On this month’s fiction podcast, Hisham Matar, whose story “Naima” appeared in the magazine last year, reads “Shakespeare’s Memory,” by Jorge Luis Borges (translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley), which tells the story of a Shakespeare scholar named Hermann Sörgel who is offered an unusual gift: the Bard’s memory—all his recollections and impressions—will be transferred to Sörgel’s mind. At first Sörgel is elated at the prospect of this insight. “I would possess Shakespeare,” he says, “and possess him as no one had ever possessed anyone before—not in love, or friendship, or even hatred. I, in some way, would be Shakespeare.” But he soon discovers that memory is a slippery thing, “not a summation, it is a chaos of vague possibilities.”
This story, which is one of the last that Borges wrote, is a meditation on the mind, understanding, and inspiration—and it draws on the author’s deep erudition. As Matar says, Borges has “such a complex and intricate and agile intellect, but actually, I think he has a very simple (simple in the ‘clear’ sense) temperament. So he does this wonderful thing that I think has got to be one of the things that literature is about—it’s a kind of thinking. He thinks through these stories.”
You can hear Matar read “Shakespeare’s Memory” and discuss it with our fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, by listening to the stream above or by downloading our free podcast from the iTunes store.
