Collected Fictions - Review

Jorge Luis Borges Translated by Andrew Hurley Viking, $40, 565 pp.

Gene H. Bell-Villada

From the midsixties through the early eighties, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges - the man and his thoughts both - seemed well-nigh ubiquitous. There were the appearances on TV, the standing-room-only lectures at college campuses, the bylines in the weeklies, even an interview in Commonweal (October 25, 1968). A shy, reclusive man, renowned for his complex, difficult art, Borges somehow burgeoned forth as everyone's favorite foreign author, the international man of letters for that era.

Following his death in Geneva in 1986, Borges's best works have settled into the rarefied ranks of the world's classics, while his most striking ideas have remained reliable currency, a part of our fin-de-siecle literary exchange. Fantastical realms invading ours; an effete French poet setting out to write Don Quixote; a cosmic library that houses every possible volume; a point in space containing all other points - these a re some of the wilder notions that have made the term "Borgesian" almost as recognizable in its implications as a re the familiar adjectives "Orwellian" or "Kafkaesque."

Ironically, by the time the elder Borges's face and voice had become ordinary fixtures within the broader cultural milieu, the artist's greatest work was well behind him. Those three-dozen short stories, penned between 1938 and the mid-fifties, started drawing admiration from overseas literati in the postwar years, and got a major boost in 1961 when Borges shared with Samuel Beckett the International Publishers' Prize. By then the sixtyish Argentinean was almost completely blind, and could write only via a hired amanuensis.

He also felt dried up as a fiction writer; the ideas just weren't coming like they used to. Enter his translator and secretary from 1967, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, who piqued Borges's muse and urged him to write stories once again. The results, alas, were disappointing. The pieces gathered in Brodie's Report (1970) and The Book of Sand (1975) were but a dim reflection of the grand, luminous visions that had shined forth in Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949). The once-fresh intuitions had hardened into sententious tics, the cosmic insights narrowed into formulaic mannerisms. Intrinsically, Borges's later texts weren't all that bad; from a lesser writer, they'd be deemed worthy, "promising." But they are ever in the shadow of the playfully brooding, quietly dazzling, thoroughly inspired works of the genius at mid-century. They're like Shakespeare's Cymbeline or Faulkner's The Town; the Bard and the Mississippian, we know, did better than that.

Englishings of Borges are a history unto themselves. In 1962, two American volumes of his prose chanced to come out from avant-garde houses: the Ficciones (Grove, edited by Anthony Kerrigan) and an anthology, Labyrinths (New Directions, edited by James Irby and Donald Yates). The latter collection in particular achieved standard-item status, with sales somewhere in the six figures. Later, in the 1970s, di Giovanni did his own renderings of select works for E. P. Dutton, in which the Argentine's high style was "Americanized" somewhat, and both author and translator revised a bit here, deleted a tad there. Meanwhile, Anglophone readers have lacked a single, authoritative translation of all the stories, from apprenticeship to final statements.

Now comes the Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley, a professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico. An expert hand, Hurley has previously rendered a half-dozen Hispanic authors, some of them forbiddingly colloquial in style and hence a challenge to the most seasoned translator. The Borges project, a labor of love, has been years in the making. The results are almost consistently first-rate, with supple rhythms that roll trippingly on the tongue, and a liberal use of contractions, even in descriptive passages. Fashioning a uniformly smooth voice for all 110 pieces, Hurley distills them into a "universal" kind of English, largely unspecific to any time or place and thus not subject to fast fading. (Still, he isn't averse to translating the obscenity pendejo - in "Man on Pink Corner" - as "asshole," an improvement over di Giovanni's "kid.")

Some choices for titles exemplify his skill. For the early collection, Historia universal de la infamia, the concluding word is changed to "iniquity," which scans better, almost rhymes. The unforgettable classic story, "Funes el memorioso," often previously rendered as "Funes the Memorious," now achieves extra clarity as "Funes, His Memory." For "La intrusa," concerning a love-triangle, "The Interloper" seems more layered and evocative than di Giovanni's "The Intruder." Similarly, the succinctness of "The Wait" (for "La espera") has a visual impact, absent from "The Waiting" in Labyrinths.

At times Hurley's search for natural rhythms leads to a loss, at least for those of us who know earlier versions. Take the ending of "Emma Zunz," which Yates in Labyrinths renders thus: "True was Emma Zunz's tone, true was her shame, true her hate. True also was the outrage she had suffered. Only the circumstances were false.... "Hurley, by contrast, remakes it, "Emma Zunz's tone was real, her shame was real, her hatred was real. The outrage that had been done to her was real. All that was false were the circumstances.... "While Hurley's prose sounds more idiomatic, like everyday speech, Yates's, with its inversions that mirror the original yet also strike us with their strangeness, seems appropriate to the odd mental conceit being argued here.

Every reviewer has quibbles; I shall air mine. "Imbecilic" (page 505) sounds stilted; I would say "idiotic." In English we don't "consecrate" (page 381) but rather "dedicate" an essay to a topic. "Notorious" (page 143) is a false cognate for notorio, which actually signifies "well-known" or "obvious." One jarring adaptation is Hurley's use of "working class" (page 302), a sociopolitical construct about which Borges was simply clueless; "slum dwellers" better captures the spirit of the original. (On the other hand I liked Hurley's coining the term "trivia police," page 347.)

Such lapses are few; the Collected Fictions stands as a noble, indeed monumental endeavor. In addition, Hurley includes forty pages of detailed endnotes that elucidate obscure references, particularly those regarding matters South American. Still, I doubt that this volume will supplant earlier efforts, notably Labyrinths, which gathers both fiction and essays, is selective and manageable, and exists as a publishing event in its own right. But Hurley's Borges - like Robert Fitzgerald's Greeks, or those Penguin Russians many of us were nourished on - is here to stay.

Gene H. Bell-Villada, chair of Romance Languages at Williams College, recently published The Pianist Who Liked Ayn Rand: A Novella & 13 Stories (Amador). A second, updated edition of his Borges and His Fiction will appear next summer.

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