DOCSLIB.ORG

Labyrinths Selected Stories & Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges Edited by Donald A

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Labyrinths Selected Stories & Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges Edited by Donald A Labyrinths Selected Stories & Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges Edited by Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby Preface by André Maurois a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF Back Cover: Although his work has been restricted to the short story, the essay, and poetry, Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina is recognized all over the world as one of the most original and significant figures in modern literature. In his preface André Maurois writes: "Borges is a great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives. Yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of invention, and their tight, almost mathematical style." Labyrinths is a representative selection of Borges' writing, some forty pieces drawn from various of his books published over the years. The translations are by Harriet de Onís, Anthony Kerrigan, and others, including the editors, who have provided a biographical and critical introduction, as well as an extensive bibliography. Copyright © 1962, 1964 by New Directions Publishing Corporation Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-25440 (ISBN: 0-08112-0012-4) All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. This augmented edition was first published in 1964. Labyrinths, Selected Stories & Other Writings, by Jorge Luis Barges, has been translated and published by agreement with Emecé Editores, S, A., Bolivar 177, Buenos Aires, Argentina. All selections here included and translated into English have been taken from the following volumes originally published in Spanish by Emecé: Ficciones (1956), El Aleph (1957), Discussión (1957), Otras Inquisiciones (1960) and El Hacedor (1960). We also acknowledge permission to reprint those translations into English here included which have previously appeared in magazines and books, as follows: translated by Donald A. Yates: "The Garden of Forking Paths," Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review, Spring 1958; translated by James E. Irby: "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," New World Writing No. 18, April 1961, and "The Waiting" Américas, June 1959; translated by John M. Fein: "The Lottery in Babylon," Prairie Schooner, Fall 1959; translated by Harriet de Onís: "The Secret Miracle," Spanish Stories & Tales, Pocket Books (PL 40) 1956; translated by Julian Palley: "Deutsches Requiem," New World Writing No. 14, 1958 (Property of the Rutgers Translators); translated by Dudley Fitts: "The Zahir," Partisan Review, February 1950; translated by Anthony Kerrigan: "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal" Noonday No. 3, 1959. Manufactured in the United States of America Published in Canada by McClelland and Stewart, Ltd. New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin by New Directions Publishing Corporation, 331 Sixth Avenue, New York 10014. TENTH PRINTING Contents Preface Introduction Fictions Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius The Garden of Forking Paths The Lottery in Babylon Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote The Circular Ruins The Library of Babel Funes the Memorious The Shape of the Sword Theme of the Traitor and the Hero Death and the Compass The Secret Miracle Three Versions of Judas The Sect of the Phoenix The Immortal The Theologians Story of the Warrior and the Captive Emma Zunz The House of Asterion Deutsches Requiem Averroes' Search The Zahir The Waiting The God's Script Essays The Argentine Writer and Tradition The Wall and the Books The Fearful Sphere of Pascal Partial Magic in the Quixote Valéry as Symbol Kafka and His Precursors Avatars of the Tortoise The Mirror of Enigmas A Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw A New Refutation of Time Parables Inferno, 1, 32 Paradiso, XXXI, 108 Ragnarök Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote The Witness A Problem Borges and I Everything and Nothing Elegy Chronology Bibliography Preface Jorge Luis Borges is a great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives. Yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of invention, and their tight, almost mathematical, style. Argentine by birth and temperament, but nurtured on universal literature, Borges has no spiritual homeland. He creates, outside time and space, imaginary and symbolic worlds. It is a sign of his importance that, in placing him, only strange and perfect works can be called to mind. He is akin to Kafka, Poe, sometimes to Henry James and Wells, always to Valéry by the abrupt projection of his paradoxes in what has been called "his private metaphysics." I His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound -- he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas -- but it is vast. For example, Pascal wrote: "Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere." Borges sets out to hunt down this metaphor through the centuries. He finds in Giordano Bruno (1584): "We can assert with certainty that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere." But Giordano Bruno had been able to read in a twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille, a formulation borrowed from the Corpus Hermeticum (third century): "God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." Such researches, carried out among the Chinese as among the Arabs or the Egyptians, delight Borges, and lead him to the subjects of his stories. Many of his masters are English. He has an infinite admiration for Wells and is indignant that Oscar Wilde could define him as "a scientific Jules Verne." Borges makes the observation that the fiction of Jules Verne speculates on future probability (the submarine, the trip to the moon), that of Wells on pure possibility (an invisible man, a flower that devours a man, a machine to explore time), or even on impossibility (a man returning from the hereafter with a future flower). Beyond that, a Wells novel symbolically represents features inherent in all human destinies. Any great and lasting book must be ambiguous, Borges says; it is a mirror that makes the reader's features known, but the author must seem to be unaware of the significance of his work -- which is an excellent description of Borges's own art. "God must not engage in theology; the writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us." He admires Poe and Chesterton as much as he does Wells. Poe wrote perfect tales of fantastic horror and invented the detective story, but he never combined the two types of writing. Chesterton did attempt and felicitously brought off this tour de force. Each of Father Brown's adventures proposes to explain, in reason's name, an unexplainable fact. "Though Chesterton disclaimed being a Poe or Kafka, there was, in the material out of which his ego was molded, something that tended to nightmare." Kafka was a direct precursor of Borges. The Castle might be by Borges, but he would have made it into a ten-page story, both out of lofty laziness and out of concern for perfection. As for Kafka's precursors, Borges's erudition takes pleasure in finding them in Zeno of Elea, Kierkegaard and Robert Browning. In each of these authors there is some Kafka, but if Kafka had not written, nobody would have been able to notice it -- whence this very Borgesian paradox: "Every writer creates his own precursors." Another man who inspires him is the English writer John William Dunne, author of such curious books about time, in which he claims that the past, present and future exist simultaneously, as is proved by our dreams. (Schopenhauer, Borges remarks, had already written that life and dreams are leaves of the same book: reading them in order is living; skimming through them is dreaming.) In death we shall rediscover all the instants of our life and we shall freely combine them as in dreams. "God, our friends, and Shakespeare will collaborate with us." Nothing pleases Borges better than to play in this way with mind, dreams, space and time. The more complicated the game becomes, the happier he is. The dreamer can be dreamed in his turn. "The Mind was dreaming; the world was its dream." In all philosophers, from Democritus to Spinoza, from Schopenhauer to Kierkegaard, he is on the watch for paradoxical intellectual possibilities. II There are to be found in Valéry's notebooks many notes such as this: "Idea for a frightening story: it is discovered that the only remedy for cancer is living human flesh. Consequences." I can well imagine a piece of Borges "fiction" written on such a theme. Reading ancient and modern philosophers, he stops at an idea or a hypothesis. The spark flashes. "If this absurd postulate were developed to its extreme logical consequences," he wonders, "what world would be created?" For example, an author, Pierre Menard, undertakes to compose Don Quixote -- not another Quixote, but the Quixote. His method? To know Spanish well, to rediscover the Catholic faith, to war against the Moors, to forget the history of Europe -- in short, to be Miguel de Cervantes. The coincidence then becomes so total that the twentieth- century author rewrites Cervantes' novel literally, word for word, and without referring to the original. And here Borges has this astonishing sentence: "The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer." This he triumphantly demonstrates, for this subject, apparently absurd, in fact expresses a real idea: the Quixote that we read is not that of Cervantes, any more than our Madame Bovary is that of Flaubert.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Jorge Luis Borges: Visions of Culture and Knowledge Professor Dr
    (PALAS 420) Jorge Luis Borges: Visions of Culture and Knowledge Professor Dr. Alejandro Manara Program in Argentine and Latin American Studies Universidad de Belgrano Course Syllabus 2013 Course Information M-W 1:00-2.30PM Instruction in: English Contact Information [email protected] Course Description Borges’ vision of the world as a Library of Babel and an Aleph anticipated the information age and the development of the Internet by several decades. However, although Borges can be regarded as the least representative Latin American writer, not all his fictions address universal problems. This course shows how many of his short stories, essays and poems are embedded in and have contributed to the Latin American and Argentine literary traditions. The course also considers Borges’ precursors (Poe, Marcel Schwob and Kafka) and his followers (Donald Barthelme, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, among others). Finally, it looks at Borges’ presence in visual culture: film, architecture and art. Course Requirements Following UB policy, students need a minimum of 75% of attendance to be in good standing for the final exam. Sliding the ID card is the only way to track record of attendance. Classes missed for national holidays will not be recovered. Students are expected to do close readings, participate in class, and do at least one oral presentation. During the semester, students will write two short position papers. The requirements also include a midterm and a final exam. In addition to this, each student will be expected to make a significant contribution to the classroom dialogue. Grading Policy In-class Participation 10 % Oral Presentation 20 % Short Papers (2) 30 % Midterm Exam 20 % Final Exam 20 % For a better understanding of the comparable table for grading: check the International Student Handbook (see orientation kit packet).
    [Show full text]
  • 1 the Global Appropriation of Jorge Luis Borges
    1 The Global Appropriation of Jorge Luis Borges: Reconfiguring the Scattered Pieces Ernesto Livon-Grosman, University at Albany, SUNY Three years after Jorge Luis Borges’s hundredth birthday, in the midst of a rise in the global appropriation of this Argentine author as an international writer, the time is ripe for piecing together some of the many Borges’s configured inside his native country and elsewhere in the world. Outside of Argentina, Borges is viewed today, perhaps more than ever, as “closer” to the English language than any other twentieth-century Latin American author, a cultural figure without national boundaries who, consequently, is perceived to be the least Argentine of all Argentine intellectuals. It would be helpful, then, to begin this survey by recalling some of the most salient moments in the process that constructed the international Borges. European Discoveries In 1961 Jorge Luis Borges, together with Samuel Beckett, received one of the most important European awards for literature, the Formentor prize, which gave him a unique visibility. The prize, in part for its rather arbitrary association with Beckett, would prove to be the first step in the adoption of Borges as a member of the European literary community. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, one of Borges’s favorite reference books, comments thus on the consequences of the award: Prior to that time, Borges was little known, even in his native Buenos Aires, except to other writers, many of whom regarded him merely as a craftsman of ingenious techniques and tricks. By the time of his death, the nightmare world of his “fictions” had come to be compared with the world of Franz Kafka and to be praised for concentrating common language into its most enduring form.
    [Show full text]
  • Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges I I Owe the Discovery of Uqbar to the Conjunction of a Mirror and an Encyclop
    Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges I I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors hare something monstrous about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number or men. I asked him the origin of this memorable observation and he answered that it was reproduced in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia , in its article on Uqbar. The house (which we had rented furnished) had a set of this work. On the last pages of Volume XLVI we found an article on Upsala; on the first pages of Volume XLVII, one on Ural-Altaic Languages, but not a word about Uqbar.
    [Show full text]
  • Poe and La Plata Syllabus
    “Poe and La Plata” Professor: Emron Esplin Course Description In this course, we will adopt an inter-American literary studies approach to examine the influence and affinities between Edgar Allan Poe and several writers of the Río de la Plata region—Argentina and Uruguay—of South America. We will begin the course with a brief study of when and how Poe’s texts first arrived in Spanish America, a concise reading of several of Poe’s poems, and a discussion about the impact of “The Raven” on Spanish American literature in general. We will spend the majority of the semester reading Poe’s fiction alongside the works of Argentine writers Leopoldo Lugones, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar and Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga. Our primary themes will include the fantastic, horror, analytic detective fiction, and revenge. We will examine how each of these writers from the Río de la Plata region was not only influenced by Poe but also influenced Poe’s reception in the Río de la Plata area and throughout Spanish America through their literary criticism and interviews on Poe, their translations of Poe’s work, and their own fiction. The course will demonstrate that influence is not a one-way street and that literature, although connected to specific national and linguistic contexts, pays no heed to the political and linguistic borders which divide the Americas. Our transnational approach will help English majors accomplish the “global perspective” learning outcome for the B.A. in English, will provide American Studies minors the opportunity to “examine America and American cultures in context of the world,” and will allow all students enrolled in the course to be active participants in KSU’s “Get Global!” initiative.
    [Show full text]
  • Jorge Luis Borges-The House of Asterion in Labyrinths
    Jorge Luis Borges Labyrinths Selected Stories & Other Writings Edited by Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby Preface by André Maurois Jorge Luis Borges Labyrinths Selected Stories & Other Writings Edited by Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby Preface by André Maurois 2 Although his work has been restricted to the short story, the essay, and poetry, Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina is recognized all over the world as one of the most original and significant figures in modern literature. In his preface André Maurois writes: "Borges is a great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives. Yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of invention, and their tight, almost mathematical style." Labyrinths is a representative selection of Borges' writing, some forty pieces drawn from various of his books published over the years. The translations are by Harriet de Onís, Anthony Kerrigan, and others, including the editors, who have provided a biographical and critical introduction, as well as an extensive bibliography. 3 Copyright © 1962, 1964 by New Directions Publishing Corporation Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-25440 (ISBN: 0-08112-0012-4) All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. This augmented edition was first published in 1964. Labyrinths, Selected Stories & Other Writings, by Jorge Luis Barges, has been translated and published by agreement with Emecé Editores, S, A., Bolivar 177, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
    [Show full text]
  • Jorge Luis Borges
    Jorge Luis Borges. Collected Fictions. Tr. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin 1998 The Lottery in Babylon Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment. Look here-- my right hand has no index finger. Look here--through this gash in my cape you can see on my stomach a crimson tattoo--it is the second letter, Beth. On nights when the moon is full, this symbol gives me power over men with the mark of Gimel, but it subjects me to those with the Aleph, who on nights when there is no moon owe obedience to those marked with the Gimel. In the half-light of dawn, in a cellar, standing before a black altar, I have slit the throats of sacred bulls. Once, for an entire lunar year, I was declared invisible--I would cry out and no one would heed my call, I would steal bread and not be beheaded. I have known that thing the Greeks knew not--uncertainty. In a chamber of brass, as I faced the strangler's silent scarf, hope did not abandon me; in the river of delights, panic has not failed me. Heraclides Ponticus reports, admiringly, that Pythagoras recalled having been Pyrrhus, and before that, Euphorbus, and before that, some other mortal; in order to recall similar vicissitudes, I have no need of death, nor even of imposture. I owe that almost monstrous variety to an institution--the Lottery-- which is unknown in other nations, or at work in them imperfectly or secretly.
    [Show full text]
  • Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges
    FICCIONES Jorge Luis Borges Translated by Andrew Hurley ALLEN LANE THE PENGUIN PRESS Published by the Penguin Group 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 --- Kôtsukéno Suké Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv Man on Pink Corner Etcetera Index of Sources FICTIONS (1944) THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS (1941) Foreword Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius 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) 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 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 Martín Fierro Mutations Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote Paradiso, XXXI, 108 Parable of the Palace Everything and Nothing Ragnarök Inferno, 1, 3 Borges and I MUSEUM On Exactitude in Science In Memoriam, J.F.K.
    [Show full text]
  • Jorge Luis Borges a Minor Collection of Works Contents
    Jorge Luis Borges A Minor Collection of Works Contents : The Library of Babel Death and the Compass Theme of the Traitor and Hero Three Versions of Judas The Babylon Lottery Funes, the Memorious The Secret Miracle The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim The Garden of Forking Paths The Sect of the Phoenix An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote The Circular Ruins The South The Form of the Sword Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius The End Borges/ Various -2- Jorge Luis Borges The Library of Babel By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters . - The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part 2, Sect. II, Mem. IV. The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle, encircled by very low railings. From any hexagon the upper or lower stories are visible, interminably. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves - five long shelves per side - cover all sides except two; their height, which is that of each floor, scarcely exceeds that of an average librarian. One of the free sides gives upon a narrow entrance way, which leads to another gallery, identical to the first and to all the others. To the left and to the right of the entrance way are two miniature rooms. One allows standing room for sleeping; the other, the satisfaction of fecal necessities. Through this section passes the spiral staircase, which plunges down into the abyss and rises up to the heights.
    [Show full text]
  • A Dictionary of Borges
    A DICTIONARY OF BORGES Evelyn Fishburn & Psiche Hughes Forewords by Mario Vargas Llosa & Anthony Burgess Duckworth i First published in 1990 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. The Old Piano Factory 43 Gloucester Crescent, London NW1 7DY © 1990 by Evelyn Fishburn & Psiche Hughes All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN 0 7156 2154 8 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Fishburn, Evelyn A dictionary of Borges. 1. Fiction in Spanish. Argentinian writers. Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899-1986. Critical studies I. Title II. Hughes, Psiche 863 ISBN 0-7156-2154-8 Photoset in North Wales by Derek Doyle & Associates, Mold, Clwyd. Printed in Great Britain by Redwood Press Ltd, Melksham. ii Contents Maps Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa Foreword by Anthony Burgess Introduction Abbreviations DICTIONARY Biographical summary iii For F.J.F. & P.H. iv Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa This is a book that would have been to Borges's taste. Although he used to pride himself on never having read anything that was written about his life or his work, I am sure he would have read it from beginning to end. This is because it is a book of imaginative erudition, or erudite fantasy, an unusual combination which he used with greater originality than anyone else, so that the genre, though of the greatest antiquity, seems now almost to have been invented by him. Like the strange sect of 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' which wished secretly to interpolate a fictitious universe into the real one, Borges too, throughout his life as a writer, sought to distil beings, titles and events which his fantasy had forged into the history and literature of reality.
    [Show full text]
  • The Babylonian Lottery-1
    1 The Babylonian Lottery (1) Douglas Lockhart Babylon is nothing else than an infinite game of chance. Jorge Luis Borges Labyrinths: The Lottery in Babylon . poetry cannot be translated into prose. To attempt it is to move away from the edges of language and back into the clarity of language’s central plains, and that very move takes us away from where the poet was standing Paul van Buren The Edges of Languages (p. 106) [L]anguage, even rudimentary, is polysemic, many-layered, expressive of intentionalities only imperfectly revealed or articulate. It encodes . Language is in itself multilingual. It contains worlds. More often than not, articulate enunciation is the iceberg tip of submerged implicit meanings. George Steiner My Unwritten Books (p. 56) The Confusion of Tongues Labyrinths is a book of short stories by the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, a writer of mysterious bits and pieces described by Andre Maurois as someone who “ . creates 1 outside time and space, imaginary and symbolic worlds.” Carlos Fuentes captures 2, another aspect of Borges and describes his writing style as “so cold it burns one’s lips” and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, while admitting that he can’t stand Borges as a writer, nevertheless claims to love him because of “the violin he makes use of for expressing 3 himself.” Equally mysterious in his reaction to Borges is George Steiner: “No poet has conveyed with more density of life the possibility that our existence is being ‘dreamt 4 elsewhere’, that we are mere figures of another’s speech.” And all this for someone who never wrote a novel, a writer of little poems, essays and short stories the fame of which were to earn Borges many prestigious literary prizes.
    [Show full text]
  • Fact (In Fiction)
    Fact (in Fiction) CLARISSA LEHNE In the final section of his 1962 collection, Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges presents us with his “Parables.” These pithy essays, brief entertainments of cavernous concepts that could spawn lengthy treatises but are granted at most two and a half pages, rest on intentionally familiar foundations. Borges builds his postulates from established figures and fables, from Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote to the gods of ancient Greek and Egyptian mythology to William Shakespeare. But viewed through his narrative lens, these well-known people and stories become unrecognizable, disfigured by Borges’s dismantling of their most identifiable traits. In “Ragnarök,” the ancient gods, typically paint- ed as heroic paragons of the human condition, become hideous, degenerate mutes, with “[v]ery low foreheads, yellow teeth, stringy mulatto or Chinese moustaches and thick bestial lips” (277). Still more unsettling, they become mortal and are “joyfully killed” with the ignominiously mundane bullets of “heavy revolvers” by those who formerly revered them (277). In “Everything and Nothing,” Shakespeare’s plays, the crown jewels of the English canon, become “only a bit of coldness . dream[s] dreamt by no one” (284). Borges’s readers are driven to question who this author is, that he feels himself quali- fied to so desecrate strains of human thought and tradition that have survived for centuries. His reply would probably be similar to the one that the God in “Everything and Nothing” grants Shakespeare after his death: “Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one” (285).
    [Show full text]
  • Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
    Labyrinths Selected Stories & Other Writings Jorge Luis Borges Edited by Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby Preface by André Maurois a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF Back Cover: Although his work has been restricted to the short story, the essay, and poetry, Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina is recognized all over the world as one of the most original and significant figures in modern literature. In his preface André Maurois writes: "Borges is a great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives. Yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of invention, and their tight, almost mathematical style." Labyrinths is a representative selection of Borges' writing, some forty pieces drawn from various of his books published over the years. The translations are by Harriet de Onís, Anthony Kerrigan, and others, including the editors, who have provided a biographical and critical introduction, as well as an extensive bibliography. Copyright © 1962, 1964 by New Directions Publishing Corporation Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-25440 (ISBN: 0-08112-0012-4) All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. This augmented edition was first published in 1964. Labyrinths, Selected Stories & Other Writings, by Jorge Luis Barges, has been translated and published by agreement with Emecé Editores, S, A., Bolivar 177, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
    [Show full text]