When Borges tells us that a certain article is what he will “now attempt” ( que ahora ensayaré), the promise seems awkward by his standards, the start of something laborious or mock laborious.

I should say too that ensayar is not the ordinary Spanish word for “try” as essayer is the ordinary word in French. Since “attempt” is the meaning of the word ensayar in Spanish-closer to “sketch” than to “experiment,” and the word also means “rehearsal”-the ensayo acquires a mildly melancholy note that is not present in the French and English names of the genre. But trying often brackets off the idea of failure in a way that “attempt” does not. This is what Claire de Obaldia suggests in a carefully worded sentence: “if (the essay) is associated with the authority and authenticity of someone who speaks in his or her name, it also disclaims all responsibility with regard to what is after all only ‘tried out’ and which is therefore closer, in a sense, to the ‘as if’ of fiction.” We can try and fail, of course. But perhaps the thing is too provisional to succeed or fail. They return to Montaigne and his use of the word essai-and also to his practice of the genre. But the desire of the essay is not to seek and filter the eternal out of the transitory it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.Ĭ urrent conversations about the essay-and there are many-emphasize the provisional, speculative nature of the genre, the suggestion of a test, a tryout.

Borges selected non fictions