Rights and credits
jorgeluisborges.org is made by a reader of Jorge Luis Borges, for other readers. It is my representation of Borges’s literary universe, inspired by the literary exhibitions I visited in Buenos Aires, and you can walk through it. It is not for profit: it sells nothing, carries no advertising, and asks nothing of anyone who visits. It is not an official site, and it is not affiliated with Borges’s heirs, his publishers, RTVE, or any institution. This page lists everything the site uses that is not ours, who it belongs to, and why we use it.
Borges’s writing
Jorge Luis Borges’s work is still under copyright, held by his heirs. The site quotes brief passages (a sentence or two of prose, or a few lines of verse), always with the work and the year they come from, to share his writing and invite others to read him, within the right of quotation (article 10 of Argentina’s Law 11.723 and article 32 of Spain’s intellectual property law). We do not reproduce complete stories, essays, or poems. The works quoted are:
- “El Aleph,” “El inmortal,” “La casa de Asterión,” and “Emma Zunz,” in El Aleph (1949)
- “La biblioteca de Babel,” “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan,” “Funes el memorioso,” “Las ruinas circulares,” “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “La muerte y la brújula,” and “El Sur,” in Ficciones (1944 and 1956)
- “Borges y yo,” “Poema de los dones,” “Arte poética,” and “Ajedrez,” in El hacedor (1960)
- “El Golem” and “Poema conjetural,” in El otro, el mismo (1964)
- “Un lector,” in Elogio de la sombra (1969)
- “Nueva refutación del tiempo,” in Otras inquisiciones (1952)
- “Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires,” in Cuaderno San Martín (1929)
- “El otro” and “El libro de arena,” in El libro de arena (1975)
- “El remordimiento,” in La moneda de hierro (1976)
- “Los justos,” in La cifra (1981)
- A remark by Borges at the Biblioteca Nacional, recorded in Borges para millones
The interview
The voice you hear is Borges’s, from the interview Joaquín Soler Serrano recorded with him for A fondo, Televisión Española, 1976. All rights in the program belong to RTVE (Corporación de Radio y Televisión Española), which publishes it openly on RTVE Play, where we took the audio from. We use only the sound, compressed and without the picture, from about 2:08, where he is called a cold man and answers that he is sentimental: the whole program on computers, and fifteen minutes on phones. It plays as an accompaniment to the walk, and repeats, so that Borges’s voice is present. The voice comes from the transcript: loudest when you stand right in front of it, quieter as you leave, and from the left, the right, or behind you, depending on where you stand. Headphones make that direction clear. We offer no links to download it, and we recommend watching it in full on RTVE Play.
The transcript that stands to the right of where you arrive, at eye height, is ours. It stays there and follows the voice, including when the recording repeats. It was generated automatically from the audio with Whisper, a speech recognition model, and it may contain errors. It is not an official transcript from RTVE.
Typefaces, textures, and code
- Tinos, by Steve Matteson, under the Apache License 2.0, for the letter and the transcript.
- Inter, by Rasmus Andersson, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
- Both are served from Fontsource through jsDelivr. Everything else is set in Helvetica Neue, or the equivalent typeface installed on each device.
- The paper texture is Paper001, from ambientCG, in the public domain (CC0).
- three.js and troika-three-text, both under the MIT License, served from jsDelivr and esm.sh.
What is ours
The letter, the design, the walk, and the code of the site are the work of the reader who made this site. You are welcome to share the letter if you credit where it comes from.
If something here is yours
If you hold any of these rights and would rather we not use it, or use it differently, write to contact@jorgeluisborges.org and we will take it down or correct it right away.