Announcing the Svaglic Chair Fall 2021 Lecture

The Svaglic Chair Lecture, co-sponsored by the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, will take place on September 30th, from 4:30 to 6:00 p.m., at the Information Commons, 4th floor.

Inspired by new collaborations by scholars and artists, Balderston and Martín have put together three volumes of facsimile editions of Borges’s manuscripts found in libraries in the United States and presented them with typographical transcriptions (Martín) and commentaries (Balderston). In 2018 they published Poemas y prosas breves, with twenty poems by Borges from early in his career until after he had gone blind. In 2019 this was followed by Ensayos, a collection of five essay manuscripts, which includes an extensive unpublished manuscript by Borges on Flaubert (in a critical edition done in collaboration with Mariana Di Ció). Cuentos, the third and final volume of the series, appeared in 2020; it includes manuscripts of four stories and a typescript. Building on a decade of research by Balderston on Borges manuscripts and prior collaborations on the design of the journal Variaciones Borges, these books, published by the Borges Center at the University of Pittsburgh, make available rare Borges manuscripts for study, while exploring the technical and artistic possibilities of graphic design in the representation of Borges’s tiny handwriting and complex compositional practices. In today’s presentation, Balderston and Martín will consider the unique challenges and allure of Borges’s manuscripts as well as their own innovative collaborative process. Their work addresses scholars and readers of Borges and Spanish-language literature, textual scholars, typographers and designers, and all those seeking to re-imagine the book in light of emerging digital materialities. The talk will be delivered in English.