Daniel Balderston (University of Pittsburgh)

Wednesday 11 March 2015, 6.00pm, Room 354, Malet Street (entrance via Torrington Square), Birkbeck, University of London, London WC1E 7HX

This talk will explore Borges’s relations with drawing and painting. Norah Borges, Borges’s sister, was a well-known painter, and one of his best friends was the important avant garde artist Xul Solar. He wrote an important essay in 1928 on the Uruguayan painter Xul Solar. What is less known are his own drawings, none of which he published in his lifetime. Professor Balderston will talk about a number of them that he has found in the course of writing a book called How Borges Wrote, which he has just submitted for publication.

Daniel Balderston is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also chairs the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures. He has just published a book of translations of Silvina Ocampo, Thus Were Their Faces (New York Review Books, 2015) and in two months his book Los caminos del afecto, on queer traditions in Latin American literature, will appear with the Instituto Caro y Cuervo in Bogotá.