Meeting with Silvia Hopenhayn
Tuesday, June 2, 2026 – 6:30 PM
Maison Rousseau et Littérature (Grand Rue 40 – Old Town)
Jorge Luis Borges reinvented fiction and discovered unknown territories. And this is not only due to the metaphysical nature of his literature, but rather to the way he conceives of the fantastic genre as something real, especially in some of his short stories.
It is worth remembering that most of them are very brief, no more than four or five pages long. Therefore, the act of reading them is itself a first creative exercise. A few pages, an entire invention.
Borges’s erudition is sometimes mistaken for a demand that the reader also be erudite. Most of the time, however, it is merely a trap or the veil of a fragile truth. Perhaps fiction in Borges is precisely that: the discovery of a key that opens the door to a unique and, at the same time, universal subjectivity. Like most celebrated literary figures, Borges created decades’ worth of characters, generally all with first and last names, parents’ names, and multiple coordinates of existence — all of which make them particularly real.
Writer and cultural journalist Silvia Hopenhayn will speak about some of these characters: Pierre Menard, Funes the Memorious, Juan Dahlmann, Ulrica, Borges himself (as a character in his story The Aleph), and Emma Zunz. This roundtable discussion will explore the sources of Borgesian creation: paradigmatic enumerations, portraits, genres (detective fiction, fantasy), rhetorical figures (paradoxes, analogies, oxymorons, hypallages, etc.), but above all his extraordinary capacity for imaginative, sensitive, and analytical writing.