Collected Fictions

by Jorge Luis Borges

Book Overview

For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called "the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century" collected in a single volume

"An event, and cause for celebration."--The New York Times

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paper

For some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story--from his...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B002BXOA64
• ISBN13: 9780140286809
• Release Date: September 1999
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 576 Pages
• Weight: 1.47 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 5.8" x 8.4"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Borges is Phenomenal

Every single story Borges writes takes you to a world of wonder and metaphysical vertigo. highly recommend.

Sobering readings

After reading Borges Collected Fictins I have found it difficult to take most other authors seriously. Borge's prose is fluent and easily read. The stories are short, sometimes even short-short, which makes them suitable for reading before going to sleep. The stories have a basic structure with a beginning, middle, and end. So much for the easy part! There is the superficial text, of course, but within each story are metaphors and philosophical questions that stimulate my mind. Each story reads like a riddle - that's the closest simile I can think of. Borges is never obscure, even when the riddle is unsolvable it is very clear what he means. Borges himself does not claim too have any answers that are general. That makes his writings so very human. Life for Borges is just too rich and complex to recude it just too a series of problems and their solutions. Therefore, and this is possibly Borges's only firm stance, he is decisively against any form of dictatorship or mass-movement, since they destroy the identities, and importance, of the individual.

I now describe my pet turtle as monstrous

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.

A trove of mythological stories defying space and time.

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."

Master of Time: Borges and I

At the end of Shakespeare's Memory the character Hermann Sorgel unbinds the spell that has enslaved him within a labyrinth of memories, saying: "Simply the thing I am shall make me live."This enigmatic statement, haiku like in its density, suddenly awakens us to that mystery which is time - or, should we say presence?In one of his seminal essays The Wall and the Books Borges tells us: "Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, all want to tell us something, or have told us something we shouldn't have lost, or are about to tell us something; that imminence of a revelation as yet unproduced is perhaps, the aesthetic fact."Reading and rereading Borges over the past several years has sparked my awareness of this truth over and over. And with this new translation we are once again taken into the magic stream of a master...

An excellent first-ever compedium of all of Borges' work.

I discovered Jorge Luis Borges, not through some literature class, or from other post-modern writers. Instead I discovered his work through science fiction.His weird worlds often have, inadvertently, a science fiction flavor, and it is several of his stories that have appeared in science fiction story anthologies that I first learned about this most unusual writer. I was disappointed to see just how scattershot his work was, however, until the publication of this latest and complete translation. They are all here--the stories that introduced me to his work..."The Library of Babel" "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbius Teritus" and others. And many stories I had never heard of...or ever seen more than a mention of. It's a hefty volume, but if you like writers like Umberto Eco, or simply want doses of something other than our mundane banal reality, Borges' work, sadly and idiotically ignored for a Nobel prize, is worth a try. And this volume, the complete and definitive collection of his stories, is the one and only book you need purchase.