I Wanted To Live Among Books.

It Has Always Been My Experience That, Whatever Groupings I Choose For My Books, The Space In Which I Plan To Lodge Them Necessarily Reshapes My Choice And, More Important, In No Time Proves Too Small For Them And Forces Me To Change My Arrangement. In A Library, No Empty Shelf Remains Empty For Long. Like Nature, Libraries Abhor A Vacuum, And The Problem Of Space Is Inherent In The Very Nature Of Any Collection Of Books.

In The Dark, With The Windows Lit And The Rows Of Books Glittering, The Library Is A Closed Space, A Universe Of Self-serving Rules That Pretend To Replace Or Translate Those Of The Shapeless Universe Beyond.

I Had A Library Of Maybe 1,000 Books In My Room In Buenos Aires. I Did Have The Sense That Everything There Was Organised In The Right Way. You'll Probably Think I Needed Serious Psychiatric Treatment, But There Were Times When I Would Not Buy A Book Because I Knew It Wouldn't Fit One Of The Categories Into Which I Had Divided The Library.

Old Books That We Have Known But Not Possessed Cross Our Path And Invite Themselves Over. New Books Try To Seduce Us Daily With Tempting Titles And Tantalizing Covers.

It Is In The Translation That The Innocence Lost After The First Reading Is Restored Under Another Guise, Since The Reader Is Once Again Faced With A New Text And Its Attendant Mystery. That Is The Inescapable Paradox Of Translation, And Also Its Wealth.