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mentalgear 2 days ago

Is there an audio file of this interview? I'd prefer listening to the original (in the background).

gwern 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I see no hint of an audio recording having been made, much less surviving & digitized, in the original article's description: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-histo... It's too detailed to be retroactive notes by Simon or Borges, so I would guess Borges's secretary or a student simply transcribed it as they went.

benbreen 2 days ago | parent [-]

Gwern and others who have dug into it this far might be interested by this footnote in the Crespo article: "I have tried to lay my hands on the original version of the conversation, as I am sure Simon did, too. I contacted Gabriel Zadunaisky, who, as the article explains, participated in the meeting. He is a professional translator. I asked him for the original version, and he replied on WhatsApp: 'Mr. Crespo: I am very sick. Unfortunately, I am unable to provide you with the information requested.' My hypothesis is that Zadunaisky translated the conversation directly from the recorded version and that this original version has been lost."

My read is that most likely, it was recorded on an old school reel-to-reel tape recorder. It's entirely possible that the tapes are still sitting on a shelf somewhere in Argentina, though the chances of actually tracking them down are pretty low. I worked with some reel-to-reel tapes that Alan Ginsberg made (now held at Stanford) in the mid-60s (including one where he is talking to Bob Dylan!) and they held up pretty well. Had to use audio editing software to remove tape hiss, but they were not as badly preserved as I expected.

gwern a day ago | parent [-]

That's unfortunate about Mr Zadunaisky, but it does suggest there's no hope of a recording unless someone should stumble across it in the Borges papers (although given how his estate has been abused, little hope of that being useful, one way or another) or the Argentine library archives...

Anyway, I uploaded the Simon book chapter at https://gwern.net/doc/borges/1996-simon-2.pdf

benbreen a day ago | parent [-]

That's awesome, thank you for uploading.

mrpsbrk a day ago | parent | prev [-]

This seems to be the version published in an Argentinian magazine:

https://borgestodoelanio.blogspot.com/2017/05/jorge-luis-bor...