Collected Fictions

There are works of fiction that change the way you look at life, and then there is the work of Jorge Luis Borges, which just might alter the way you look at everything, including yourself. The best way to explain Jorge Luis Borges is to compare him to painters - if you combined Picasso, Dali and Escher's imaginations into a writer, you would have Borges. His visions of doppelgangers, puzzles, labyrinths, infinite libraries and Argentine Gauchos are on a level of reality different from any other storyteller in history. My personal favorites here are Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, The Aleph, and The Gospel According to Mark, among many others. Recommended for anyone interested in short stories or Latin American writers.

I discovered Borges early in his English translations in the 60s, and couldn't get enough. His minimalism is deceptively simple-looking, but hard to do for me as a writer; his preoccupation with time and existence fascinates and disturbs; and his often-overlooked attention to epistomology is a continuing source of his pawky humor. Borges is endlessly readable, again and again, and I LOVE having all his "fictions" in one volume!

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...

First off, let me say that anyone collecting and disseminating Borges' works is doing no disservice. The translation is extremely competent, but I would tend to stay with Irby and Yates' somewhat more readable translation (Labyrinths). Their work is not as 'complete,' but the wording of the earlier translation is somewhat better. As far as the question of 'complete,' Hurley leaves out several of Borges' short stories from _Sur_ (The South). On the other hand, it's the closest thing to an _Obras Completas_ (Complete Works) those of us who are not fluent in Spanish have. It is very usefull in the footnotes that explain elements otherwise lost to the non-Argentine (and scrupulously literate) reader. I would certainly reccomend it to the Borges enthusiast, but might encourage a newcomer to read Labyrinths first (it's a good deal cheaper).

Es probable que lo que escriba (segun la interpretación del quien en este momento este leyendo estas palabras)se pierda en alguna red irrecuperable, además el hecho de que este escrito en español, lo desprestigia... no discutiré esa problemática... ¡qué sobervia!
Borges no tiene identidad y eso atrae a las personas que la buscan
Nada más

I have not evaluated Hurley's translation in any depth. Indeed, I just opened the book at random and found what seems to be a very problematic item. The Aleph (one of Borges's greatest stories, IMHO) begins "La candente mañana de febrero en que Beatriz Viterbo murió." I've seen this translated as "On the incandescent Februry morning on which Beatriz Viterbo died" and "On the burning February morning on which Beatriz Viterbo died." Hurley has it as "That same sweltering morning Beatriz Viterbo died." What happened to "February" which was in the orginal? I'm no Borges scholar, but this omission seems inexplicable and inexcusable to me. (Perhaps others may be able to explain it.) It also undermines my confidence in the faithfulness of Hurley's translation generally.

Borges was undoubtedly a great writer, but Hurley's translation is only so-so. The di Giovanni translations are vastly better - reading them after reading Hurley's version is like seeing an ancient painting restored to its original glowing life. Hurley's translation is not awful - if it were the first form in which I had encountered Borges, I would no doubt have been delighted - but, by comparison with di Giovanni's, its clunky and rather wretched.

I gather there was some sort of ugly conflict with the Borges literary estate that led to the di G translations going out of print, but used copies are readily available - the wise reader will go and find them.

True, the translation could be better. I found myself re-writing in my head alternative sentences. But that is exactly what Borges would have wanted his readers to do. A dream master, JLB guides us into worlds that guess at other worlds and leads us to our own discoveries. I can't count the times I had to put the book down to allow myself to ponder on what I was reading. Some of his stories border the essay, and that uncertainty makes the plot more believable and profound. Like with any book, recreate it in your mind, and be part of a Borges dream.

"Ficciones"=Borges. This book shows us what Borges really is: a great writer (maybe the greater, why not?). It contains a lot of wonderful sories like "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan", "Funes el memorioso", "Las ruinas circulares" and maybe the best detective's storie ever written: "La muerte y la brújula". Of course it has more tales, but I think these are the best ones, and if you consider yourself a reader, you MUST read this ones. Borges... whate else???? No hay nadie como Borges.

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.

The Audible version of the Collected Fictions has no chapter or story breaks. It is recorded as a single audio file. Close to 50 short stories all stacked together as if this were a novel. BUT NO, that's not accurate either because Audible doesn't allow you to bookmark where you left off listening, so you start over at the beginning of the book every time you return to it. Borges loved labyrinths, but something tells me he wouldn't appreciate this one. WORSE, when I upgraded my mac recently Audible uniquely refuses to recognize the new computer, so I lost access to this book. Thank God I didn't buy any more from them or I would have been out of my entire investment.

RUN in the other direction.

Borges is my favourite contemporary author and I would rank him among the best thinkers of all eras in literature and philosophy.
I purchased this book as a gift. I looked at different books by this author but this particular one contained all the compositions that made great impression on me. I think this makes a great present and a great book for a home library.

Jorge Borges may have been the most well read individual in the 20th century. His range of knowledge is incredibly vast, as is the range of topics his short stories cover. From a female chinese pirate, to ronin samurai avenging the death of their lord, to the life of an immortal being, everything Borges writes is sheer brilliance. I cannot reccomend this book enough

I regrettably have to concur with the readers from Portland and Panama - as they indicate this collection is a tragedy, as well as a travesty. Here are a couple of examples from my desert island short story, Tlon Uqbar, Orbius Tertius:
- Andrew Hurley has: "The mirror troubled the far end of a hallway in a large country house..."
- James E. Irby (in the Penguin Modern Classic edition of Labyrinths) has: "The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house..."
and
AH: "... A literal (though also laggardly) reprint..."
JEI: "... a literal but delinquent reprint..."
He doesn't seem to have any respect for Borges' style of writing. Really disappointing. And Carlos Fuentes, a notable admirer of Borges, shared this view on reviewing the Hurley edition.
Avoid.

Excellent collection of Borges' Fictions. Borges transports you to reasonings and philosophies not so common in the world we live in. There is a message behind every single story, one has to look deeply to see it.

finally, a good - dare I say great? - translation of Borges into English... previous editions may seem to have stood the test of time, but Andrew Hurley has done a magnificent job of capturing the mystery and enchantment of the Argentinian master.

I was recommended Borges' works by one of his innumerable over-educated sycophants and I will never forget the tremendous time I wasted attempting to grasp the supposed value of his life's work (when I should have been writing my dissertation). Each time I read one of his pedantic, mediocre peices of short fiction, I was convinced by these elite book review troglodytes that I would like other examples of his work if I continued reading since "all of his stories are so unique." I found the exact opposite to be true. One story after another about mazes, mirrors, mystical mathematical formulas and books, books, books. The ideas were transperant, the language boring in the extreme. His poetry is trite. Who needs this? Borges reads like a petulant graduate student at University of Chicago who failed repeatedly to get his/her short fiction published in _The Atlantic Monthly_. Particularly among academics, literary elites and like people, many seem to cite Borges and worship his genius more than read him--and certaintly _no one_ reads him critically. I read most of his work, and I can tell you, outside of a few interesting turns of phrase, you'd be better off reading a Yale dissertation on the semiotics of self-superiority. People incessantly talk about how imaginative Borges is. The vast majority of popular SF and fantasy writers are more imaginative. Even many of the despicable magical realist "geniuses" make Borges look rather plain. Borges merely litters his works with elite literary references and a kind of faculty cocktail party wit to make it more palatable to the kind of people who never step foot out of Manhattan or Cambridge. If you're this kind of pompous fellow, you'll want to sleep every night with a portrait of Luis by your side and a series of mirrors, as it were, slowly attempting to seek some kind of trans-substantiation with this benighted old librarian. If you're the kind of person who prefers reading about interesting characters, enjoying nuanced use of language, and grasping subtle, daring ideas that transcend purile academic banter, run far, far away from Jorge Luis Borges. Even top authors from all over the world and every historical period get bad reviews. The adulation of Borges merely underlines the fact that this is more about a cult of personality among (those who think themselves) intellectual elites than a serious attempt to evaluate his fiction. I think his fiction is better considered a kind of academic experiment, relegated to quirky local fiction publications and coffee house poetry slams, and not an example of literary genius. In that sense, 30min spent on one of his short stories gets you the drift of his entire body of work, and that's about as much attention as he deserves.