Lost in Translation: Languages and Student Mobility — Historical Perspectives (19th–21st Century)

Annick Louis, a Franco-Argentine academic, and Félix Terrones, professor at the Institute of Hispanic Language and Literature (Universität Bern), bring scholarly expertise in Hispanic studies and literary criticism.

This lecture examines the elements of Borges’s writing that fascinate scholars and engage general readers, investigating his narrative strategies, themes of identity and labyrinthine structure, and the legacy he left for subsequent authors and literary movements.

In French.

Alberto Manguel, Argentine-Canadian writer, essayist and former director of the National Library of Argentina, is known for A History of Reading and Reader of Borges; his work examines reading, libraries and literary imagination.

He will discuss Borges’s biographical dimension and its links to his poetics, examining how reading shaped Borges’s creativity—from childhood encounters in his father’s library to his later practice of reading through others. The lecture explores themes of memory, translation, textual transformation and the reader’s role.

In French.

Jacques Berchtold presents a study of Rousseau’s self-identification with exile, in dialogue with Chake Matossian (Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels). He situates Rousseau’s gestures within artistic and textual traditions.

The lecture examines Rousseau’s abrupt adoption of Armenian dress and its representation by painters, linking classical (Ovid at Tomis) and Christian (John Chrysostom) models. Berchtold investigates the Enlightenment re-reading of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat and argues this purification of origin frames Rousseau as a new Noah confronting modern degeneration.

In French.