Preface by Juan Cruz. 22pp, 172 x 240mm, Edition of 500
ISBN: 978-1-900687-32-4
Sean Kaye and Jenny West have taken an English translation of Borges’ 1941 short story La Biblioteca de Babel – The Library of Babel – and attempted to write a version of its opposite, not an inversion of the story itself, more like a distorted mirror image of the whole text.
The term ‘library’ is inverted in this book by ‘a random dispersal of dust,’ and dust is a compelling metaphor for the accretion of orthographic symbols to which Borges alludes in his notion of the library, which appears to form itself independently of authorial will. In this book the authorship is more certain, and dust is not only a metaphor derived from the inversion of the original title, but also the principle around which the whole text coalesces. Books in the library are consistently referred to as specks of dust and the librarian is a vacuum- cleaner. Where Borges refers to the constituent parts of books, Sean Kaye and Jenny West have gone to some lengths to research the molecular structure of a speck of dust.
“The Borges story suggests a structure that goes on forever whereas ‘A Random Dispersal of Dust (Mutely Understood)’ suggests a condensing of matter alluding to physical production, visual art and ‘seeing’, in contrast to literature, writing and religion.”
Published by Wild Pansy Press, 25th September 2009, price £12.00