I came across this slim volume while browsing the shelves of the Cambridge Public Library and was immediately drawn to it for several reasons.  Published in 2000, the book I checked out of library had been reissued in 2025 with a brilliant introduction by Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and, like Borges, a Charles Eliot Norton lecturer at Harvard.

The Norton Lectures began at Harvard in 1925 honoring Norton, an author, social critic, and Harvard Professor who was described during his life as “the most cultivated man in America“.  Traveling widely and making friends everywhere he went, he translated Dante, was the executor of John Ruskin’s estate, and was a founding member of the Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston.

Past Norton lecturers read like a “who’s who” of literature, music, and art.  Eliot, Frost, Stravinsky, Wilder, Copland, Cummings, Shahn, Fuller, Trilling, Bernstein, Milosz, Stella, Bloom, Cage, Ashbery, and Gordimer all spoke from the podium at Sanders Theater, and more recently, weI have been able to attend many of the Norton Lectures since moving to Cambridge in 2004. We had the pleasure of listening to Daniel Barenboim, Orhan Pamuk, William Kentridge, Herbie Hancock, Toni Morrison, and Viet Thanh Nguyen.  What a splendid gift to the Harvard and Cambridge communities and the world this lecture series is.

I was particularly interested in Borges’ contributions because he spoke during my senior year at Harvard, though as the still naive Midwestern boy, I was oblivious to both the series and to him.  The lectures were taped and then lost for more than 30 years before being discovered in a dusty basement, published, and then republished as part of the 100 year celebration of the Nortons.

The lectures read like the spoken word with frequent asides and parenthetical additions, clearly intended for speaking and not for book form.  They feature Borges as his most clever, erudite, and deeply thinking self as he holds forth on The Riddle of Poetry, The Metaphor, The Telling of the Tale, Word-Music and Translation, Thought and Poetry, and A Poet’s Creed. A number of authors are mentioned among his favorites including Twain, Cervantes, Whitman, Carlyle, Doyle, Poe, Wilde, and Melville.

Some of this was tough sledding, but overall, a delightful interlude spent with this brilliant thinker and writer.