Atlas

Atlas is the travel book Jorge Luis Borges made near the end of his life. Short prose pieces are paired with photographs María Kodama took on their journeys together, an act of seeing carried out by a writer who had gone blind decades earlier.

Anthony Kerrigan's English translation gathers short texts keyed to specific places and objects: Geneva, Ireland, a hot-air balloon over California, a street corner in Buenos Aires. Each text faces one of Kodama's photographs. Borges wrote from memory of how a place had looked before he lost his sight. At other times he built an image from what Kodama described to him as they traveled. The result reads as part journal, part fantasia, arranged by geography rather than chronology. It began as a Spanish volume, Atlas, published in Buenos Aires in 1984. The Kerrigan translation followed in 1985 from E.P. Dutton in New York and in 1986 from Viking in London, an oblong hardcover illustrated throughout in black and white.

Atlas was among the last books published in Borges's lifetime. Kodama had been his student, then his secretary and travel companion through his blind years. She married him weeks before his death in 1986 and became executor of his literary estate. Atlas records how the two worked together, her photographs and his recollection completing each other. It sits alongside a body of poems, essays, and fictions that includes Ficciones, The Aleph, and Labyrinths.