Collected Fictions
Collected Fictions book cover

Collected Fictions

Paperback – Deckle Edge, September 1, 1999

by
Price
$20.99
Format
Paperback
Pages
565
Publisher
Penguin Books
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-0140286809
Dimensions
8.37 x 5.78 x 1.5 inches
Weight
1.34 pounds

Description

A New York Times Notable Book “A marvelous new collection of stories by one of the most remarkable writers of our century.” — The New York Times “The major work of probably the most influential Latin American writer of the century.” — The Washington Post Book World “An unparalleled treasury of marvels . . . Along with a tiny cohort of peers, and seers (Kafka and Joyce come to mind), Borges is more than a stunning storyteller and a brilliant stylist; he’s a mirror who reflects the spirit of his time.” — Chicago Tribune “An event worth of celebration . . . Hurley deserves our enthusiastic praise for this monumental piece of work.” — San Francisco Chronicle “Borges is the most important Spanish-language writer since Cervantes. . . . To have denied him the Nobel Prize is as bad as the case of Joyce, Proust, and Kafka.” —Mario Vargas Llosa “When I read a good book, I sometimes like to think I might be capable of writing something similar, but never, in my wildest dreams, could I write anything that approaches the level of cleverness and intellect and madness of Borges. I don’t think anyone could.” —Daniel Radcliffe Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1989 and was educated in Europe. One of the most widely acclaimed writers of our time, he published many collections of poems, essays, and short stories before his death in Geneva in June 1986. In 1961 Borges shared the International Publisher’s prize with Samuel Beckett. The Ingram Merrill Foundation granted him its Annual Literary Award in 1966 for his “outstanding contribution to literature.” In 1971 Columbia University awarded him the first of many degrees of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa (eventually the list included both Oxford and Cambridge), that he was to receive from the English-speaking world. In 1971 he also received the fifth biennial Jerusalem Prize and in 1973 was given one of Mexico’s most prestigious cultural awards, the Alfonso Reyes Prize. In 1980 he shared with Gerardo Diego the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish world’s highest literary accolade. Borges was Director of the Argentine National Library from 1955 until 1973. Andrew Hurley (editor/translator) is a translator of numerous works of literature, criticism, history, and memoir. He is professor emeritus at the University of Puerto Rico. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Contents A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INIQUITY (1935) Preface to the First Edition Preface to the 1954 Edition The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro The Widow Ching—Pirate Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan The Uncivil Teacher of Court Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv Man on Pink Corner Et cetera Index of Sources FICTIONS (1944) THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS (1941) xa0 Foreword Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote The Circular Ruins The Lottery in Babylon A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain The Library of Babel The Garden of Forking Paths ARTIFICES (1944) xa0 Foreword Funes, His Memory The Shape of the Sword The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero Death and the Compass The Secret Miracle Three Versions of Judas The End The Cult of the Phoenix The South THE ALEPH (1949) The Immortal The Dead Man The Theologians Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829–1874) Emma Zunz The House of Asterion The Other Death Deutsches Requiem Averroës’ Search The Zahir The Writing of the God Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths The Wait The Man on the Threshold The Aleph Afterword THE MAKER (1960) Foreword: For Leopoldo Lugones The Maker Dreamtigers A Dialog About a Dialog Toenails Covered Mirrors Argumentum Ornithologicum The Captive The Mountebank Delia Elena San Marco A Dialog Between Dead Men The Plot A Problem The Yellow Rose The Witness Martin Fierro Mutations Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote Paradiso , XXXI, 108 Parable of the Palace Everything and Nothing Ragnarök Inferno , I, 32 Borges and I MUSEUM On Exactitude in Science In Memoriam, J.F.K. Afterword IN PRAISE OF DARKNESS (1969) Foreword The Ethnographer Pedro Salvadores Legend A Prayer His End and His Beginning BRODIE'S REPORT (1970) Foreword The Interloper Unworthy The Story from Rosendo Juarez The Encounter Juan Murafta The Elderly Lady The Duel The Other Duel Guayaquil The Gospel According to Mark Brodie’s Report THE BOOK OF SAND (1975) The Other Ulrikke The Congress There Are More Things The Sect of the Thirty The Night of the Gifts The Mirror and the Mask “Undr” A Weary Man's Utopia The Bribe Avelino Arredondo The Disk The Book of Sand Afterword SHAKESPEARE’S MEMORY (1983) August 25, 1983 Blue Tigers The Rose of Paracelsus Shakespeare’s Memory A Note on the Translation Acknowledgments Notes to the Fictions Read more

Features & Highlights

  • 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 volumeA Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition
  • From Jorge Luis Borges’s 1935 debut with
  • The Universal History of Iniquity
  • , through his immensely influential collections
  • Ficciones
  • and
  • The Aleph
  • , these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display his 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.

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
60%
(563)
★★★★
25%
(235)
★★★
15%
(141)
★★
7%
(66)
★
-7%
(-66)

Most Helpful Reviews

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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."
178 people found this helpful
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Bad translation

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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How literature and philosophy can be saved by parables

This is something very hard to find, almost by definition: a literary writer who thinks in abstract terms (the only other such author I've read is Stanislaw Lem). These are philosophical thought experiments in their purest form, yet somehow magically delivered in a playful literary athmosphere. Borges is a mathematical philosopher, first and last. Ignore the "Latin American" categorization and the nonsense about his background and personal life: one should resist embedding him in a socio-cultural framework; he is as universal as they come. It is good to read a short story once in a while to see how literature and philosophy can be saved by the parable.
92 people found this helpful
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Excellent Book, Grating Translation

I will admit that my Spanish is not amazing, but I understand enough to get a sense of Borges' work, and I have read enough translations to be able to speak with a certain degree of confidence. And I have to ask, who let Andrew Hurley near this book, and were they appropriately disciplined?

His English is flat and completely without style, very much the work of an academic. As Eric Ormby wrote in The New Criterion, "he appears not to have a good sense of English prose style, or to command such a style himself." Alberto Manguel hammered the nail in Hurley's coffin when, for the Observer, he wrote: "English-language readers have either to resign themselves to the old, barely serviceable translations, or submit to the new, barely serviceable translations by Andrew Hurley, Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico. Hurley has no ear for the rhythms of Borges's language." I could not agree more. Hurley's translation was minimalist where Borges was baroque, stiff where Borges was supple, and obvious where Borges was sly.

Hurley's endnotes were also obsessive to the point where I began to wonder if he was going to annotate every concept that might be above the reading level of a five year old. This felt more like a kind of intellectual arrogance rather than scrupulousness. And the change of the title "Funes the Memorious", quite possibly the most compelling and apt translation of a title in all of short fiction, to the clunky and obscene "Funes, His Memory" is frankly nothing less than a sin against literature.

I have given this book three stars because it is Borges (who deserves all five) and because it is a useful thing to have all his stories in one place in English. I would have given it five if Hurley had not made such a colossal mess of it.
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If Not badly translated, surely differently so.

To be finally faced with this monumental work cannot be anything but a joy and privledge to anyone who reveres the work of Jorge Luis Borges. To one whose English contact with his work has been represented by others than Andrew Hurley however, his work can be abruptly disconcerting. Consider and compare one spare example: Read side by side from "The Book Of Sand", the two versions of "The Other", both by Andrew Hurley and that of Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, and you may recall the fable of the blind men describing an elephant; each by feeling a different part of the anatomy. They tell the identical tale, but the resultant effect is completely dipolar. Di Giovanni recreates for us in English, the essential magical realism with which Borges spoke, while retaining the essence and cadence that fill this short tale with it's dreamlike structure. It is carefully and lovingly crafted, with respect and methodic attention to the original Spanish cadre. The hypnotic illusion it creates puts the reader in it's spell fully, from the first sentence. Hurley's version, relies soley upon his perception of how best to explain to the reader, what it is he thinks the author had in mind.. It is as if though he sought to put the lines onto paper as quickly as possible, while recreating a contemporary English version of Borges plan. For the reader new to Borges' majestic presence, there is an unwarranted intrusion into the translation concept, as if the project was rushed to completion. How long and hard Hurley has worked on this enormous procect deserves utmost admiration. How new readers of Borges will interpret what they read is troubling, in comparison to those who have come before him.
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Who are these reviewers anyway?

What I want to know is what qualifications do all these guys have who wrote in saying Hurley's translations are inferior? Since when is knowing Spanish a qualification for judging the value of a translation? I'm sure none of these guys who decided off the top of their heads that these translations are weak know a third as much about the Spanish language as Hurley does. Just because something doesn't read to your particular, highly questionable tastes, doesn't make it a bad translation. Did they ever translate something themselves? What are their credentials? At the very least, they should put some credentials forward before commenting on the quality of the translation.
As far as I'm concerned, and I'm only speaking as a layman here, I've read many different translations of Borges, and Hurley's, though slightly more complicated than the others, are IN NO WAY INFERIOR. And for a super price you get ALL of Borges' ficciones in one book.
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weird translation decisions

Here are a few examples of weird choices of the translator:

1.

Borges: title is "Funes, el memorioso"

Hurley: "Funes, His Memory"

Other translations have "Funes, The Memorious". Hurley writes that he didn't want to use the "invented", "Lewis Carroll-esque" word "memorious", but it is in fact a word, albeit rare. (see OED: "Having a good memory")

2.

Borges: (Deutsches Requiem) "Símolo de mi vano destino, dormía en el reborde de la ventana un gato enorme y fofo."

Hurley: "On the windowsill slept a massive, obese cat--the symbol of my vain destiny."

Now, "fofo" (flabby) is probably a hint a-la-Strangelove of the nature of zur Linde's wound, which had "serious consequences", but it is lost with Hurley's "obese".

3.

Borges' great lines from "Tema del traidor y del héreo": "De esos laberintos circulares lo salva una curiosa comprobación, una comprobación que luego lo abisma en otros laberintos más inextricables y heterogéneos"

Hurley translates the first "laberintos" to "labyrinths" and the second to "mazes". A Borges sentence with a recurring word is rendered into a sentence without any. Granted, there aren't any synonyms for "laberinto" in Spanish, but it seems somewhat strange to use both English options in one sentence.

4.

Borges: (Ragnaroek) "En los sueños (escribe Coleridge) las imágenes figuran las..."

Hurley omits the parentheses for some reason: "The images in dreams, wrote Coleridge, figure forth..."

Examples of similar translating concepts can be found on almost every other page.

Those of you who demand a translation which is as literal as possible without mutilating style and imagery, might find this one disappointing. Anyhow I would recommend this as a filler since it has all the stories in one volume, while the great Borges-di Giovanni translations (or revision-translations) do not include everything (they didn't get the rights, absurdly enough).
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A very sloppy translation- details provided.

As a Latin American literature major who has studied Borges in depth, I have meticulously read the English translations of his work to find one to recommend. And I mean it when I say meticulously- I have compared them sentence by sentence. This is not me trying to be snobby, it's simply that Borges wrote very precisely, and justice should be done to his prose style, and I want to be able to make a clear recommendation to my friends who read Spanish-language literature in translation. To be fair, this version is readable, but Andrew Hurley has very imprecisely translated many important nuances of the stories. I will give two detailed examples below. I suppose these could be considered mild "spoilers", so don't read beyond this point if you're worried about a story being ruined.
One example of sloppy translation is found in one of Borges' most famous stories, The Immortal. In the story, after encountering Homer, the Greek poet, the narrator asks him how much he remembers of the Odyssey. He responds that he remembers very little, because, in the original Spanish, "ya habrán pasado mil cien años desde que la inventé," which means "eleven hundred years have passed since I created it." However, Hurley translates this is "eleven hundred years since I LAST WROTE IT." This translation is extraordinarily problematic for two reasons: first of all, Homer was a poet who, according to tradition, NEVER WROTE ANYTHING, as he was a blind storyteller. Notice that in the original Spanish the verb "inventar" is used; to invent, create. There is no implication of writing, as there shouldn't be. Secondly, Hurley for some reason felt the need to add the word LAST, implying that Homer not only wrote the Odyssey, but that he wrote it more than once. This is very, very sloppy work.
Another example of bad translation can be found in the story "The Shape of the Sword." In the original Spanish, the story ends bluntly and powerfully with "yo soy Vincent Moon. Ahora desprécieme." (I am Vincent Moon. Now despise me.") However, Hurley translates this as "It is I who am Vincent Moon. Now, despise me." The addition of "it is I" as opposed to just "I" as well as the unnecessary addition of the comma in "now despise me" make this final statement overly wordy and much less viscerally powerful than in the original Spanish.
As I said, I realize these are very specific critiques, but there are dozens of them throughout the stories and, once again, someone as precise as Borges deserves to be translated more carefully. Unfortunately, this seems to be the only available single-volume translation of Borges' complete fiction. However, I prefer nearly every other English translation, especially the joint effort between Borges himself and Thomas di Giovanni.
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Tragedy

An abortion. Read other 1-star reviews for more depth, but please, please do not read anything translated by Andrew Hurley. It's sad that people don't realize there are other options out there probably because this complete fictions pop-up first on Amazon. Start with Labyrinths. Do not read anything translated by Andrew Hurley, read Di Giovanni, Yeats...
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A wealth of literary labyrinths

What a treasure this book is! The Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges's fictional works are the ultimate celebration of the power of the imagination, each story a unique, glittering gem worthy of careful and repeated inspection. Combining abstract concepts with familiar elements of the real world, Borges works in a genre that could be called philosophical fantasy -- an exploration of the myriad ways of interpreting and portraying reality and unreality.
I have encountered no writer more eclectic than Borges; there is no place on earth and no time in history in which he is uninterested or unwilling to take inspiration. He writes about sorcerors, pirates, impostors, hoodlums, samurai, detectives, troglodytes, gauchos, kings, primitive tribes, artifacts, fantastic libraries, imaginary worlds, imaginary books, lost civilizations, and alternate realities with astonishingly equal aplomb. Much of the writing is immersed in cultural mysticism (the Kabbalah), traditional religions (the Koran, the Talmud, the Bible), mythology (Greek, Arabian, Oriental), philosophy (particularly Schopenhauer), world history, and lore of Borges's own invention. Motifs of knives, mirrors, and especially labyrinths -- both physical and metaphysical -- recur throughout many of the stories.
The titles alone invoke immediate intrigue: "The Garden of Forking Paths," "The Library of Babel," "The Cult of the Phoenix," "The Immortal," "The Sect of the Thirty," "The Mirror and the Mask," "Toenails," et cetera. Borges takes the typical detective story and elevates it to lofty levels of erudition -- one can see how he influenced Umberto Eco. "Death and the Compass" is a mystery with a geometrical solution, "Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth" embellishes its clever plot by merging two disparate cultures, while the eerie "There Are More Things" takes its inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft. Some stories, like "The House of Asterion" and "Everything and Nothing," are like riddles, while others are rich romantic tales of the tough barrios of Buenos Aires.
This collection is a marvel -- perfect for engaging your intellect and purging yourself of the mundane.
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