Time to pause and read a bit of Borges on the 110th anniversary of his birth in Buenos Aires: August 24, 1899.

If you’re not sure where to start, here’s my top 10 stories by Borges, part of a series of posts I wrote back in 2006: 30 Days with Borges.

A proposal before the Argentine congress aims to bring the remains of Jorge Luis Borges from his burial place in Geneva to Argentina where the writer would be interred in the family vault in Recoleta Cemetery. It sounds crazy to me, but the proposal is backed by the head of the Argentine Society of Writers.

An irony behind the proposed law to repatriate the body of Borges is that the legislation is presented by a Peronist lawmaker. Borges was intensely anti-Peronist. And the proposal seems to defy the wishes of Borges.

It’s well documented that Borges chose to die in Geneva, a city that held significance to him from his stay there during his childhood. While as a young man Borges did write a famously romanticized poem about Recoleta Cemetery and is the quintessential Argentine writer, as a dying man in his old age he did not want his burial to be part of the circus that is Buenos Aires media.

If Borges is brought back to Argentina, then it will be the biggest reburial here since Juan Perón’s coffin traipsed through the streets of Buenos Aires in 2006 during a reburial that ended in a fiasco.

The newspaper Perfil which reported on the story (in Spanish) simply indicated that Maria Kodama, the widow of Borges, could not be located for comment.

Repatriating the remains of iconic figures in Argentine history is not uncommon, and it’s also not that uncommon in Argentina for bodies to be reburied and shifted about from one grave to another. I guess one could argue that Borges had his 20 years in Geneva, now it’s time for him to come home.

Yet, I’m also wondering if these Peronist lawmakers who presented this idea don’t have better things to do in congress, like trying to address the problems facing this country?

And here’s a photo of the family mausoleum where Borges would rest in Recoleta Cemetery. He would be not too far from the tomb of Evita Perón….a woman with the most amazing story of the traveling dead.

Macedonio Fernández was an enigmatic figure shadowing over the literary scene in Buenos Aires during the early 20th century.

In a new essay published in The Quarterly Conversation, Marcelo Ballvé writes about the influence of Macedonio on Argentina’s most famous writer – The Man Who Invented Borges.

Both men were enamored of speculative philosophy, and arguably it was Macedonio who was responsible for making a metaphysician out of Borges. Both writers were incessant explorers of a handful of themes: the inexistence of the individual personality, the elastic nature of time, the permeability of waking life to dreams and vice-versa; one might say: the instability of reality in general. In both writers’ work the supposedly bedrock concepts by which we live are revealed to be unstable isotopes, slippery and layered, none being in essence what they appear to be and all of course eminently moldable, especially within the pages of a story, poem, or essay.