Jorge on Henry
September 17, 2004
It is the sort of story that Henry James (whose writings were first revealed to me by Clara Glencairn de Figueroa, one of the two protagonists of my story) might not have scorned to use. He would have consecrated more than a hundred tender and ironic pages to it, and would have embellished them with complex and scrupulously ambiguous dialogue; he might well have added a touch of melodrama. The essence of the story would not have been altered by its new setting in London or Boston. But the events in fact took place in Buenos Aires, and there I shall leave them.
-- Jorge Luis Borges, "The Duel" (A. Hurley, trans., from Collected Fictions)
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