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Jorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century. Now for the first time in English, all of Borges' dazzling fictions are gathered into a single volume, brilliantly translated by Andrew Hurley. From his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges' talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and toying with language. Together these incomparable works comprise the perfect one-volume compendium for all those who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master's work for those who have yet to discover this singular genius.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
- Sales Rank: #17023 in Books
- Published on: 1999-09-01
- Released on: 1999-09-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.40" h x 1.51" w x 5.76" l, 1.34 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 576 pages
Amazon.com Review
Although Jorge Luis Borges published his first book in 1923--doling out his own money for a limited edition of Fervor de Buenos Aires--he remained in Argentinian obscurity for almost three decades. In 1951, however, Ficciones appeared in French, followed soon after by an English translation. This collection, which included the cream of the author's short fictions, made it clear that Borges was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist--a brilliant, lyrical miniaturist, who could pose the great questions of existence on the head of pin. And by 1961, when he shared the French Prix Formentor with Samuel Beckett, he seemed suddenly to tower over a half-dozen literary cultures, the very exemplar of modernism with a human face.
By the time of his death in 1986, Borges had been granted old master status by almost everybody (except, alas, the gentlemen of the Swedish Academy). Yet his work remained dispersed among a half-dozen different collections, some of them increasingly hard to find. Andrew Hurley has done readers a great service, then, by collecting all the stories in a single, meticulously translated volume. It's a pleasure to be reminded that Borges's style--poetic, dreamlike, and compounded of innumerable small surprises--was already in place by 1935, when he published A Universal History of Iniquity: "The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it." (Incidentally, the thrifty author later recycled the second of these aphorisms in his classic bit of bookish metaphysics, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Teris.") The glories of his middle period, of course, have hardly aged a day. "The Garden of the Forking Paths" remains the best deconstruction of the detective story ever written, even in the post-Auster era, and "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" puts the so-called death of the author in pointed, hilarious perspective.
But Hurley's omnibus also brings home exactly how consistent Borges remained in his concerns. As late as 1975, in "Avelino Arredondo," he was still asking (and occasionally even answering) the same riddles about time and its human repository, memory: "For the man in prison, or the blind man, time flows downstream as though down a slight decline. As he reached the midpoint of his reclusion, Arredondo more than once achieved that virtually timeless time. In the first patio there was a wellhead, and at the bottom, a cistern where a toad lived; it never occurred to Arredondo that it was the toad's time, bordering on eternity, that he sought." Throughout, Hurley's translation is crisp and assured (although this reader will always have a soft spot for "Funes, the Memorious" rather than "Funes, His Memory.") And thanks to his efforts, Borgesians will find no better--and no more pleasurable--rebuttal of the author's description of himself as "a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories." --James Marcus
From Publishers Weekly
Undeniably one of the most influential writers to emerge in this century from Latin America or anywhere else, Borges (1899-1986) is best known for his short stories, all of which appear here for the first time in one volume, translated and annotated by University of Puerto Rico professor Hurley. Many of the stories return to the same set of images and themes that mark Borges's best known work: the code of ethics embraced by gauchos, knifefighters and outlaws; labyrinths; confrontations with one's doppelganger; and discoveries of artifacts from other worlds (an encyclopedia of a mysterious region in Iraq; a strange disc that has only one side and that gives a king his power; a menacing book that infinitely multiplies its own pages; fragmentary manuscripts that narrate otherworldly accounts of lands of the immortals). Less familiar are episodes that narrate the violent, sordid careers of pirates and outlaws like Billy the Kid (particularly in the early collection A Universal History of Iniquity) or attempts to dramatize the consciousness of Shakespeare or Homer. Elusive, erudite, melancholic, Borges's fiction will intrigue the general reader as well as the scholar. This is the first in a series of three new translations (including the Collected Poems and Collected Nonfictions, all timed to coincide with the centennial of the author's birth), which will offer an alternative to the extensive but very controversial collaborations between Borges and Norman Thomas di Giovanni. First serial rights to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and Grand Street.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Borges, one of the giants of 20th-century world literature and a pioneer of Spanish American letters, is the master of the short tale he called ficcion. Not quite short stories, Borgesian narrations are metaphysical speculation, the elaborate working out of a hypothetical premise or philosophical concept. Published partly in commemoration of the centennial of his birth, this collection marks the first time that all his narratives, stretching over 50 years, have been compiled in one volume in English. Except for Shakespeare's Memory, which appears here in translation for the first time, the other seven books have appeared separately. The Reign of Labyrinths (1964), the staple anthology for years, will now more than likely be usurped by this more modern translation, which has useful notes about Argentine history and culture. What a thrill to find old favorites?"The Circular Ruins," "Pierre Menard," "The Library of Babel"?updated and boxed with lesser-known gems. An exciting publication event and an indispensable acquisition for all libraries; collected poetry and nonfiction are slated to follow next year.?Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
117 of 119 people found the following review helpful.
I now describe my pet turtle as monstrous
By Jonathan Tu
I have always been hesitant to read fiction originally written in any language except English. I'm fickle enough as it is without needing another person's biases and tendencies interfering with my own... and so it was with great trepidation that I bought Hurley's collection.
The stories in summation: marvelous. Hurley's work? I'll never be able to read these Borges stories again without Hurley's translation heavily influencing, and that is an endorsement. I suspect that for most people their first experience of Borges will always be their most memorable, and their preferred. I don't think there are many "On first reading Chapman's Homer" instances: that initial shock of strange and monstrous (perhaps my favorite Borgesian adjective) is evident through any kind of translation so long as it is basically competent. Whatever arguments others may have with Hurley's, they can at least admit that his is that.
But I feel there's more: a playful lilt to the language, one that isn't overly scholarly or mechanical. Hurley's introduction briefly talks about the particular style Borges would become famous for: a laconic, matter-of-fact myth disguised as mere sentences, with the employment of words normally alien to each other. Hurley serves this style well, and his presentation of the most memorable lines of each story were the ones that stayed with me even after readings of several different versions. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I sat down with four different versions of "The Library of Babel" and compared them sentence by sentence. I was living in a bookstore at the time, stuck on an island in the middle of the Aegean and co-habitating with an Englishman who held Irby's version as the superior. I listened politely, and compared, and found that even after ouzo and attempts at persuasion it was my original experience that resonated. Reading Irby's left in me a strange longing for Hurley's words. I remember this line in particular:
"They were urged on by the delirium of trying to reach the books in the Crimson Hexagon: books whose format is smaller than usual, all-powerful, illustrated and magical." (Irby)
"They were spurred on by the holy zeal to reach - someday, through unrelenting effort - the books of the Crimson Hexagon - books smaller than natural books, books omnipotent, illustrated, and magical." (Hurley)
It was that "someday, through unrelenting effort" which stuck with me, and its absence in Irby doomed the entire enterprise. Is this a lack of Irby's, or my own bias towards the translation I first read? I'm not sure, but in almost every way I preferred Hurley.
There seems to be a distinct wave of anti-Hurley sentiment, and it's of the "I read a review that said it, but I'll assume that opinion as my own" variety. I eventually found that the Irby-devoted Englishman hadn't even bothered to read the Hurley version. Don't make his mistake of dismissal-by-proxy: try it for yourself.
179 of 191 people found the following review helpful.
A trove of mythological stories defying space and time.
By Dr. Kasumu O. Salawu
Some earlier reviewers complained about the quality of the translation of this collection of stories by Andrew Hurley, especially when compared to the collaboration between Jorge Luis Borges, (JLB, as he liked to sign), and Norman Thomas di Giovanni in preparing Labyrinths. (I suggest you read all reviews in the order they were written.) As one reasonably familiar with JLB's oeuvre, (a word JLB disliked), I state unequivocally that paying six dollars more for four times the number of stories in Labyrinths is a great bargain. Beyond nickels and dimes, it is precisely because the works of JLB were erstwhile translated into English in bits and pieces that his recognition as a gifted writer took so long in coming. (Jean-Pierre Berne's two-volume French translation, Oeuvres completes, is highly recommended.)
American-born writer, editor, translator and collaborator, di Giovanni, was JLB's personal assistant in Buenos Aires from 1968 to 1972. I shall now illustrate specifically how his style of translation differed from that of Hurley with the story "The Gospel According to Saint Mark." In characterizing the Gutre family when they first met Espinosa, di Giovanni wrote "They were barely articulate," (in English, that is), while Hurley scribed "They rarely spoke." While the former sentence explains why "the Gutres, who knew so much about things in the country, did not know how to explain them," (page 398 in this book), the latter indicated an aloofness if not suspicion of Espinosa from their first meeting which addresses the irony of the ending. In depicting their eagerness to have St. Mark read to them after dinner, Hurley wrote "In the following days, the Gutres would wolf down the spitted beef and canned sardines in order to arrive sooner at the Gospel" while di Giovanni essayed "The Gutres took to bolting their barbecued meat and their sardines so as not to delay the Gospel." Where di Giovanni deciphered JLB's allusions to Herbert Spencer, W. H. Hudson and Charles I, Hurley explicated the origin of Baltasar Espinosa, the whereabouts of Ramos Mejia and the theme of the novel, Don Segundo Sombra. Take your pick.
Finally, JLB habitually changed texts from edition to edition, especially in his poetry. It is then problematic to determine the faithfulness of the translations. Rest assured that, though rhyme and rhythm are compromised in any translation, in Hurley's rendering, the brilliance and magic of each story is preserved down to, say, the symbolism of the goldfinch at the conclusion of the illustrative yarn, "The Gospel According to Saint Mark."
156 of 167 people found the following review helpful.
Bad translation
By lux
The critical applause the marketing department of this book's publisher dreamed up is one recent example of how money corrupts art. Penguin, often a reliable imprint, needs to be told that THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR PUBLISHING INFERIOR MATERIAL. This was the first Borges I read, and I loved it, until I encountered alternative translations in an anthology called 'Borges: A Reader'. I noticed that the most elegant and intense translations were by someone called Norman Thomas di Giovanni. I asked a number of my Spanish-speaking friends to compare the stories to the originals, and they unanimously agreed that the di Giovannis were more accurate as well. Later I heard that di Giovanni published a number of Borges' works in several books that are now out of print. I wondered why a superior translation would be superseded by a new, clunky one, and why this new clunky one would be hailed as the "definitive English version". I found out that it's because di Giovanni made his translations in collaboration with Borges himself, that they spent years getting it right, and that Borges wept with joy over the translations which he deemed in some cases better than the original. So they agreed to split the profits 50/50, an unprecedented thing for translator to make that percentage. When Borges died his Estate decided they'd make more cash if they got a new translation... and they hold the copyrights. Thus the true definitive versions are condemned to dust.
The best that can be said about Hurley's translation is that they're "capable" (see Harold Bloom's obviously paid-for quote on the back); well, you'd have to REALLY screw up to make Borges not amazing. In other words, read whatever you can because Borges is the absolute greatest: the most intellectual fantacist, the most romantic scifi artist, the most classical modernist and modern classicist... and let's not forget the inventor of postmodernism.
I should say that after reading all of Hurley's Borges and most of di Giovanni's (as well as versions by various other people here and there) there's nothing really *wrong* with Hurley; often he succeeds in being more "cool" (in a curt, bad*ss kind of way) than di Giovanni, though at the cost of Borges' Victorian intellectual tone (present in all the writings, lectures, and interviews he did in English, as well as the Di Giovanni versions); and instead of re-translating into English from Spanish the bits here and there that Borges translated from English (most often and lengthily occurring in 'A Universal History of Infamy') Hurley just prints the text of the original verbatim, which breaks down some of Borges' carefully crafted illusions but offers much more insight. Also, he is on occasion a little more literal than the Di Giovanni/Borges translations, and therefore perhaps more 'authentic' in some sense... but is it possible to be more true to Borges than Borges was? Changes from the original stories in the Di Giovanni versions must be viewed as the author's revised intentions rather than as inaccurate translation, because of how closely Borges worked with him.
Bottom line: In a perfect world, both (and even more) versions would be readily available. But in the present circumstances, where due to greedy money battles we must have one and only one, and all others must be locked in the vault and kept from the eyes of the people forever, why would we want the results of some guy's day job instead of the one Borges himself worked on?
WHY WOULD THEY KEEP THAT FROM US?
Don't support this blacklisting; seek out the di Giovanni versions and demand Penguin stop publishing inferior material.
In a final note, I would recommend 'Borges: A Reader' edited by Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid over any other Borges book in print as both the best place to start and an essential volume. It contains poems, lectures and essays, movie reviews, satires, and of course a great many of the stories printed here, from a variety of translators (including a few Hurleys and a whole lot of Di Giovannis). There is material here you can't find anywhere else, and as two Spanish speakers and Borges experts you can trust them to pick "the best translations" as they say. It is out of print but not hard to come by. Explore!
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