’ allows us not only to access the treasure of Borges' last manuscripts, up to now unpublished, but also to see almost without mediation how he operated his creative machine and how he read his library, in this case to prepare, with the meticulousness of a craftsman, lectures and courses whose content seemed lost.
