Susan Stewart and Dr. Thomas Lyon, Spanish and Portuguese

My relationship with Jorge Luis Borges and his prose and poetry began on a river trip I took two months after I had purchased his work of fictions Labyrinths. I had many hours floating down the river to read, digest and love his thrilling, enigmatic prose. His words were playful and tricky. His mysterious and mathematically written works mocked the stable and expected.

My fascination with Borges and his literature urged me to go to South America, where this master of letters was born and as a missionary I perused the streets of Uruguay and Argentina. There I met and spoke with hundreds, possibly thousands of people, not of Borges or his works, but of the people, their beliefs and what made them extraordinary. I slept under tin roofs, walked through muddy streets and rode on buses through sticky and smelly cities as well as clean and pristine country roads. I experienced South America first hand; I experienced Borges.

As my love for this genius grew, I had a desire to find others with a similar passion. Professor Ted Lyon of the Spanish and Portuguese department at Brigham Young University was eager to share his equal if not greater enthusiasm and extreme knowledge of Borges. He hired me to be on a team of researchers and we were excited about helping Ted in his pursuit to gain a deeper understanding of Borges. Our task was to find all of the interviews that Borges had granted in his lifetime so that Ted could eventually publish them along with a theoretical evaluation that we would help formulate.

This daunting task seemed to be more reachable if I were in Argentina where I would have access to many of his interviews and be surrounded by that which stimulated and inspired him. Solely because of the help from the Office of Creative Research and Activities at BYU, in January of 2002 I flew to Buenos Aires, Argentina and became an investigator of Borges searching everywhere for clues and speaking with everyone I met about him.

The country was in the beginning of a terrible economic crisis, which practically prevented me from leaving. However I left with the hope that discussing such an amazing legend of their country would bring a glimmer of hope to the depressing situation in Argentina.

I had planned on setting up interviews with two scholars of Borges who lived in Buenos Aires, however only one, Anna María Barrenechea, had stayed despite the horrible crises that Argentina was facing. The widow of Borges, Maria Kodama, had fled to Europe without knowledge of the public and another scholar, Noé Jitrik, had left Buenos Aires as well. Despite their absence, I was able to speak with Anna María Barrenechea, a very distinguished woman who knew Borges personally and had written two distinguished theory based books on Borges and several peer reviewed articles and essays. Additionally, she had been invited to teach as a guest professor on Borges at Columbia University as well as many other universities and colleges world-wide.

In addition to speaking with Ms. Barrenechea, I was able to breath the same air that Borges did, walk the same streets as he did and in some way share with him what he had experienced.

The majority of my time spent in Buenos Aires, Argentina was in the library. Argentina is very careful about how they release information and I waited hour after hour to have access to every book, newspaper or journal that might have contained an interview that Borges granted. I was very successful in finding many, and I now have in my possessions forty-seven interviews and the ones that I could not find in Argentina are in the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. which totals over one-hundred and twenty interviews. Dr. Lyon has many in his possession as well and when he returns from Chile, where he is the mission president of the MTC, he will continue his efforts to publish the interviews.

I tried to visit “The Center of Borges” on several occasions but had a difficult time because it had been partly shut down due to the horrible economic crisis. I called the center several times to no avail but after passing by for the fourth time I met the cleaning lady. She made arrangements for me to meet the head of the center and the next day I went back to get the grand tour. The woman showed me the unfinished center. I was dismayed that such a project had been deferred but the books Borges left behind that lay untouched in the small library at the Center fascinated me. I picked up Borges’ copy of Don Quixote and sniffed it. It smelled musky. I looked at the margins in the book and there on the pages were Borges personal notes. Seeing the finely written notes in the book gave me hope that one day this center would be the wonderful place that many people would visit from many places around the world. Hopefully the “Center of Jorge Luis Borges” will get enough money to accomplish that which it set out to do. Although the Center was unfinished, I was able to vision what it would be like. The head of the Center pointed to a window that could be seen from the Center and told me that Borges had written many of his works in the room behind the window. It was really neat to be able to see where he created his thrilling masterpieces.

Doing research on Borges for Dr. Ted Lyon has been the climactic point of my academic career. I am confident about doing intense, rigorous and highly rewarding research and I know that these skills will enable me to reach out to the community and continue serving others in a meaningful way for the rest of my life. I hope to return to Buenos Aires, Argentina in order to help finish the “Center for Jorge Luis Borges” so that many people will have the opportunity to learn more about him and see the books and other treasures that such a unique Argentinean genius left behind.