| |
|
Picked up Borges’ ‘Labyrinths’ today and read the first story, ‘Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’. It made me think of Umberto Eco’s ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’, Grant Morrison’s ‘Doom Patrol’ run (particularly the ‘crawling from the wreckage/orqwith city of bone’ storyline), Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire’, Stanislaw Lem’s ‘Solaris’ (all of the ‘solaristics’ stuff is pretty similar to Borges’ ‘tlonistas’ stuff), and Flann O’Brien’s ‘3rd Policeman’ (especially all of the deSelby commentary). All of these books/stories are about or reference false histories/realities.
Now, aside from Morrison and probably Eco, it looks like Borges, Nabokov, Lem, and O’Brien are all more or less contemporaries. What I’m wondering is did they read each other’s work, did one influence the others, or if there’s someone I’m missing here who may have had an influence on each of them (like say maybe Kafka). Are there any uberbook geeks out there who know when all of these books were translated (if necessary) into English, or if there were translations circulated prior to the publication of their official English translations? More specifically for Borges and Lem, as their works were originally written in Spanish and Polish, respectively. After some poking around, it looks like ‘solaris’ was published in 1961, ‘tlon, uqbar, orbis tertius’ in 1956, ‘pale fire’ in I think 1962, and ‘3rd policeman’ in 1967. So did these people influence each other or are they just similar types of writers or what?
Interesting to note that except for Morrison and O’Brien (who himself was steeped in Gaelic), none of these writers' first language is English. Not sure what I’m trying to get at here… |
|
|
