These are all the footnotes from Borges and Bioy-Casares’ Six Problems for Don Isidoro. Like the excerpt a few days ago mocking trends in experimental poetry, the authors here are playfully taking the piss on a practice that has only grown worse since their time – the useless footnote.
[1] Affectionate nickname for H. Bustos Domecq used among his intimates. [Footnote by H.B.D.]
[2] See footnote 2. [Footnote by H.B.D.]
[3] Carlos Anglada’s commendable bibliography also comprises the following: the crude naturalistic novel Drawing-Room Flesh (1914), the magnanimous palinode Drawing-Room Spirit (1914), the long since superseded manifesto Words to Pegasus (1917), the travel notes In the Beginning Was the Pullman Car (1923), and the four numbered numbers of the review Zero (1924-27).
[4] Mario is sometimes so aggressive. [Footnote contributed by Dona Mariana Ruiz Villalba de Anglada.]
[5] Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitate—Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity. [Footnote submitted by Dr. William Ockham.]
[6] Not at all. We—contemporaries of the machine gun and biceps—repudiate this delicate rhetoric. I should say, with the finality of a bullet, “I put salesroom and atelier on the ground floor. I lock the Chinamen upstairs.” [Footnote written in the hand of Carlos Anglada.]
[7] In fact, the doctor smiled and gave a greeting. [Author’s note.]
[8] The duelists have crossed swords. The reader can already hear the clash of rival steel. [Marginal note by Gervasio Montenegro.]
[9] A bucolic touch. [Original note by José Formento.]
Footnote 1 – the ‘author’ references himself in third person.
Footnote 2 – points recursively to itself.
Footnote 3 – for no logically apparent reason continues an unfinished list started in the main text.
Footnote 4 – a useless aside from a recurring character in the stories
Footnote 5 – a quotation ‘submitted’ by the semi-disguised fourteenth century philosopher William of Ockham.
Footnote 6 – another useless aside from a recurring character.
Footnote 7 – ‘author’s’ correction of his narrator’s sequence – “the face that now greets you and smiles.”
Footnote 8 – a third useless aside from a third recurring character.
Footnote 9 – a fourth useless aside from a fourth recurring character.
Extracts 