This is a collection of Borges's fiction, translated and gathered into a single volume. From his 1935 debut with "The Universal History of Iniquity", through the influential collections "Ficciones" and "The Aleph", to his final work from the 1980s, "Shakespeare Memory".
Industry Reviews
The Borges centenary got off to a start six months ago and reaches its climax in Buenos Aires later this year. Collected Fictions, an omnibus tome of 565 pages, is the Anglo-American contribution to an important celebration of literary genius. As by now everyone knows, Jorge Luis Borges was a consummate master of a new brand of witty short fiction that blurred the distinction between genres. Erudite, bookish, interested in such philosophical ideas as the nature of reality, time, and infinity, Borges was at the same time sly, playful, and richly comic. Some of this most famous tales are hoaxes that take the form of essays and book reviews. But what have we here? Is this collection a misguided hoax on unsuspecting readers? Apparently so, for the fabled prose - elegant, spare, economical - is nowhere to be found in these dismal, literal versions. 'I always thought I wrote better than that,' Borges confessed to me years ago, referring to translations of his stories that had appeared before he took a hand in translating them himself. The author of this translation, hopelessly cowed by Borges and unable to construct a decent English sentence, makes of the master a third-rate imitation of himself. Borges's succinct 'Witnesses approved by outbursts...' is rendered by long-winded Hurley - among the dozen transgressions per page - as 'Bystanders would applaud the way I got my frustrations off my chest...' All a bit of a cheat, for which Viking-Penguin of New York, the originators of this volume, should be taken to task. In the translator's notes, written in an English oddly superior to that of the translation itself, no mention is made of Anglophile Borges's cherished commitment of precious years to the versions of his tales and poems that he collaborated in. Borges, who largely modeled his style on English writers like Stevenson, Kipling, Wells, and Chesterton, changed the very nature of Spanish prose. Ideally, then, Borges should sound like a native English author. Instead, what the publishers blithely palm off on us in the present pages is a sample of the rampant illiteracy into which the English language has descended in certain American academic circles. Norman Thomas di Giovanni This collection has been published to celebrate the centenary of Borges' birth, but also (and incidentally), it marks the 50th anniversary of the first appearance of Borges in English translation. At least 17 translators have had a shot at translating Borges since then, but this is the first time that one translator has translated all of his fictions. Andrew Hurley's versions capture Borges' quiet, subtle, laconic tone superbly. 'Borgian' has become such a catch-all adjective for any kind of clever, convoluted tale that it's good to go back to the original stories and be reminded not only of the cleverness, but also of the wit, insight and compassion. In 'Funes, His Memory', he ponders the tragedy of a man able to remember everything that has ever happened to him or that he has ever seen or read or heard; in 'The House of Asterion' he retells the tale of the Theseus and the Minotaur from the minotaur's point of view, a perspective that only becomes clear at the end. When the narrator of 'The Zahir' becomes obsessed with a coin handed to him in his change one night, he learns that the coin is a 'zahir' - a thing which has the terrible power to be unforgettable, and whose image can eventually drive the obsessed person mad. He learns too that the zahir can take many forms, a slab of marble, for example, or a tiger. The narrator, unable to think of anything but his coin, says bitterly: 'How wasy not to think of a tiger!' In 'A Weary Man's Utopia', the narrator stumbles on a community where Doubt and the Art of Forgetting are school subjects and where printing, 'one of the worst evils of mankind', has been banned. There are recurrent themes, for example, obsession, the fragility of personal identity, detective stories, the violent Gaucho south of Argentina, the double-edged sword of memory and knowledge, but Borges, with his vast erudition and voracious imagination, always finds a fresh angle. As the narrator of 'The Zahir' discovers, and as these marvellous stories constantly remind us, 'there is nothing, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of causes and effects'. (Kirkus UK)
