Mirror logic

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Spiegellogikum ( Spanish original title La conjura del espejo , eng. The conjuring of the mirror) is a fantastic story by the author Juan Llorenço Barabair , which appeared in the Argentine literary magazine Sur in the early 1930s and is considered lost in the original version.

content

Due to a mix-up, the writer Adolfo Ocampo ends up in the Argentine city of Resistencia and has to spend 24 hours there before he can leave the city again. Ocampo sees this unwanted stay as an opportunity to briefly break out of his own life and live for a day as one of his fictional characters, the writer Carlos Gonzáles. He moves into a room in a hotel and encounters with a homeless person, seven women attending a wedding, and a hotel guest who also bears the name Carlos Gonzáles form the content of the story.

background

The original story La conjura del espejo is thought to be lost and its existence can only be deduced from secondary traditions. This includes, in particular, a German translation of the text from 1978, which was printed under the title Spiegellogikum in an edition of the Andromeda Nachrichten magazine, which has now also been out of print . The last known copy of this edition was in the inventory of the Fantastic Library in Wetzlar , the world's largest public library for fantasy, but was probably lost during the renovation in 1993. In the edition it was pointed out that Spiegellogikum was a revision of the first German translation from 1932 - at that time under the title The Conspiracy [sic] des Spiegel by Juan Lucas [sic] Barabair - a text that presumably was destroyed in the course of the book burning in 1933. It is also controversial who is behind the name Juan Llorenço Baraibar , as nothing is known about the author apart from this story. In professional circles, however, it is suspected that it is an early pseudonym of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges . Since the 1940s, he published works under the pseudonyms B. Suarez Lynch and H. Bustos Domecq , which were created in collaboration with Adolfo Bioy Casares . The matching initials of Baraibar and Borges as well as the content and style of the narrative, which is a characteristic footnote to imaginary books for Borges, are cited as indications of this assumption. In addition, Borges was one of the central authors of the magazine Sur , founded by Victoria Ocampo and her sister Silvina in Buenos Aires , which between 1931 and 1970 was dedicated to the cultural exchange between Latin America and Europe and which was to have a major impact on Latin American intellectual history until 1992. The story and the name Juan Llorenço Baraibar are mentioned in reports about the missing zero number of this magazine . If this assumption turns out to be true, Spiegellogikum would be assigned to Borges' early creative phase, after his first poetry and essay publications in the late 1920s and the short story collection Historia universal de la infamia (German: Universal history of infamy ) from 1935 .

Reception and effect

In the 20th century, Spiegellogikum fits into a whole series of narratives that reflect or parody literary authors and creators through fictionalization and a turn to the surreal, fantastic or grotesque. Examples include Michael Ende's Der Korridor des Borromeo Colmi , which is subtitled as a homage to Jorge Luis Borges, and Michael Siefener's fictional autobiography Albert Duncal . With Michael Siefener in particular, knowledge of the German-language edition from 1978 cannot be completely ruled out due to his sideline work as a fanzine editor (e.g. Deadalos) and the associated proximity to the German fantasy fandom.

In The Conjuring of the Mirror by the German-speaking author Martin Böhnert, there is an explicit reference to Spiegellogikum . This story is conceived as the middle fragment of a Kafkaesque novel and is largely a collage of literary quotations. It is about how the main author Felix Woitkowski ponders the logic of mirrors, immediately before she meets her doppelganger and then finds herself in a world which, in terms of form and content, in turn recalls its own stories (including: membrane , hearing in the case of Mr Arthur Turkur ).

A republication of the text in German was announced in 2019 by Phantastik-Verlag Edition Murr as an e-book .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ulrich Blode: The fantastic library Wetzlar . In: The other Arcadia / On the way in the Universum Fantasticum. die horen - magazine for literature, art and criticism . No. 217, vol. 50 (2005). Pp. 201-223.
  2. ↑ Emir Rodríguez Monegal: Jorge Luis Borges - A literary biography. Paragon House, 1988, pp. 211 ff.
  3. ↑ Reflexiones sobre el subgénero fantástico. La literatura virtual o Borges y la negación de lo fantástico. Simulación rizomática. Azar dirigido y skándalon semiótico. In: Studi di Litteratura Ispano-Americana. 33, 2001, pp. 105-151.
  4. ^ Catarina Juliane von Wedemeyer: The magazine "Sur" and the Latin American literatures in modern and postmodern times , accessed on January 7, 2016.
  5. ^ John King, "Towards a Reading of the Argentine Literary Magazine Sur" , Latin American Research Review. 16 (2) / 1981, accessed January 7, 2016.
  6. ↑ Ellen Norten, Michael Siefener (ed.): DAEDALOS 1994-2002: A literary journey through the »Story Reader for Fantastic« . p.machinery, Winnert 2018, ISBN 978-3-95765-148-8 .
  7. ↑ Martin Böhnert: The conjuring of the mirror . In: oA (Ed.): When Felix Woitkowski woke up one morning from restless dreams. A dissertation. (non-commercial private printing). Mainz 2019, p. 99-112 .
  8. ^ Edition Murr: in preparation. Retrieved December 13, 2019 .