For decades, author Jorge Luis Borges’s personal notebooks remained hidden—until a team of BYU students, led by Emron Esplin, began transcribing them.
A collection of notebooks once belonging to Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges remained inaccessible to scholars for decades until they were obtained by Michigan State University. Unstudied and unpublished, these notebooks offer a rare glimpse into Borges’s creative mind. Over the past several years, Professor Emron Esplin (English), a Borges scholar, has worked with a team of Spanish-speaking BYU students to transcribe and publish the contents of these handwritten manuscripts, including the notes and edits Borges made to them. This collaborative effort resulted in the publication of a book of transcriptions, called Cuadernos & Conferencias, which revealed not only the intricate process behind Borges’s writing but also the evolution of his ideas, providing insights into his development as an author.
Decoding Borges
While on a Borges-focused research trip to Michigan State University in 2019, Esplin discovered a section of rare manuscripts that had recently acquired in the university’s special collections. Esplin soon realized that the manuscripts included 13 notebooks that were previously unknown to the academic community. These notebooks, filled with Borges’s elaborate notes, revisions, and musings, offered a glimpse into the author’s writing process. “These notebooks are common composition notebooks, but they’re just full of really elaborate notes with lots of crossings out, lots of different options,” Esplin explains. “An initial goal we had was we wanted these to be legible.”
To tackle the daunting task of transcribing the handwritten manuscripts, Esplin assembled a team of BYU students in 2021, many of whom spoke Spanish natively or were studying in the Spanish translation program. Over the last three years—and with the help of a Humanities Mentored Experience Grant (H-MEG)—Esplin worked with 15 students in total to complete the project.
The project resulted in a book that contains transcriptions from many sections of the notebooks alongside commentary and analysis done by Esplin and his colleagues Alfredo Alonso Estenoz, Daniel Balderston, Mariela Blando, and María Celeste Martín. The book explores Borges’s creative process by examining his handwritten notes and revisions, showing how they differ from the final, published versions of his works. Borges’s notebooks, filled with alternate ideas and margin notes, reveal the evolution of his work from class notes to published essays, often through different manuscript versions. Through genetic criticism—a method for analyzing a text’s development through drafts, revisions, and the creative process—Esplin and his students traced the development of Borges’s ideas and uncovered additional writings not included in the finished texts.
Beyond the Text
For the students involved, the project served as a transformative experiential learning opportunity, providing hands-on research experience and close mentorship. “This has been a long experiential learning project where I’ve been repeatedly surprised by and happy with things that students have done and [the] things that they’ve taught me along the way,” says Esplin.
The project has equipped these undergraduates with skills that extend far beyond the classroom. Due to the complexity of Borges’s handwritten notebooks, the students not only honed their linguistic abilities, particularly in Spanish, but also developed skills in attention to detail and critical thinking—skills that are valuable in many fields of study, not just translation or transcription. “The students become better readers in general,” Esplin notes, “and for the non-native speakers, this is very helpful for their Spanish, both in the reading and in the discussions.”
Esplin emphasizes that the students’ contributions were crucial not only to the success of the research project but also to the broader Borges scholarly community. “The students’ work has made this project work,” he says. “Scholars who’ve spent their lives studying Borges are grateful and impressed that undergraduates at BYU are doing this type of work.”
Through this collaboration, Esplin’s project not only enriches different interpretations of Borges’s writing but also provides a unique educational experience for the students. By assisting with the transcriptions, they have contributed to significant findings in the world of literature, while gaining valuable research skills. Thanks to their efforts, scholars and students alike will be able to study Borges’s works—and explore the intricacies of his creative process—for years to come.
To learn more about Cuadernos & Conferencias, go to University of Pittsburg’s Borges Center website.