Les Insectes

by Jorge Luis Borges

Etrange ville que celle de Nuremberg. Elle a vu naître dans ses murs des dynasties d'artistes, de Dürer à Besler, sans oublier Rösel von Rosenhof. Dans sa famille, on était peintre, graveur ou miniaturiste. A ses qualités d'artiste, August Rösel joignait celles d'un homme de science. Pionnier de l'entomologie moderne, ce contemporain de Linné et de Buffon, doit sa célébrité à l'ouvrage qu'il consacra aux insectes : du cocon à l'état adulte, il montre leurs métamorphoses à travers une série de planches somptueuses alliant la précision scientifique à la qualité artistique. On s'émerveille de la splendeur de son répertoire, de la fascinante variété des formes et des couleurs qu'il nous livre. Ce monde aussi divers qu'étrange, il l'observait à l'aide de lentilles qu'il polissait lui-même pour plus de précision !
C'est ce mélange de science et d'art qui fait de son livre un véritable chef-d'oeuvre, digne de figurer aux côtés d'Audubon ou de Besler. Pour la première fois depuis le XVIIIe siècle, une édition reproduit la totalité des planches gravées et coloriées par Rösel. Sous la direction de Claude Caussanel, une équipe de chercheurs a travaillé aux textes pour nous donner la synthèse des informations scientifiques que l'on possède aujourd'hui.

496 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph (transl. The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
Born in Buenos Aires, Borges later moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind by the age of 55. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. By the 1960s, his work was translated and published widely in the United States and Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages.
In 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971, he won the Jerusalem Prize. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by the growing number of English translations, the Latin American Boom, and by the success of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. Writer and essayist J.M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists."