Nueve ensayos dantescos. Introducción de Marcos Ricardo Barnatán. Presentación por Joaquín Arce.

172 × 110 mm. 161, [11] pages. Portrait of Borges on the frontispiece (photo by Oronoz). Eleven illustrations in text, reproducing William Blake's drawings, preserved in the British Museum, The Tate Gallery in London, and in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Original editorial wrappers. An excellent copy.

The original edition of the collection Nueve ensayos dantescos. Appeared in the editorial series Selecciones Austral the volume contains nine essays and articles devoted by Borges to Dante and the Commedia, including the first edition of his most famous tribute to Dante, La última sonrisa de Beatriz, written in about 1948. Borges began to read the Commediasystematically in the late 1930s, on his daily tram journey to the National Library in Buenos Aires, where he was employed. The inexhaustible textual imagery of Dante's poem fascinated him. "Were I to save [...] a whole book I would save the Divine Comedy [...] I think of Dante of being the writer, as being the poet” (Jorge Luis Borges).