Aug.24：Jorge Luis Borges, 龐貝掩埋

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo KBE was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language literature. Wikipedia

Born: August 24, 1899, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Died: June 14, 1986, Geneva, Switzerland

Short stories: The Aleph, The Library of Babel, MORE

Awards: Miguel de Cervantes Prize, MORE

Quotes

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

Jorge Luis Borges was born Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo in Buenos Aires, Argentina on this day in 1899.

"The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous."
--from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1940) included in FICCIONES

Jorge Luis Borges was one of those very rare creators who changed the face of an art form—in his case, the short story. His work has been paid the ultimate honor of being appropriated and imitated by innumerable writers on every continent of the world.The seventeen brief masterpieces of FICCIONES explode the boundaries of genre, offering up labyrinthine libraries, a fictional encyclopedia entry that spawns an entire world, a review of a nonexistent writer’s attempt to re-create Don Quixote word for word, a man with the disabling inability to forget anything he has ever experienced, and other metaphysical puzzles. But the true measure of Borges’s greatness lies in the fact that his fictions—elaborately paradoxical, postmodern, and intellectually delicious as they are—managed to return the short story to the realm of the fabulous and the uncanny from which, as parable and fairy tale, it originally came. READ more here: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/ficciones-by-jorge-lui…/

Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruption_of_Mount_Vesuvius_in_79

公元前79年的今天，維蘇威火山(Mount Vesuvius)爆發，將羅馬小城龐貝掩埋在灰燼、岩石和浮石之下。

我們對這一事件的了解主要仰賴於小普利尼(Pliny the Younger)，他在給羅馬歷史學家塔西陀(Tacitus)的信中描述了此事。據記載，當天下午稍早時，小普利尼的媽媽告訴他的叔叔老普利尼(Pliny the Elder)，“一片看起來大小和形狀都十分怪異的雲彩”正在飄來。

“我給不出更準確的描述了，” 小普利尼寫到這片雲時說，“它像是一棵松樹，樹幹長得極高，頂部像枝葉一樣散開。”

老普利尼乘坐小船去探索這片雲彩的來源，一路上遇到許多“滾燙的黑色石塊”。然後他繼續對船員說，“幸運總是偏愛大膽的人。”

然而這句格言被證偽了——至少在那天。

“他悶死了”，侄子寫道，“被惡臭的毒氣。”