Fall
2015: The Department of World Languages
& Cultures: Dr. Clark M. Zlotchew will again offer a
Senior Seminar based on world-famous Argentine author, Jorge Luis Borges. Zlotchew not only has studied this giant of
Latin American literature and had numerous articles on him published in Spanish
and English in literary journals on four continents. He has also presented
papers on Borges at international conferences around the world.
Borges,
by the 1970s, if not earlier, was the best-known, most admired, most widely
translated living writer in the Spanish language. Very few authors have been as argued over and discussed, widely praised,
attacked, loved, or abhorred as he was. Many critics assert that Magic Realism in
Latin America starts with Borges’ first short story.
Professor
Zlotchew interviewed Borges at his apartment in Buenos Aires, Argentina in
1984, and chatted with him over dinner at a conference at Allegheny University
in Meadville, Pennsylvania in 1985, just one year before Borges’ demise. The complete
interview in Spanish was published in Plural, the literary/cultural magazine of Excelsior
(largest circulation newspaper of Mexico), January 1994. Dr. Zlotchew’s English version of the
interview was published in the prestigious American Poetry Review (1988), attracting attention as far afield as Mumbai,
India. Later it was published in Zlotchew’s book,
Voices
of the River Plate: Interviews with Writers of Argentina and Uruguay, which
was first published by Borgo Press in 1995, then re-published in 2011 as an Authors Guild
Backinprint.com Edition.
With
reference to Voices…, one Borges scholar says, “Zlotchew cajoles, insists,
ignores bursts of temper, repairs errors of memory, elicits buried details,
leads firmly but allows meandering.” (Edna Aizenberg, Professor of Spanish,
Marymount Manhattan College.)
In 1998 the English
version was included in Richard Burgin’s collection of Borges interviews, Jorge Luis Borges:
Conversations, and has appeared in Bangla Desh and India in
Bengali translation. In 2008, this
interview was published in Chinese. Richard Burgin’s book, which contains this
interview, was translated from English into Mandarin and published in Shanghai,
China.
Referring to Zlotchew’s publications
on Borges in refereed journals, Borges scholar Carter Wheelock writes,
"Zlotchew is a thorough and meticulous scholar whose work on Borges, the
greatest twentieth-century writer in the Spanish language, bypasses the
critical clichés and moves into little-explored areas where his seminal and definitory observations
have opened up new paths of inquiry. His
powers of synthesis, abetted by his knowledge of world literature, give his
critical commentaries both a depth and a breadth that are uncommon in the study
of Borges' fiction. By going always to
the core of a literary problem, with economy of language, he adds brevity to
cogency; and this, combined with an objective modesty and clarity of style,
makes his work admirably readable."
Letter to Kasling Committee, 12/2/89.
(My emphasis).
In addition to his own interview
with Borges having been published in many venues, Zlotchew translated Fernando
Sorrentino’s Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges into English (Original
title, Siete conversaciones con Jorge Luis Borges). In addition to translating the seven
conversations, Zlotchew included notes, wrote
an appendix of short biographies of Hispanic personalities mentioned in the
interviews, and a foreword. This book
was initially published in hard cover by Whitston Publishing in 1982, and
republished as a new edition in paper by Paul Dry Books in 2010. Choice, March 1982, wrote, “Clark M. Zlotchew's meticulous annotations will help American readers to understand the many allusions to Argentine history and letters, and to Buenos Aires popular culture and geography."
The
Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Elie Wiesel used
Seven… in a class, and said,
“We
used your Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis
Borges for my course [at Boston University] "Literature of
Memory: Writers on Writing" --and
may I add, that it was very well received by my students?" (letter to Zlotchew 11-27-96).
Dr.
Zlotchew’s SPAN-423 of Fall semester on Borges, an icon of 20th-Century
Latin American fiction, poetry and essay, should be an informative and
enjoyable course.
Clark Zlotchew
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