The Immortal

In early 1925, in a literary magazine in Buenos Aires called Proa ("Prow"), which he had helped to found, Jorge Luis Borges wrote an essay called "El Ulises de Joyce." He would then have been just twenty-five years old, and was anxious to boast of being "the first Hispanic adventurer to have arrived at Joyce's book." Far from content with this avant-garde claim, he evolved the further ambition to do for his native Buenos Aires what Joyce had done for Dublin, and to weave from its slums and boulevards the lineaments of a universal city.

On the centennial of Leopold Bloom's epic meanderings this is a delightful coincidence to come upon if you believe—but cannot perhaps quite prove—that there is something universal about literature, too, and that unforgiving Time, as Auden said in farewell to Yeats, nonetheless "Worships language and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives." ...