Below, you will find a collection of book reviews relating to the Library of Babel. It is important to keep in mind that The Library of Babel is part of the collection in The Garden of Forking Paths, which is the first of two parts in Borges’ Collected Fictions (translated by Andrew Hurley in 1998). In this light, the greater collection becomes the focal point for these reviews.
BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Savoring a Borges Blend of Imaginings
New York Times
By Richard Bernstein
September 9, 1998
The story “Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth,” roughly in the middle of this marvelous new collection of stories by Jorge Luis Borges, is as good a place as any to start an appreciation of one of the most remarkable writers of our century. A king flees the ghost of his vizier, whom he has killed, taking refuge in a labyrinth he builds on the moors of Cornwall. But the ghost, or what seems to be a ghost, catches up with him, and the king is murdered within his own hiding place.
It is not one of Borges’s greatest stories, but many of the familiar elements of his work are here: arcane knowledge, characters that emerge from some combination of mythology and scholarship, images of labyrinths, a lightly satirical Homeric tone, blood and vengeance, the blending of murder and metaphysics, and an interplay of appearances and apparitions in which reality and illusion are almost indistinguishable.
Only Borges created literature out of that mixture, though one can guess at some of his diverse sources of inspiration: Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Miguel de Cervantes, with a liberal dusting of Omar Khayyam, the cabala and Islamic theology, and a great deal of esoteric reading. In the introduction to an earlier collections that is wrapped into this one, Borges writes about “the madness” of “setting out in 500 pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes.” He spent his career (which ended with his death in 1986) writing “notes on imaginary books.” This new collection of the complete imaginings of the Argentine writer, freshly translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley, is an event, and cause for celebration.
Reading Borges’s work chronologically, as this collection is arranged, is to be reminded of the strangeness of his art (strangeness being, in the opinion of the literary critic Harold Bloom, the main criterion for membership in the canon of great writers). Borges was attracted to fantasy writing, as in his story “The Aleph,” but a very recherche fantasy writing grounded in arcane lore.
“The Aleph” begins, like so many Borges stories, with what seems an autobiographical digression, the death of Beatriz Viterbo, friend with whom the narrator had been unrequitedly in love. Beatriz had a cousin, Carlos Argentino Daneri, despised by Borges (who, as in many of his stories, identifies himself as the narrator) as a man whose “oral expression was extravagant” but whose “metrical clumsiness prevented him, except on a very few occasions, from transmitting that extravagance to the poem.” Inside Daneri’s house, it turns out, is an aleph, a point in space that contains all points, which he invites Borges to see. The compressed personal and metaphysical themes of the story combine in a work of mystical enchantment.
The aleph that Borges sees is “a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness” in which “all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist.” Borges gazes upon infinity, which, of course, is undescribable, and sees, among many other things, a disturbing truth about Beatriz and Daneri, which is why the hated cousin wanted him to look upon the aleph in the first place. The story is really about love, deceit and, in the end, a desperate effort by Borges to escape the moral consequences of what he has seen.
“The Aleph” is a luminous work, and far from the only one in this collection. This is not to say that all of Borges’s stories reach that level. The book reveals, in fact, that Borges reached his peak in the 1940’s with collections like “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “Artifices” as well as “The Aleph.” The work of later decades is tinged with a certain imitativeness of the earlier stories, but even a reduced Borges is fascinating. Almost everything he presents, from the heavily intellectual masterpieces like “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” to fragments like “Toenails” (a single-paragraph thought about mortality), is laden with mystery, double meanings, ambiguity.
In “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” perhaps the height of philosophical playfulness as literature, Borges invents an orderly alternative way of thinking and talking. He sets down the principles of a language in which there are no nouns, only “impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) functioning as adverbs.” ” ‘The moon rose above the river’ is ‘hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo,’ or, as Xul Solar succinctly translates: Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.” Marvelous.
There is a a deeper meaning here, about the inherent tyranny of totally ordered societies. (Borges is writing in response to the rise of Nazism in Germany, with its Argentine echoes.) “Contact with Tlon, the habit of Tlon, has disintegrated this world.”
How different from this learned exercise in political parable are “Death and the Compass” and “Emma Zunz,” in which Borges indulges one of his favorite pastimes, inventing perfect acts of vengeance. Though linked by the high-impact elegance of Borges’s prose, these stories are a far cry from his other utopias, like “The Lottery in Babylon,” in which a state lottery presents an organizing principle for all of life: that chance alone determines individual fate.
Then there are marvels like “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a mind-bending parody of a literary dispute, about a writer whose greatest achievement was to recompose two chapters of “Don Quixote.”
“There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless,” Borges writes, a statement produced in full knowledge that he is fashioning an intellectual exercise about an intellectual exercise. It is a typically enigmatic touch from a writer who endlessly teases himself and his readers.
The World, by Jorge
By Alberto Manguel
January 3, 1999
The last time I saw him was in Paris, in the small hotel on the Rue des Beaux Arts that now carries plaques with the names of its two most celebrated guests: Oscar Wilde and Jorge Luis Borges. He was enjoying a period of travel to places he had always wanted to visit and now talked about them incessantly: to Egypt, where he had pocketed a handful of sand; to Iceland where, in a ruined church, he had recited ‘Our Father’ in Anglo-Saxon; to Japan, where he had discussed Buddhism with a Shinto priest. He was once again writing short stories in the fantastic vein that he had made his own in Ficciones and The Aleph.
Over dinner he told me the plot of the last fiction he was to write, ‘Shakespeare’s Memory’, about a man who inherits the maze of Shakespeare’s thoughts and recollections. It was never fully revised and should perhaps not have been published. In a brief poem written in the Fifties, he had observed that time doesn’t like to reveal its endings: we don’t know whose hand we’ve shaken for the last time, or what door we have closed for all eternity. I didn’t know that after that dinner we would never meet again. Borges died in Geneva on 28 June 1986.
Vladimir Nabokov said that on first reading Borges he thought he had come upon a new and marvelous portico, but that behind the facade he found nothing. Poor Nabokov! What he took to be nothing is, in fact, everything or the possibility of everything: every story, every reflection, every thought and every event are all contained in what Borges called, in one of his best stories, the Library of Babel, the recipient of every book, past, present and future. What Borges offered his readers was a philosophy, an ethical system, a method (but these words are too mechanical) for the art of reading that is to say, for the craft of following a revelatory thread through the labyrinth of the universe.
Borges’s own readings were uniquely illuminating and original. They shone light on unexpected corners of the text, and his comments were original not because he was the first to make them, but because he was the first to remind us that such perceptions existed. Listening to him read (or rather, since he was as blind as Homer, listening to him comment on the texts that were read to him out loud by readers such as myself) was always a revelation. He insisted that his readings were rediscoveries, and quoted Bacon quoting Plato (unwittingly) quoting King Solomon to prove it: ‘So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.’
His acute observations colour the readings of even those who haven’t read him, because they now form part of the way so many writers think and write, writers as diverse as Marguerite Yourcenar and Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino and George Steiner, Salman Rushdie and Northrop Frye. His clear intelligence led him to define the essential ambiguity at the heart of every work of art, thereby granting readers permission to enjoy and yet not fully understand: ‘The imminence of a revelation that does not take place,’ he wrote, ‘is, perhaps, the aesthetic fact.’
He observed that every writer creates his own precursors, thereby explaining the linked libraries that a soul-piercing book creates in the reader’s memory. He told readers that they were, as much as himself, literary creators. He accepted the common feeling of bewildering unreality that at times pervades every reader and yet admitted the overwhelming knowledge that, despite it, our lives are horribly real (‘Time is a tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger,’ he admitted in ‘A New Refutation of Time’. ‘Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am that fire. The world, alas, is real and I, alas, am Borges’).
He was a modest, profoundly ethical man who wished he could be braver and stronger, a man of action. He had no desire to be famous. He said that he longed for nothing but oblivion. He described in a short and extraordinary parable how Shakespeare, tired of being so many men, hoped to be nothing but one man, and how God, Shakespeare’s Dreamer, mirrored his dream’s despair in his own cosmic resignation. That mirroring was, for Borges, who hated mirrors, consolation of a kind. Above all, he believed, hope against hope, that it was our moral duty to be happy.
Since the first American translations of Borges, attempted in the Fifties by well-intentioned admirers such as Donald Yates and James Irby, English-speaking readers have been very poorly served. From the uneven versions collected in Labyrinths to the more meticulous, but ultimately unsuccessful, editions published by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, from Ruth Simm’s abominable apery of ‘Other Inquisitions’ to Paul Bowles’s illiterate rendition of ‘The Circular Ruins’, Borges in English must be read in spite of the translations. That one of the key writers of the century should lack an outstanding translator is indicative of how low ‘foreign’ literature lies in the estimation of English-language publishers. English-language readers have either to resign themselves to the old, barely serviceable translations, or submit to the new, barely serviceable translations by Andrew Hurley, Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico.
Hurley has no ear for the rhythms of Borges’s language. ‘Funes el memorioso’ is for Hurley ‘Funes, His Memory’ which is both inaccurate and ugly. ‘Hombre de la Esquina Rosada’ becomes ‘Man on Pink Corner’, in inexplicable pidgin English. ‘The Circular Ruins’, whose perfect prose can be recited like a poem, begins felicitously in Hurley’s rendition with ‘No one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night’ and then sinks ignominiously with ‘no one saw the bamboo canoe’ and its inappropriate rhyme. A number of stories have been decently translated and are as readable as the best among the earlier versions, but mere readability is not good enough.
On what was to be our last night in Paris, Borges told me that, a few days earlier, he had attended a staging of Macbeth and that, in spite of the terrible performance, he had left the theatre ‘shattered by tragic passion’. ‘How curious,’ he said, ‘that Shakespeare’s genius can even overcome the efforts of a bad actor.’ Borges’s genius will overcome Hurley’s version, as it has so many others, and English-speaking readers, while waiting for the inspired translator of Borges, may have to resign themselves to the not impossible task of learning Spanish.
A Writer’s Writer
By Marc Berley
July/August 1999
Born in Buenos Aires 100 years ago, Jorge Luis Borges devoted his life to the preservation and investigation of books, first as a municipal suburban librarian and later as the director of the National Library of Argentina. From the early 1920’s until his death in 1986, he also lived a private life as a writer’s writer, crafting exquisitely fantastic–and, appropriately, bookish–fictions that eventually won him a reputation as a 20th-century master, on a par with Joyce and Kafka (to mention two with whom he is often compared).
Among his fellow Latin American writers, appraisals of Borges have been divided since the beginning of his career. Although he excited interest because of the aesthetic possibilities he unearthed in a universe conceived of and in books, for some of his colleagues he too blatantly transgressed the local commandment that fiction should address itself to the political conditions of Latin American society. Thus, the novelist, and leftist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1967: “He is one of the writers . . . I have read most, and yet he is perhaps the one I like least.” Why? Because he “writes about mental realities, he is sheer evasion.”
To this it must be added that Borges’s own quirky but decidedly nonleftist politics were no more palatable to his critics than his unwillingness to make them part of his fiction. “My convictions with respect to political matters are well known,” he wrote in 1970:
I have joined the Conservative party (which act is a form of skepticism), and no one has ever called me a Communist, a nationalist, an anti-Semite, or a supporter of . . . [the 19th-century right-wing dictator Jean Manuel de] Rosas. I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government. I have never hidden my opinions, even through the difficult years, but I have never allowed them to intrude upon my literary production, either, save that one time when I praised [Israel’s] Six-Day war.
Two new collections of Borges’s work have come out in the past year, and a third (Selected Nonfictions) is due soon. Selected Poems represents about half of his verse production, and gives us, on facing pages, the Spanish originals and English translations (by about a dozen hands).
Borges’s earliest poems paint a picture of a very literary young man in love with his city–its streets, houses, light, and sounds–and with the dignity of his ancestors. (“He wrote his roll of deeds/in prose inflexible as battlesinging trumpets,” Borges memorialized his great-grandfather, who in 1824 successfully led a regiment against Spanish forces in Peru.) Then, from about 1930 to 1960, the years of his best fiction, Borges abandoned poetry altogether. When he returned, it was to the same subjects and themes: Buenos Aires, his forebears, literature, and language.
In general, Borges’s poetry is most powerful when it is about personal matters–including the encroaching blindness that by the 1960’s had robbed him of the capacity to read–and also when it is most concrete. It is at its worst when abstract, which is much too often. Ideas that flourish in Borges’s narrative prose founder in verse. As he himself wrote in 1929, in “all poets who are worthy of being read again and again,” the lyrical and the intellectual must “coexist.” Unfortunately, in his case they only rarely do.
But if Selected Poems makes for a lackluster centenary celebration, Collected Fictions is something else again. It offers, in one volume and in a fine translation by Andrew Hurley, all of Borges’s remarkable and often indelible meditations on time, memory, infinity, the meaning of life, the value of art, chance, morality, and other subjects that are as fit for philosophical as for literary investigation. Despite the largeness of these themes, most of Borges’s stories are short, and some are very short. It is “madness,” he once wrote, to compose “vast books–setting out in 500 pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes.”
Borges published a number of volumes of stories over the decades, and all of them appear in Collected Fictions in chronological order. But his two earliest–and especially the second of them–are justly considered his best.
The first, A Universal History of Iniquity (1935), focuses on bad people who spoil for fame and battle, and includes stories about, among other strange types, barrio knife fighters, a woman pirate, and Billy the Kid. One begins with “two toughs sheathed in grave black clothing [doing] the tango of evenly matched knives” until the death of one of them “brings the dance without music to its end.” Of Billy the Kid, who “never fully measured up to the legend of himself, though he came closer and closer as time went on,” we are told that he “died at the age of twenty-one owing a debt to human justice for the deaths of 21 men–‘not counting Mexicans.'” Death, often gruesome, seems to be not just the resolution but the point of these careers conducted for the sake of notoriety.
In Borges’s own later description of the trajectory of his career, he soon “moved on from the mythologies of the slums and outskirts of the city to games with time and infinity.” His second collection, the highly celebrated Fictions (1944), contains such masterpieces as “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “The Lottery in Babylon,” and “The Library of Babel.”
In “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” the narrator–who is named Borges — is trying to research “the entire history of an unknown planet,” an encyclopedic account of which has been brought to his attention by another Argentinian writer. This vertiginous search for a nonexistent account of a nonexistent planet leads to fantastic descriptions of an imagined civilization that, in eerie and finally alarming ways, turns out to mirror our own.
A similar mirror-like effect underlies “The Lottery in Babylon,” a fable of an entire country attempting to limit the uncertainties that bedevil the human condition. Its favored means is a clever-seeming innovation: a game of “twofold chance” every 60 nights in which some win prizes while others win punishments that include maiming and death. As people become addicted to the lottery, and above all to its punishments, they begin perversely to enjoy “all the vicissitudes of terror and hope” they had thought to escape by means of the lottery itself.
A stringent morality stands behind Borges’s fictionalized searches. In his earliest stories, the ugly deaths of the iniquitous suggest that human justice does eventually exact its “debt”–a lesson reinforced by Borges’s chilling visual descriptions of his protagonists’ ends. Later stories go farther. “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is a haunting portrayal of what can happen when a society seeks “to prove to the nonexistent God that mortals could conceive and shape a world,” while “The Lottery of Babylon” warns of the terrible consequences that issue from the undisciplined hope of creating through artifice a better world.
In short, far from evading reality, as Marquez charged, Borges uses his bookish imagination to investigate the human penchant for, precisely, evading reality. To accomplish this, he seduces us back into Plato’s cave of images, the false but alluring world of shadows from which we can learn, at great labor, properly to evaluate objects and events in the world of blinding light. For Borges, working in the medium of fiction, this is an exercise requiring highly ironic narrative structures with many intricately woven levels of meaning and reference–a technique that to the unconditioned reader can sometimes seem ridiculous or merely fanciful, but whose effect is in the end simultaneously mesmerizing and cathartic.
If Borges did not write about himself or about Argentina the way some of his fellow Latin Americans desired him to, he accomplished something grander and more enduring. One of our last true humanists, living through languages, books, and history, he condensed into unforgettable fictions the experience of intellect speaking to and about the world. This alone ensures his place as a matchless man of modern letters.
The Magician
By Mavis Gallant
September 13, 1998
Jorge Luis Borges began as a poet who transposed his native Buenos Aires into a city of imaginings and dreams. Some of the poems touched on love, or what must have seemed to him love, a topic almost entirely absent from his prose. He was born in 1899, lived to be 86, and in his lifetime wrote continually, even after a genetic weakness caught up with him and he became blind. His strange, cruel fictions, as dispassionate as fairy tales — fairy tales where just treatment means ill will, magic is malevolent and murder goes unpunished, as a matter of course — suited the age and made him famous.
The first stories to appear in translation, in French, then in English, came out of his middle years. They remain far and away his finest work, the core of his reputation. Some — ”The Aleph,” ”Emma Zunz,” ”The South” — stand among the great short fiction of the century. From the early 60’s to the end of his life he accumulated, at a dizzying rate, state honors from many countries, honorary doctorates, distinguished awards and international prizes (all but the Nobel). Taken together, they exceeded anything bestowed on any other author in the second half of the century. The flow of accolades involved exhausting travel and complicated arrangements, for he was frail and sightless and had to be helped. He seems to have accepted in good heart the long flights, the jostling, speechmaking and meetings with strangers he could not see. By all accounts a shy and modest man, he never attracted envy, jealousy and begrudging remarks. It made him a rare soul in international letters.
In temperament, he seemed the opposite of his own creations. It was hard to picture Borges taking part in a fatal knife fight, a frequent occurrence in his fiction. One wondered if he had ever seen one. The cold violence of his imagination and the warmth of his manner made him an enigma. He was read and discussed outside his own country for a generation. Now, 12 years after the great wave of the obituaries, and a year short of the centenary, it is all but impossible to find anyone who has read Borges recently (other than Spanish-speaking readers, translators, specialists in Latin American writing, teachers and graduate students preparing dissertations). Some of his admirers, who have his work on the bookshelf, seem to have lost much recollection of individual stories. If one insists, they will remember the coincidences, the cabalistic magic, the grip of the past on the present as an explanation for fate. But it sounds more like general information than true memory. What Borges could see in his mind he described accurately, and his account still sounds truthful, just as a child who invents a ghost is telling a truth. For Borges, death weighs in on the same scale as survival. Perhaps that idea has become unacceptable, and that is what creates the fading of memory, or the blur. Or perhaps Borges did not care about death, but just how people accept it, how they die. Among his characters is one named ”Borges.” Sometimes ”Borges” tells the story, sometimes just slinks along the edge of it, but he always seems uncertain of his role and his identity. So, how can the rest of the world remember exactly what ”Borges” was and what he said?
To discover the fictions at midcentury was stunning. There was no one like Borges. Everything else, for a short time, seemed predictable and beside the point. It is astonishing now to recall how many people whose first language was not Spanish believed they could write like Borges, who declared themselves under his influence. To be influenced means to be seduced while still a minor. Influence, true influence, sinks under memory — the memory Borges once said is placed along the edge of the sea, under the tides — and becomes like anything else underwater: a stone that looks just like another, a smoothed scrap of a bottle. Say, rather, that Borges was plundered, like ivory taken out of the elephants’ graveyards, like their feet made into umbrella stands. To write like Borges would require reading the same books in early childhood (in his case, everything), seeing the same films in early youth; it would mean holding the same fixed ideas, being trapped inside the same inhibitions and sexual caution. It would need wide erudition and an imagination set free. Rereading his stories, from the beginnings, through the superb fictions of his middle life, on to the loose, tedious copies of the real thing toward the end, one can see where his imitators found their natural home. They belong to that time when his imagination tired, except they beat him to it.
”Collected Fictions” is the first complete translation into English of all the fictions, in a single voice. Andrew Hurley, a professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, has already brought into English a number of Spanish-speaking writers and poets, among them Ernesto Sabato and Reinaldo Arenas. This collection is testimony to hard labor and devotion. No single translator has rendered all Borges work in any other language. He was first translated into French and it was in Paris that the Borges cult began abroad. But when the first volume of his collected writings appeared in the ”Pleiade” series five years ago, 10 translators were listed.
Who would be a translator? All one does is pick holes. Whether the single voice for Borges is the perfect voice will be settled (or rather, never settled) by cavalry regiments of translation experts, set to gallop across the field, from the first words of ”The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell” to the last line of ”Shakespeare’s Memory.” Most readers of fiction read for pleasure. They do not want to carry a dictionary around or another translation to compare with a volume 565 pages long. They trust the translator to be loyal to the author and to make English sound like English.
If there is any difficulty with ”Collected Fictions,” at least for me, it has to do with a sometimes jarring mixture of British and American usage, occasionally on the same page. In ”The Garden of Forking Paths,” ”jail” is spelled ”gaol,” while a few lines away comes ”a little ways from the main entrance.” The plural of ”way,” meaning distance, is American only. In ”Man on Pink Corner,” tough talk by some of Borges’s knife fighters is rendered in a bizarre mixture of early hillbilly, imitation Huck Finn and dialogue from cowboy movies shown on Saturday afternoons long, long ago. There is even a trace of the unwittingly funny American speech one used to find in British novels. (They still don’t get it right.) It is a first-person narration, by a man who pronounces ”wasn’t” as ”wa’n’t,” but also is made to say, ”that stranger’s insufferable bullying,” and ”an insolent red-wheeled hack crammed with men.”
Well, of course, one can’t go to Venice for the first time more than once. Trying to reread ”The Zahir” and ”The Library of Babel” as though for the first time results in a new discovery: the fictions have remained in the mind not as stories, but as if they were films. After the first paragraphs they project a mostly silent image, unchanged. They are like old and precious reels a curator in a film museum has lovingly kept unscratched and dusted. Everything happens and will happen in the same way, over and over. It is an experience wholly unlike rereading a story by Eudora Welty or Vladimir Nabokov or Italo Calvino and finding that light and shade have shifted: now this is distinct and that is in the dark. With Borges there is the same shadowless light from no source one can pinpoint or even detect.
It will take another 25 years after the centennial for a new generation to test the stories for vitality and endurance. People may discover ”The Aleph” with shock and pleasure and may even think, as one did on first encounter, ”At last, something new.” Or they may just wonder what it was all about. There used to be an elderly Hungarian painter in Paris who was as unassuming and polite as Borges is said to have been. But if a visitor to his studio talked nonsense or wasted his time, he would say: ”You like? You no like? Me, what?” ”Me, what?” just meant: Given the nature of art and the ambiguousness of understanding anything, you can take it or leave it.
Make-Believe for an Uncertain Age / The long-awaited complete collection of Jorge Luis Borges’ fiction in a new translation
By Jorge Luis Borges Translated by Andrew Hurley Viking; 565 pages; $40
In 1962, a year after the blind librarian Jorge Luis Borges shared the Prix Formentor with Samuel Beckett, the first translations of his incomparable fictions made their sly appearance, forever altering the landscape of the English-language short story.
For most North American readers, “Ficciones” proved an initial exposure to the “magic realism” practiced so adroitly by our neighbors to the south. Coming across a tale such as “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” for the first time was like taking a walk on the moon.
On the approach of his centennial next year, the publication of “Collected Fictions,” Borges’ complete fictional oeuvre in a single volume of crisp new translations by Andrew Hurley, is an event worthy of celebration. The first of three planned volumes from Viking, (the other two will gather the great Argentine’s poetry and nonfiction), this long-awaited collection possesses an intrinsic value far in excess of its all-in-one, Swiss-Army-knife utility.
In his foreword to “Ficciones,” Borges, who died in 1986, called the composition of vast books “a laborious madness.” It is far better, he suggested, to make believe such works “already exist” and then offer the reader a precis of the imaginary book, summarizing and commenting on a hypothetical text.
In “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” the chimerical book in question is “a vast and systematic fragment of the entire history of an unknown planet, its architectures and its playing cards, the horror of its mythologies and the murmur of its tongues, its emperors and its seas, its minerals and its birds and fishes, its algebra and its fire.”
The subtlety and skill by which Borges leads a reader to accept the existence of this fantastic book is no small measure of his genius. Weaving together imaginary anecdote and actual friends, he creates the illusion of a literary essay, detailing through hints, digressions and mock footnotes the path that led him to the discovery of this parallel world, Tlon. With deft economy the reader is shown glimpses of Tlonian geometry and philosophy and is introduced to the concept of the hronir, the duplication of a lost object through the force of pure expectation.
Borges then reveals that this vast 40-volume encyclopedia of an illusory planet was, in fact, created by a secret society funded in the 1820s by a wealthy American slave-owner, who wished to celebrate his atheism by proving that “mortals could conceive and shape a world.”
Borges goes on to relate the first intrusions of objects from Tlon into the reality of our own world: a fantastic compass and a small, shining metal cone of incredible weight, “an image of the deity in certain Tlonian religions.”
The author brings us full circle, from a fantastic book about an imaginary world to the notion that a “fictitious past has supplanted in men’s memories that other past, of which we now know nothing certain — not even that it is false.” Borges thus provides an apt, witty metaphor for our uncertain age.
The cumulative delights gained from immersing oneself in the work of a great master far outweigh the pleasure of doling the pieces out sparingly, like bonbons. Revisiting Borges and becoming reacquainted with his mythic themes — the mask, the dagger, the mirror, the maze — reinforces one’s understanding of the author’s enduring dictum: “Literature is but guided dreaming.”
“Collected Fictions” opens with the story “A Universal History of Iniquity,” Borges fictional debut in 1935, a landmark of Spanish prose literature acclaimed as the first example of magic realism. A reunion with this rogue’s gallery of thugs, outlaws and Chinese lady pirates feels like swaggering back into the shadows of some disreputable and dangerous saloon.
Although his “hoaxes and pseudo-essays,” as Borges referred to these stories, are now famously familiar, a vague unease accompanied a recent rereading. An earlier edition of the lead story, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovani in collaboration with Borges, has the title as “A Universal History of Infamy.” Why the discrepancy? Surely the difference between “infamy” and “iniquity” matters. The original Spanish title is “Historia universal de la infamia.”
What occasioned Andrew Hurley’s strange choice? He certainly knows the Spanish word “iniquidad.” Those preferring the sound and sense of “infamy” might resolve to read the stories again in both translations.
The differences they would find are slight but many. Hurley perfectly captures Borges’ hieratic style (a convoluted clarity, his dry wit informed by gentle self-mocking pedantry) but sometimes seems to miss the heart of the matter. For example, “Hombre de la esquina rosada,” the title of the tale Borges called his “first outright short story,” is translated literally by Hurley as “Man on Rose Corner.”
This requires a long explanatory footnote describing the slums in turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires, with their corner bars where Borges’ beloved low-life knife-fighters hung out looking for trouble. As originally translated by di Giovani/Borges, the title was rendered simply as “Streetcorner Man,” at once succinct, hard-boiled, noir — capturing the essence of the tough compadrito.
Hurley eloquently justifies his linguistic decisions, citing 17 previous translators of Borges and referring to the master’s own dictum that “every translation is a ‘version’ . . . one in a never-ending series.” Each new version, per Hurley, is not a conquering correction of its predecessors but a “new voice given the old work, by the new life in a new land that the translation confers on it.”
It might also be well to consider what Borges and di Giovani had to say concerning their own collaboration: “We have tried to make these stories read as though they had been written in English. . . . (English and Spanish) are two quite different ways of looking at the world, each with a nature of its own. . . . We have therefore shunned the dictionary as much as possible and have done our best to rethink every sentence in English words.”
Alas, not even Borges himself had access to all of his work. Publishing rights denied him the chance to rethink the stories in “Ficciones,” and several from “The Aleph” as well.
Comparing these first early translations (by Anthony Kerrigan and others) with Hurley’s versions yields subtle differences in nuance, with neither risking the leaps Borges urged his own translator to take. Nevertheless, Hurley, with footnotes flying, jars the haunting “Funes the Memorious” (the tale of a crippled young man whose recollections encompass all the known universe) into “Funes, His Memory,” perhaps the most discordant note in this fastidious translation.
Literary nitpicking is at its harshest when tiny flaws prevent the reader from appreciating overall accomplishment. Hurley deserves our enthusiastic praise for this monumental piece of work, which introduces Borges’ final collection, “Shakespeare’s Memory,” into English for the first time. Among its four tales, “The Rose of Paracelsus” becomes an instant favorite, added to a long list of rediscovered landmarks on a wondrous safari back through Borges country.
Borges adroitly comments on his work in small introductions and afterwords here. These notes guide the reader from the author’s earlier inventions — those labyrinthine puzzles masked as literary essays — to the late stories in “The Book of Sand” and “Brodie’s Report,” the latter “a set of modest experiments in straightforward storytelling” that the di Giovani/Borges translation called “Dr. Brodie’s Report.” “The Book of Sand,” in particular, owes an acknowledged debt to Kipling’s early tales, yet unmistakably resonates from the dream-laden imagination of Borges.
By reading many of the fictions in dual translations, mismatched twins, so alike yet utterly different, one feels akin to a character caught in a shadowy Borgesian fantasy, a man between mirrors, a figure lost in an M.C. Escher print forever treadmilling on a Mobius staircase.