YO, BORGES, DAPPELGÄNGER

   When my Love stomps backward
a pace and a half in her stall, her
rump slams the headboard of our
bed.
      Gaucho proverb

Don Quixote rode upon his Rocinante, but for 673 pages Sancho Panza's gray ass was never given a name. Smollett, in his translation of the Adventures, kindly called it Dapple. Others have taken other liberties. Jorge Luis Borges, saddled with blindness and bent with age, paced the flickering shadows of his Buenos Aires apartment. His Quixote, rendered from the Spanish back into the Spanish, would mirror the original word for word, meticulously. Save for…Dapple, he murmured to himself, groping to fathom what secret the author of Roderick Random had sought to encode for posterity. D'apple? Appul. Apul. Apulo. Apuleyo…Yes, of course! Lucius Apuleius of Madaura, magus and cruelly maligned intercalator of the 2nd-century Metamorphoseon. Saddled with blindness and bent with age, as if on his frail back he had been carrying a fat rustic of gross appetites for a lifetime, the octogenarian bibliophage lowered himself to all fours on the polished parquet floor of his Buenos Aires apartment and began to bray with the stentorian gusto of the saved: JOR-GE! JOR-GE! JOR-GE!

r o b e r t   p e r c h a n
p u s a n,    s o u t h   k o r e a

margin home | contents | links | reading list | marginalia | contributors | staff | guidelines | kudos | subscriptions | contact us

Want to know about UPDATES and NEW ADDITIONS to MARGIN?
Try our - S P A M L E S S - opt-in subscription
It's absolutely free!

Layout, design & revisions © Tamara Kaye Sellman, Webmaster
Active home URL: http://www.magical-realism.com
(also: https://www.angelfire.com/wa2/margin/index. html)

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

TERMS OF USE: This site contains copyrighted materials, including but not limited to text and graphics. You may not use, copy, publish, upload, download, post to a bulletin board, include in any weblog or otherwise transmit, distribute or modify any elements of this site in any way, except that you may download one copy of such contents on any single computer for your own personal, non-commercial use, provided you do not alter or remove any copyright, author attribution or other proprietary notices.

Rev'd 2005/05/31