This Craft of Verse

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by Jorge Luis Borges,

Edited by Calin-Andrei Mihalescu

Harvard University Press

Due/Published September 2000, 160 pages, cloth

ISBN 0674002903

Transcribed from recently discovered tapes of lectures Borges delivered at Harvard in 1967-68, This Craft of Verse offers a typically-Borges introduction to the pleasures of the word and as a first-hand testimony to the life of literature.

 Though his avowed topic is poetry, Borges explores subjects ranging from prose forms (especially the novel), literary history, and translation theory to philosophical aspects of literature in particular and communication in general. He draws on a wealth of examples from literature in modern and medieval English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese, speaking on Plato, the Norse kenningar, Byron, Poe, Chesterton, Joyce, and Frost, as well as on translations of Homer, the Bible, and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.