Although there are many places where one might enjoy being a living writer, there seem to be only two countries where one would want to be a dead one: Germany and France. Theirs are the only societies where it is generally believed both that a great writer is worthy of a monument, and that the proper monument to a great writer is a reliable and comprehensive edition of his or her works.

The United States, in this regard, was a complete disaster until Edmund Wilson's campaign for an American version of the French Pléiade led, in the 1980s, to the creation of the Library of America. Now it is only half a disaster. For the first time—many decades after their deaths—there are decent editions of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. Yet much of American literature still moulders in the archives: books by Henry James that have been out of print for the entire twentieth century, scores of essays by T. S. Eliot that have never been collected in book form, and much more.

Latin America is far worse. Its great writers—unlike those of the US—are sources of national pride, and are likely to be immortalized in statues, street names, cultural centres, schools, political speeches and postage stamps. Their texts, however, tend to be as ephemeral as their dinner conversation. When I translated Vicente Huidobro's book-length poem of 1931, Altazor—unquestionably, for Spanish readers, one of the century's major works—I consulted six editions, including the first, and all were different from one another. To translate the poem, I essentially had to invent my own original. As a reader and translator of Octavio Paz, I am relieved and grateful that he devoted the last years of his life to the fifteen massive volumes of a Complete Works, organizing the material and revising all the texts—perhaps the first writer to undertake such a project on this scale since Henry James in his monumental (but incomplete) New York Edition. Readers need to have both the peaks and the valleys of a great writer in order to see the entire landscape. Complete editions are essential: a line or two in the seemingly most insignificant writing often illuminates the most important.

By contrast with Paz, the textual state of Jorge Luis Borges, the centenary of whose birth falls on August 26, suggests one or other of two Borgesian words: labyrinth or nightmare. Borges never wrote anything long, and so it is usually assumed that he never wrote much. In fact, he was a man sworn to the virtue of concision who couldn't stop writing. There are a thousand pages of Borges's stories (including the ones he wrote with Adolfo Bioy Casares), five or six hundred pages of poetry, two dozen books of translations, and thousands of pages of what may be called “non-fictions”, some 1,200 essays, prologues, book reviews, film reviews, transcribed lectures, capsule biographies, encyclopaedia entries, historical surveys, and notes on politics and culture. The accumulation of so many compact writings makes their totality seem even more immense than the collected works of a prolific author of long books. The standard edition of Borges, the five-volume Obras completas published by Emecé, represents only a portion of that work. Some stories, many poems and the larger part of his non-fictions are all missing.

It should be said that, although the boundaries of “fiction” and “non-fiction” are notoriously blurred in Borges's fiction, they are not in his non-fiction. His fictions may often resemble non-fiction, or contain factual elements, but his non-fictions never resemble fiction, or include information that is not independently verifiable. Most of all, they present a range of interests and passions even vaster than those that appear in the stories and poems. Like the Aleph in his famous story—the point in a basement in Buenos Aires from which one can view everything in the world—Borges's unlimited curiosity and erudition become, in the non-fictions, a vortex for, seemingly, the entire universe. Where else would one find Lana Turner, David Hume and the heresiarchs of Alexandria in a single sentence?

Borges, the archetype of the detached and cerebral metaphysician, turns out also to be the author of scandalous polemics on Argentina and machismo, principled stands against the Fascism and anti-Semitism of the Argentine bourgeoisie in the 1930s and 40s, and courageous attacks on the Perón dictatorship. Borges, the blind old man of the popular image, was for years a movie critic. Borges, the recondite scholar, was a regular contributor to the Argentine equivalent of the Ladies' Home Journal. He was equally at home with Schopenhauer and Ellery Queen, King Kong and the Kabbalists, Lady Murasaki and Erik the Red, the Buddha or the Dionne Quints. More exactly, they were at home with him. Borges was both a deceptively self-effacing guide to the universe and the inventor of a universe that was a guide to Borges.

But he published very few collections of these non-fictions. In the 1920s, he released three books: Inquisiciones (1924), El tamaño de mi esperanza (The extent of my hope, 1926), and El idioma de los argentinos (The language of the Argentines, 1928). Preliminary investigations into such lifelong obsessions as eternity, the Quixote and the “nothingness of personality”, these were written in a baroque, “Latin in Spanish” style, full of Argentine idioms incomprehensible to other Spanish readers, and even experiments in a supposedly “Argentine” orthography. He later disowned the three books and refused to allow them to be reprinted in his lifetime, although he joked that posterity would probably consider them his best. Before his death, however, he did permit selections to be included in the Pléiade edition of his works, and—over the objections of some Borgesians—they were reprinted for the first time in 1994.

There were another three books of non-fictions between 1930 and 1936: a thematic book on the Argentine past, Evaristo Carriego (1930), and two miscellanies, Discusión (1932) and Historia de la eternidad (1936). His next book of essays, Otras inquisiciones (1952), came sixteen years later, and included fewer than forty of the hundreds he wrote during this particularly prolific period. There were no more new books of non-fiction for another twenty-three years.

In 1955, Borges lost his sight. After that, he wrote no more essays as such, and fewer stories. He devoted himself largely to poetry, which he could compose in his head, and surveys of topics such as American, English and medieval Germanic literature, which he wrote with collaborators. He did, however, write scores of prologues to various books and to all the volumes in the two series he edited at the end of his life, The Library of Babel, collections of fantastic tales, and A Personal Library, over seventy of his favourite books. And he was an energetic author of a kind of non-fiction writing that was delivered orally from a podium.

Before his blindness, Borges was so shy that, on the few occasions when he was asked to lecture, he sat on the stage while someone else read the text. In his last three decades, however, as his star rose and he was invited all over the world, he evolved a new form that has misleadingly been given the old label “lecture”. Closer perhaps to performance art, these were spontaneous monologues on given subjects, such as immortality, the detective story, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, nightmares, or time. Scores of these were transcribed and published, with every pause and misstep left intact. Relaxed, conversational, necessarily less perfect than the written work, these lectures are a particularly Borgesian sub-genre and delight.

Quite late in his life, he allowed the publication of some retrospective volumes: a book of prologues (another Borgesian sub-genre) that spanned fifty years; two short books of lectures; an edition of his film criticism and film-script ideas, a series of the largely unpublished essays on Dante, written thirty years before; a large gathering of the hilarious book reviews and capsule biographies of modern writers he wrote for the women's magazine El Hogar (Home); and various miscellaneous volumes that combined well-known texts with previously uncollected material. All of these books still left innumerable non-fictions neglected.

There are further complications to the story. It is now generally forgotten that, until the 1950s, Borges was essentially unknown outside Argentina, even among Spanish readers. As his fame grew, the four “canonical” (unsuppressed) books of essays came back into print and began to go through various editions. It was Borges's custom to include a few recent works in the reprints, while excluding or reinstating others. Thus, for example, some of the essays in a reprint of the 1932 Discusión were written decades later, in a style that had greatly changed. And even some of his best-known essays, such as “A New Refutation of Time”, kept disappearing and reappearing in the various editions.

From 1972 to 1974, Borges revised his texts and prepared a three-volume Obras completas, organized according to the original books. Only the four “canonical” books of essays were included, and sundry writings, old and new, were moved in and out of them. These three volumes were supplemented after his death by two more: Volume Four, which consisted of four of the late retrospective collections of essays, and Volume Five, his fictional and non-fictional collaborations with Bioy Casares and others. There is a certain fundamentalist faction among Borgesians who believe that only the first three volumes—the texts overseen by Borges himself—should be allowed to remain in print. In any event, all subsequent editions in all languages have taken this organization by book—with contents according to the last version of the “book”—as their standard.

This has created an enormous problem: what to do with the uncollected work? The first three volumes of the Obras completas include fewer than a hundred non-fictions; Volume Four adds another 300, which still leaves about two-thirds of this work uncollected. A partial inventory of what cannot be found in these volumes would include the early Ultraist poems, articles and manifestos; the three suppressed books of essays, most of the articles on Germany, anti-Semitism and the Second World War, nearly all of the film criticism, scores of articles on Argentine works and cultural figures, the attacks on Perón, countless miscellaneous book reviews and prologues, the thirty prologues he wrote for the Library of Babel series, dozens of transcribed lectures, the cultural notes he contributed to Spanish newspapers in the last years of his life, and some of his most important individual essays: “Our Inabilities” (perhaps the first text, by decades, to even mention the homosexual component of machismo), “The Labyrinths of the Detective Story and Chesterton”, “The Total Library” (a non-fictional precursor to his famous story “The Library of Babel”), “Personality and the Buddha”, “The Innocence of Layamon”, “The Scandinavian Destiny”, “The Dialogues of Ascetic and King”, “A History of the Echoes of a Name”, among many others. This problem is now being both corrected and compounded by a series of addenda to the Obras completas called Textos recobrados (Recovered texts). The first volume, recovering only the years to 1919 to 1929, is 400 pages long (and, like the Obras completas, is full of typographical errors and other mistakes).

Auden said that the difference between a major and a minor writer is that one can recognize the different periods in a major writer, whereas the work of a minor writer seems all to have been written at the same time. By this standard—which is only true in certain cases—Borges is unquestionably a major writer. His life coincided with the century, and the work—particularly in the non-fictions—is radically different from decade to decade, as he moves towards a greater simplicity of style and a more direct form of speech, resulting in the “oral” compositions after his blindness.

Though some Borgesians will disagree, I believe that his practice of inserting late essays into his early books—done, I think, more for the sake of convenience than in the name of the timelessness of art—is counterproductive to an understanding of the work and his development as a writer. For the English-language edition of the non-fictions that I have recently edited, I simply ignored the individual books and presented everything, collected and uncollected, in chronological order (while signalling in the notes the publishing history of each). The selections were divided into blocks of time, corresponding to the various epochs of Borges's writing, and they in turn were organized according to genre within that period: essay, prologue, book review, film criticism, lecture. It is the kind of volume that would be normal for any other writer, but is radical for an edition of Borges. It is a comment on the current state of the texts that one-third of the essays in my book cannot be found in the Obras completas, and many of them have never been published in Spanish in book form.

Once upon a time, a function of the academy was to provide texts. This is no longer so, particularly in the United States, where textual scholarship is considered to be a job for Bartleby the scrivener. This Borges centenary year has already seen hundreds of lectures, articles, books and symposia elucidating the relationship of Borges to one of his favourite authors or texts, invoking yet again the shades of Funes the Memorious and Pierre Menard, or summoning Borges to illustrate some theory (for Borges has the quality of being applicable to all theories), and it will see many more. It is an industry that has now produced more critical writing than any one mortal could ever read. What it hasn't produced is a reliable and comprehensive edition of the works of Jorge Luis Borges. It is practically a Borges story in itself: the infinite library devoted to one author, where the only books missing are those by the author himself.