University Library System Acquires Rare Jorge Luis Borges Book

Pitt’s University Library System has acquired a rare manuscript notebook that contains some of the writing of Jorge Luis Borges — an Argentine short story writer, essayist and poet who is considered one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century. The spiral notebook, used by Borges in 1950 and 1951, contains the first draft of the important story “La espera” (The Wait), included in the second edition of “El Aleph” in 1952. It also contains notes for Borges’s famous essay, “El escritor argentino y la tradición” (The Argentine Writer and Tradition), first presented as a talk in 1951 and published two years later.

“The essay on the Argentine writer and tradition is a central text to Latin American debates about the relations between Latin American literature and the Western tradition, and was presented in response to Peronism and cultural nationalism,” said Daniel Balderston, Pitt’s Mellon Professor of Modern Languages and director of its Borges Center. The English-speaking world became familiar with Borges’s work with the publication of the anthology “Labyrinths” in 1962.

The notebook is intact, meaning that it is possible to study the sequence of texts that Borges wrote in 1950-51. It will be housed in Archives and Special Collections and will be a rich addition to the Eduardo Lozano Latin American Collection.