World-Famous Writer and Dr. Zlotchew

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 20^th-Century Latin American fiction, poetry and essay, should be an informative and enjoyable course.

Clark Zlotchew