Borges: The Middle Essays and Reviews
Résumé
Abstract Jorge Luis Borges’s essays revolve around three concepts he adopted in the early 1930s and continued to use until his final days, through under a variety of names: figuration, prefiguration, and transfiguration. At times he called them superstition, omen, and echo; other times modesty, precursor, and repetition. In the essays of Other Inquisitions and in other later texts, this trilogy would gradually assume a metaphysical status resulting from an ever-widening understanding of writing, which, according to Borges, is a part of the world but is also its totality. Time, memory, and personal and universal history would become dimensions of writing: anything that figures among the things of the world is, in fact, a thing—a discreet transfiguration of something that has already happened and an enigmatic prefiguration of something yet to come. Este artículo aborda tres conceptos de los ensayos de Jorge Luis Borges a partir de los años treinta: la figuración, la prefiguración y la transfiguración. A partir de Otras inquisiciones, y otros textos de la madurez, esa trilogía fue asumiendo un estatuto metafísico. Cualquier cosa que pueble este mundo tiene para Borges un estatuto de figura, transfiguración de algo que sucedió y prefiguración de algo que sucederá.