( Note: This is an article I wrote in 2009 to mark the 110th birth Anniversary of Borges. Therefore, some of the stories I cite here may not belong to this collection. I thought to post it here as this book is the most cited. If you plan to buy a book of Borges, buy this one or Labyrinth and other stories as both contain the same set of stories and translators. His best translators are Norman Thomas di Giovanni and Anthony Kerrigan . Stay away from the translator Andrew Hurley)THE BINOCULARS OF BORGES "Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges."No Latin American writer of twentieth century has achieved such iconic status as the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges (Pronounced as Bor-Hess. 1899-1986). During his life, Borges wore many hats. He was, variously, a poet, an essayist, a short-story writer, a librarian, and, for a short time, a poultry inspector. As a hauntingly original essayist and short story writer, his three or four dozen short stories and essays is mentioned in the same breath with the tomes of Thomas Mann or James Joyce. This blind octogenarian (His was a particular kind of blindness, grown on him gradually since the age of 30 and settled in for good after his 58th birthday) became a legend in his own time so much so that ‘Borgesian’, eventually became a common neologism like the adjectives “Orwellian” or “Kafkaesque” .In his life, Borges was an extremely shy person and possessed an exceptional modesty that makes him endearing. Though a supreme writer, he always underrated his writings as an escape from the boredom of a blind man. I can vouch his humility from reading the countless interviews that appears in the book , “Conversations with Borges”. His face lights up when anyone praises his work; yet he habitually conveys the deep stillness of a man with few illusions about himself or the world. He also conveys sweetness and wisdom, those refinements of perception that sometimes accompany old age. "Beside real short story writers," he says, "my stories hardly exist." Perhaps no writer of modern times was as bookish and multilingual as Borges. His aristocratic upbringing, cosmopolitan outlook and exposure to different cultures gave him a universal mind. As a precursor of the "Magical Realists", he ingeniously mixed philosophy, fact, fantasy and mystery in his stories. They are written in dense and challenging prose. Unlikely images and situations are woven into a richly complex tapestry that arouses questions of identity and the self, of reality and the possibility for dreams.Intellectual Labyrinths , time, space, infinity, memory, mirrors (Borges delights in the multiplicity of things; he is fascinated with mirrors because they multiply) and libraries are some of the principal themes in his works. Borges' stories take place in a world that is half commonplace, half fantastic. Dreams occur within dreams; time loses its significance. What counts is momentary impulse and observation.Economy, grace, humor and precise sounding historical and referential details and ingenious plots are hall marks of his style. The great Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa in his “Letters to a young Novelist” lauds Borges as the greatest prose stylist in Spanish language. He says: “Borges’s style is unmistakable and functions extraordinarily well, giving life and credibility to a world of sophisticated intellectual and abstract ideas and curiosities. In this world, philosophical systems, theological disquisitions, myths and literary symbols, reflection and speculation, and universal history are the raw material of invention. Borges’s style adapts itself to its subject matter and merges with it in a powerful alloy, and the reader feels from the first sentences of his stories and of many of his essays that these works have the inventive and sovereign quality of true fictions, that they could have been told in this way, in this intelligent, ironic, and mathematically precise language-not a word too few, not a word too many-with its cold elegance and aristocratic defiance, privileging intellect and knowledge over sensation and emotion, playing with erudition, making a technique of presumption, eluding all sentimentality, and ignoring the body and sensuality”. Vargas Llosa says that Spanish was suddenly "purified," "intellectualized" by the inimitable prose style of Borges.Among his stories, my personal favorites are, “The Aleph”, “Garden of Forking Paths”, “Death and the Compass”, “Pierre Menard”, “The secret Miracle” and “The Circular Ruins”. Let us dwell on the themes in some of them . In his story “Funes the Memorious”, a gaucho is confined to bed for the rest of his life after being thrown by a horse. He hardly cares. The fall has miraculously sharpened his perception so that his memories are boundless: "He knew by heart the forms of the Southern clouds on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising." Borges contrasts this world of heightened perceptions due to total memory with the real world of clumsy generalizations. Another famous story titled “The Aleph” tells about a point in space that contains all other points. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping or confusion . The story explores his fascination with infinity. And in an imaginative murder mystery called ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, considered as one of his best, time is envisioned as a complex network of planes on which spatial events may occur independently of one another—unless, of course, the planes happen to intersect accidentally. Burges’ fictional universe was born from his vast and esoteric readings in literature, philosophy, and theology. He sees man's search for meaning in an infinite universe as a fruitless effort. In the universe of energy, mass, and speed of light, Borges considers the central riddle time, not space. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.In the story “Death and the Compass”, murders in the four corners of Paris are matched to the four Hebrew letters of the name of God. The killer in this story leaves clues indicating religious motives: a distortion of kabalistic tradition in which murders reveal the divine name, letter by letter. Seeing that the first three murders form an equilateral triangle on the map and took place at regular intervals, the detective Erik Lonnrot pinpoints the time and place of the final murder, only to discover he has been set up for a trap: A common outlaw has lured Lonnrot there to murder him. The detective knows this but he is so fascinated by the pattern that he goes anyway, thus solving the mystery of his own murder.One of Borges’s most famous stories ,‘The Circular Ruins’, unfolds a pitch-perfect fable of riddling existence in the twentieth century . A wizard retreats from the world to a location that possesses strong mystical powers: the circular ruins. There, the wizard tries to create another human being from his own dreams. Sleeping and dreaming longer and longer each day, the magician dreams of his young man becoming educated, and wiser. After time, though, the wizard can no longer find sleep, and he deems his first attempt an inevitable failure. After many sleepless nights, the wizard dreams of a heart; vaguely at first, but more and more clearly each night. Years pass and the wizard creates the boy piece by piece, in agonizing detail. The wizard calls upon the god Fire to bring his creation to life. Fire agrees, as long as the wizard accustoms his creation to the real world, and that only Fire and the wizard will be able to tell the creation from a real human. His creation is sent to a distant temple of the god Fire, and becomes famous as, because it is not real, it can walk through fire unharmed. The wizard hears of this, but at length he awakes to find the ruins ablaze. As he ultimately walks into the flaming house of Fire, the wizards notices that his skin does not burn. "With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understands that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.”The color and grace of his stories lies in his use of marvelous adjectives . For example, look at the line , “No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night” which is the opening line in the story ,“The Circular Ruins”. What an odd adjective, “unanimous”. It is so odd, in fact, that one is sorely tempted to put something like “all-encompassing”, so as to make it “comprehensible” to the reader. Similarly many such weird adjectives and adverbs , violent and unexpected metaphors such as "the readers at their studious lamps", “nebulous grey beard”, “concave hands”, “immortal monkey”, “Clouds of smoke which rusted the metal of the nights” are sprinkled in his fiction and poetry . Disparate imageries and clinical contextual details in describing a place sometimes create a surreal landscape reminiscent of a Dali. The overall effect of his language is simply magical.The unemphatic style of Borges often achieves effects with a single exploding word or phrase, dropped almost as though off-handedly into a quiet sentence: "He examined his wounds and saw, without astonishment, that they had healed." This laconic detail "without astonishment", coming at the very beginning of "The Circular Ruins", will probably only at the end of the story be recalled by the reader, who will, retrospectively, see that it changes everything in the story; it is quintessential Borges. Borges' writing has often been called intellectual, and indeed it is dense with allusion. But it is also simple: the sentences are almost invariably classical in their symmetry, in their balance. To conclude, Borges was a world-class artist-a brilliant, lyrical miniaturist, an uncomplicated genius who could pose the great questions of existence on the head of a pin. Reading him might alter the way you look at everything, including yourself. The perfection of his language, the extent of his knowledge, the universalism of his electrifying ideas, the originality and inventiveness of his fiction, and the beauty of his poetry still continue to enchant the literary minds all over the world.
I owe the discovery of El Matrero to Harper Lee. Five years ago I was spending the evening with my friend Renaldo Compostella, and, as was often the way, literature was our main topic of conversation. Renaldo, who always, or certainly more than I, kept an eye on forthcoming releases and bookish news, happened to mention the scheduled publication of a new novel by Harper Lee, the American authoress famous for To Kill a Mockingbird. The ensuing discussion was notable not for what we had to say about Lee and her work, but because it led Compostella to bemoaning the lack of specific details concerning the publication of the recently unearthed novel by Jorge Luis Borges. My friend, in so casually dropping this information into the conversation, must have thought that I was aware of such a discovery, but of course I was not. Borges wrote a large number of intelligent, speculative, metaphysical short stories, but he did not, to my knowledge, ever write a novel. Compostella expressed surprise at my ignorance and asked me if I had ever read Ficciones, a small [roughly 140 pp] volume of the Argentine’s stories, comprising two collections, The Garden of the Forking Paths and Artifices, in which, he said, the novel was first referenced. I replied that naturally I had read it, but that I did not recall any mention of a novel, either within the text itself or within John Sturrock’s introduction. My friend laughed and said that I must have skipped the footnotes. I assured him that I had not skipped anything, and, as I had a hardcover Everyman’s Library edition [Alfred A. Knoff, 1993] in my apartment, I took it down from the bookshelf and handed it to him, with the instruction that he find me the relevant page.Compostella opened the slim volume and, as it often the case when you pass someone a book, flicked through it, seemingly distracted from the matter at hand. Indeed, he was keen to talk about the story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which he called a particular favourite. Compostella’s opinion was that it was about ‘Godlessness and playing God,’ which, despite my desire that he find the footnote in relation to Borges’ novel, piqued my interest. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius involves Borges’ search for, or investigation into, a number of books that outline every aspect of an imaginary planet or civilisation, including their language, customs, psychology, and so on. It seems to me that the story is about many things, about language and how it directs thought or the way that one approaches your world, about the possibilities of human imagination, about mirrors and how different cultures are a distorted reflection of your own. Compostella conceded all of these ideas, but pointed out that prior to the invention of Tlön the only person responsible for the creation of a planet or civilisation was God; that if human beings start to create planets etc then God is unnecessary, because he becomes just another man. I was of course very interested in all of this, but, being aware that it was getting late, I had to draw my friend’s attention back to Borges’ novel. Compostella again flicked through Ficciones and came to a stop somewhere in the centre, in the middle of the story The Library of Babel. He turned one particular page, page 63, over and back numerous times. It is not here, he told me, by which he meant the footnote that he had seen, which, he assured me, was present in his own first edition copy of Ficciones, but was evidently absent from mine. At this point I considered it a fine joke at my expense, and bundled my friend out of the door.However, about an hour later my telephone started to ring. It was Renaldo Compostella. He told me that he had just arrived home, that he had dug out his copy of Ficciones, and had indeed found the footnote. Your copy, he said, must be subject to a printing error, or perhaps, as a later edition, the footnote had been expunged for reasons we can only guess at. I asked him to read me the footnote, which, it turned out, was very short: ‘Very soon I hope to complete and publish my own novel.’ Although this information, this promise or tease, was certainly interesting, my excitement was tempered by the lack of concrete information. I reminded Compostella that Borges was a writer who consistently imagined unwritten books, often even outlining their plot, like in the story The Approach of Al-Mu’tasim. I also pointed out that part of his appeal is that he did not draw clear lines between fact and fiction, that one was never sure in his stories what was true and what was not, because nearly everything he wrote appeared plausible. Moreover, Borges, so often described as an impersonal author, was actually the most personal, in that he almost always used himself and details about his own life as part of his fiction. So, it did not seem too much of a stretch to suppose that the novel he refers to is itself a fiction, an imaginary novel, and that the suggestion of its existence was part of a [not out-of-character] labyrinthian game he was playing. However, my friend replied that for years he had thought this too, but reminded me that it had recently been announced that the novel had been unearthed, and it was currently being readied for publication through Penguin in the UK and US. Well, this changed everything, of course. I asked him how I could find out more, and he said that if I googled Borges and El Matrero I was bound to turn up numerous articles, as the discovery was a big deal in literary circles. At this, I thanked Compostella and hung up the phone and switched on my computer.After googling the recommended terms I was introduced to various articles, including pieces in the Guardian, The Independent, Le Monde and El País. However, according to the articles that were returned by my search El Matrero was not written by Jorge Luis Borges, but by Pierre Menard, a previously unpublished protégé of the Argentine’s. At first glance, this suggested that my friend had jumped the gun, and was not perhaps in full possession of the facts, yet, being a fan of Borges’ work, and having read all of his collections numerous times, I was aware that the name Pierre Menard actually features in Ficciones as the author of Don Quixote. The story, called, in Spanish, Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, appears to be about a fictional French writer, who re-writes Don Quixote word-for-word. The central idea being that this newer version, Menard’s, is richer than the original because it can be viewed in terms of more recent world events, by which we mean more recent than 1602, of course.In light of these articles, I was forced to ask myself, did Pierre Menard actually exist? Certainly, while one would assume that he did not, as Borges claimed, re-write Don Quixote, this naturally does not mean that, if he did exist, for surely he is dead now, he did not write the recently unearthed El Matrero. And yet if he did write the novel, why exactly is this a cause for excitement? It is worth noting that the story in Ficciones featuring Pierre Menard is, at least partly, concerned with authorship and plagiarism, is about who, if anyone, owns a work. So one might wonder, as indeed does Caroline Hurst in the Guardian, whether Pierre Menard is simply a pseudonym for Borges himself, that Borges wrote the novel as Menard, as one of his own fictional authors. Yet other commentators reject this idea, claiming, perhaps rightly, that as the footnote does not specify a title, or suggest a plot or theme, the novel referred to in Ficciones is not El Matrero.Even after a more extensive internet search I could not turn up any information relating to a writer called Pierre Menard, except in reference to the Borges’ story that has already been discussed. Therefore, I decided to reread The Library of Babel, which, as already noted, Renaldo Compostella claimed contained the footnote that first makes mention of a novel by Jorge Luis Borges. The Library of Babel, or La biblioteca de Babel, imagines the universe as a vast library, which houses every possible book, featuring every possible permutation of letters, and which, as a result, will contain many volumes of pure gibberish but also every possible piece of information, including that relating to the future and to your own life. If Compostella was to be believed, it would indeed make sense that it is here that Borges would mention the novel that he had apparently been working on, as it would, naturally, also exist within the library of Babel. However, the veracity of the information contained within the footnote now seemed even more doubtful. In the footnote, as passed on to me by Compostella, Borges mentions a novel that he hopes to complete and publish, but ‘hopes to complete’ only suggests that he has started it, when in fact he may not have put even one word down on paper. I may hope to complete a marathon, without ever taking part in the race. Furthermore, the library would of course still contain a copy of his novel, regardless of whether he had started it or not, because it contains copies of all books, past present and future.Weary of mentally going round in circles without any real progress I put the matter out of mind, and vowed to wait for the publication of Pierre Menard’s novel, El Matrero, hoping that this would make everything clear.*Postscript. Some months after the night described above, the novel El Matrero by Pierre Menard was published to rapturous acclaim, being voted the book of the year in many publications, newspapers, magazines. This critical praise was so intense that the public caught on, and Menard’s book was the year’s biggest seller. Indeed, Menard’s reputation became such that it was almost universally agreed that it was he, and not Borges, who had written Ficciones, The Aleph and so on, because only someone as talented as Menard could possibly have written those stories. Jorge Luis Borges, ran popular opinion, was merely a pseudonym for, a creation of, Pierre Menard, whose life has become the subject of endless speculation.
What do You think about Ficciones (1994)?
Reading Borges is always a challenge. When you read his stories, it seems you are reading everyone else's. There is a lot of references in his work, and if you want to truly (kind of) understand it (or begin to), you have to do a little research. He ends up being an invaluable teacher. Labyrinths, mirrors, libraries, dreams, fantasy, religion, philosophy, epistemology. My love for philosophical literature began with this author. My all-time favorite story is “Las Ruinas Circulares”; the power of thoughts. “Con alivio, con humillación, con terror, comprendió que él también era una apariencia, que otro estaba soñándolo.” What a beautiful line to end a story. (I prefer quoting Borges in his own language, my language. I do the same with English-speaking writers. Being able to read JLB in Spanish is a privilege.)"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is another jewel with a line I never forgot:…los espejos y la cópula son abominables, porque multiplican el número de los hombres.I also liked “La lotería de Babilonia”, “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”, “Funes el memorioso”, “La biblioteca de Babel” (brilliant). And... I should stop here. I loved every piece of amazing and confusing literature this guy wrote. So, this is a useless, too subjective review because I absolutely love Borges' writing. Despite the fact he makes me feel plain stupid, most of the times.JLB and his blindness, nice oxymoron. He saw things beyond the ordinary human eye. He created universes, troubled authors, fake books, never-ending labyrinths and a unique way of writing about all that and more.He is one of those great writers that makes you feel like everything has already been written.May 05, 14* Also on my blog.
—Florencia Brino
Even as a child, the Argentinian master storyteller Jorge Luis Borges lived among books and various languages -- myths, legends and literature from many civilizations and cultures: Spanish, Chinese, Persian, Nordic, to name just a few. His greatest childhood memory was his father's library; he was reading Shakespeare in English before the age of twelve; by the time he was an adult, Borges turned his mind into one vast library.Borges did not write long, involved novels like David Copperfield, The Brothers Karamazov, Sister Carrie or Ada. Not even close. Not even a novella. Why is this? One reviewer comments that Borges was something of a dandy and a pure aesthete, a writer who saw brevity as a virtue and associated length with ennui. Also, brevity lends itself to a fleeting, dream-like quality the author was seeking. Perhaps this is accurate or perhaps not so accurate, but, in any case, it is certainly our good fortune Borges wrote the way he did.Borges wrote poetry, essays and tales, some tales as short as a paragraph, others several dozen pages, and still others, most of his tales in fact, five to twelve pages. With one longer exception, the seventeen tales in the collection are in this five to twelve page range and all have a baroque quality, that is, they are written in a rich, lush language and refer to many ancient, archaic, esoteric and classical sources. To give a reader new to Borges a taste of these tales, I will focus on two: The Circular Ruins and The Babylon Lottery.The Circular RuinsA wizard paddles his canoe downstream to a temple in ruins. We read, “The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though supernatural. He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality.” What kind of effort will this wizard have to exert to accomplish his task? Borges writes, “He understood that modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed was the most difficult task that a man could undertake, even though he should penetrate all the enigmas of a superior and inferior order; much more difficult than weaving a rope out of sand or coining the faceless wind.” The narrator makes reference to Gnostic cosmogonies and the creation done by demiurges as the wizard reflects on his task; there is also a deep concern and dread in the mind of the wizard, when we read, “He feared lest his son should meditate on this abnormal privilege and be some means find out he was a mere simulacrum. Not to be a man, to be a projection of another man’s dreams – what an incomparable humiliation, what madness!” Turns out, as events and realities unfold, the wizard comes to understand more completely what it really means to be humiliated and to be part of a dream.The Babylon LotteryThe first person narrator of this tale is himself a man of the city of Babylon and shares his reflections on power, chance, gaming, logic, symmetry, labyrinths, time, zero and infinity as well as his being, in turn, a proconsul and a slave and his having severed the jugular of sacred bulls and, at another point in his life, having been declared invisible. He goes on to tell us how he was able to live such a life: “I owe this almost atrocious variety to an institution which other republics know nothing about, or which operates among them imperfectly and in secret: the lottery.” Deep into his musing, he recalls a discussion where it was said, “ . . . if the lottery is an intensification of chance, a periodic infusion of chaos into the cosmos, would it not be desirable for chance to intervene at all stages of the lottery and not merely in the drawing?” How did the narrator arrive at this statement and what does a specific philosophy of chance imply for the city’s famous game? Rather than answering these questions, permit me to note how the narrator offers possible alternatives at the end of the tale regarding how one can view the company responsible for the lottery; and how one can view the lottery itself; and, yet again, how one can view the city of Babylon. We can easily imagine Borges lingering on these questions and possibilities long after he finished writing his tale.
—Glenn Russell
Reading Ficciones takes time. It is Jorge Luis Borges' most well-known collection of short stories, and it is full of dense, imaginative pieces that are full of lots of stuff, and to get out of them what he has put into them, readers need to commit to reading slowly and carefully.There are two interrelated elements, I think, that make reading Borges so challenging: the fantastic vision (read: like a fantasy), and the prose.The Fantasy: Many pieces in Ficciones take place in imaginary lands or impossible buildings. Some are rooted in realities in which humans have total and perfect memory or in which libraries have infinite rooms that contain infinite volumes. The words and names are often unfamiliar. Metaphysical laws change. First and foremost, simply wrapping one's brain around these parameters of reality sometimes requires a mental leap or two.The Prose: To make these new realities plausible, Borges draws up detailed histories of his characters and settings, and he drops references to these fictitious backstories left and right. He refers to books written or infamous deeds done by characters as if they were part of our common history and knowledge. He expounds on relationships unknown to the reader. He refers to inventions or accomplishments that simply don't exist in our world. The combined effect of these two factors is to give the impression that the stories know much more than we do. It's like the stories are clouds, and we reach for them, and sometimes we grab wisps that we can feel and examine, but other times we merely pass through them empty-handed, aware that our hands just sifted through a great deal of matter, matter that had something to do with the universe... or dreams...? or parenthood...?When we succeed, fresh and thoughtful revelations are availed us. We are forced to rethink the nature of time, of the infinite, of nationalism, or more. When we fail, however, we find that we must go back and read and reread, for we're aware that we've gotten something out of the tale, but we're also sure that if we see the story again through a new lens or as a metaphor for something else, some asofyet frustratingly ungraspable greater meaning will open itself up to us.This makes for good reading, if you're up for it. You'll be confused and disappointed if you're not willing to work through it all, but with a clear head, a quiet room, and a willingness stop and think and reread, you'll be surprised by the range and reward of the stories.In one story, "The Secret Miracle", I think Borges identifies the existential conundrum presented by his work. The character in the story, a writer himself, ponders his own novel: "Hladik had never asked himself whether this tragicomedy of errors was preposterous or admirable, deliberate or casual. Such a plot, he intuited, was the most appropriate invention to conceal his defects and to manifest his strong points, and it embodied the possibility of redeeming (symbolically) the fundamental meaning of his life."There's a twist in there. We understand implicitly that Borges' work is deliberate--he tells us as much in "Death and the Compass"; in clever and creative ways, he re-examines our very nature. But at the same time, here Borges sneakily suggests that his tales may simply be casual inventions designed to conceal his own defects. We know better, of course. But this, I believe, is Borges' wit, and it reads to me a bit like a dare. Do I recommend it? Yes, to curious and patient puzzlers.Would I teach it? Yes, for creative writing students, to show use of detail or plot structures.Lasting impression: I enjoyed Borges' details and metaphysical musing. I will always think, however, that I need to re-read each story a dozen more times to really get it.
—Peter
