Georgie and Elsa: Jorge Luis Borges and His Wife: The Untold Story

Georgie and Elsa: Jorge Luis Borges and His Wife: The Untold Story
Литагент HarperCollins

A biography of Borges, by his translator.Jorge Luis Borges, known as Georgie to his friends, married Elsa Astete Millán in 1967. Borges was sixty-eight years old at the time of the wedding; Elsa, a widow,with a son in his twenties, was eleven years younger.It proved to be a tempestuous and eventful marriage that would leave an indelible mark on the remainder of Borges’ life, but their relationship has been largely glossed over by previous biographers. This is because the one person who knew all the details has refused to speak about it.Until now.Norman Thomas di Giovanni worked with Borges in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Buenos Aires from late 1967 to 1972 and thereafter sporadically until Borges’s death in 1986. During their first period together di Giovanni spent more time with the couple than did almost anyone else. He was privy to the private side of their relationship and to its sudden decline. It was di Giovanni who helped the demoralized Borges by organizing and arranging his divorce and at the same time rescuing his library and smuggling him out of Buenos Aires to avoid the wrath of Elsa and her lawyers.The book is based on the author’s extensive collection of original material in the form of diaries, notebooks, letters, manuscripts, and photographs, most of which has never before been seen. It provides a unique insight into one of the few true geniuses of literature.

Dedication (#u94d6cdf0-9b55-5d0a-b897-cd42ffda5aa2)

To M., who guided and inspired

To Derek and to Tom

Contents

Cover (#u011c144d-5720-555e-bf0e-f8b89fcedd8a)

Title Page (#uff362b6c-5236-5d4c-90fe-b400cb491f1f)

Dedication

Prologue: A Figure of Speech

1. Celebrating the Marriage

2. A History of the Romance

3. Off on the Wrong Foot

4. The Norton Lectureship

5. Meeting Borges and Setting Out with a Master

6. Georgie’s Mystery, Elsa’s Bombshell

7. A Visitor and a Yard of Ale

8. Vietnam, Olga, and Harvard Square

9. Borges on Tour

10. Invitations and Goodbyes

11. Interregnum

12. Arrival

13. Settling In

14. The Recoleta

15. Cracks in the Façade

16. Oklahoma and the Fur Coat

17. Hobnobbing with the Rockefellers

18. New York and the Fur Coat

19. Buenos Aires and the Fur Coat

20. Silent Sufferer

21. An Aside

22. The Breaking Point

23. The Reckoning

24. Amongst the Lawyers

25. The Night of the Oxford Martyrs

26. Escape to Córdoba

27. The Mosquito and the Judge

28. The Salem Mystery Solved

29. Return to Maipú

30. Looking Back

Epilogue: Ave Atque Vale

A note on Borges

Picture Section

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue (#u94d6cdf0-9b55-5d0a-b897-cd42ffda5aa2)

A Figure of Speech (#u94d6cdf0-9b55-5d0a-b897-cd42ffda5aa2)

Synecdoche, a part standing for the whole.

In 1944, in the kind of incisive and highly literary statement typical of him, the celebrated Argentine poet and storyteller Jorge Luis Borges postulated in one of his tales that ‘Any life, no matter how long or complex it may be, is made up essentially of a single moment – the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.’

Borges’s ultimate fame as a writer is based on a mere thirty-four stories written between 1933 and 1953 and published in two collections, Ficciones and El Aleph. His fiction was unpopular at the time, considered cryptic and abstruse, and it wasn’t until he was in his seventies that he began to be swamped with awards and prizes and honours – among them, honorary degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge.