With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires: A Memoir

This fresh and poignant portrait of Jorge Luis Borges in his later years combines spirited and philosophical conversations, biographical anecdotes, citations from poetry, and literary analysis. Willis Barnstone, a leading translator of Borges's poems and a privileged friend for more than twenty years, presents the poet-storyteller as a figure of paradox and contradictions. He relates Borges's prodigious feats of textual memory, his wry observations of the Argentinian political scene, and his musings on the events of his long and surprising life. Barnstone also recounts Borges's friendship and deathbed marriage to his one-time student and long-time literary collaborator, Marie Kodama.