This is a link to a recording of one of Borges’s lectures given at Harvard in 1967/8, this one, as the title suggests, on metaphor. My interest stems from Borges’s theme here, borrowed from the Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones and similar to suggestions that Borges makes elsewhere, that all words are “dead metaphors.” Any foray into etymology can resuscitate the metaphors behind common words, endowing them with new sense. This claim ties Borges to both Emerson’s claim that ‘every word was once a poem,’ and to Nietzsche’s claims, in “On Truth and Lies in the Extra Moral Sense,” that all “truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power…” What Nietzsche in “The Gay Science” calls (derisively) the heaven of concepts, he here calls the graveyard of metaphors. For Borges, considering poetry in this vein, the same metaphors, taken from different poets, produce very different effects.

Since I had to upload a file as well, I uploaded a Leonora Carrington painting (it seems like it fit with Borges).