Jorge Luis Borges is no longer a writer but a tradition. His descendants are vital in a myriad of tongues: Danilo Kiš and Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco and Julio Cortázar. For decades, his work in English—the language he loved most, in which he first read Don Quixote—was less a unity than a multiplicity; it was fragmented and anarchically dispersed in anthologies, translated by too many hands, the most distinguished among them Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Donald A. Yates, Alastair Reid, W. S. Merwin, Richard Wilbur, Mark Strand, John Hollander and James E. Irby. Borges himself encouraged this abundance by allowing different people to work on the same text at once. The most prominent translator is di Giovanni, an Italian-American who worked with him first in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then in Buenos Aires from 1967 to 1972, and with whom Borges produced a total of ten books. To this day, these volumes remain controversial because they are what I call reverse translation; it appears that more than once di Giovanni suggested emendations to the original for the English version and then persuaded Borges to implement them in future Spanish reprints.

A translation, Nabokov once suggested, should read as such; it should not avoid reminding the reader of its artificiality, its counterfeit nature. Borges's Spanish syntax has an Englishness to it. In his youth, he dared to compose several brief poems in Shakespeare's tongue (much as T. S. Eliot did in French); he must have felt at least some sympathy towards these attempts, for he didn't exile them from his Obras Completas, which he compiled for Emecé Editores in Buenos Aires at the end of his life. This in part explains why most available translations are more than satisfactory; to translate Borges into English is to bring him home. Furthermore, since many of these translations were instrumental in his global rise in the 1960s, after he was awarded the Prix Formentor along with Samuel Beckett, they are to be considered his ticket to the canon—or better, they themselves are the canon. The fact that they are scattered but not unreachable is a Borgesian device in itself; his library, like Pascal's sphere, has its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere.

The Borges tradition has sparked a veritable industry; more biographies, photograph albums, bibliographies and scholarly studies are published annually about him than about any other Hispanic literary luminary, Cervantes, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Gabriel García Márquez included. Too many pockets are making a buck. María Kodama, Borges's widow, now wants order. She has done everything to centralize power: instituting a Borges Foundation in Buenos Aires with an ever-expanding data base; bringing out early collections which the author himself did not wish ever to be reprinted (Inquisiciones and El tamaño de mi esperanza); reissuing old titles in Spanish in an improved format; and, perhaps most flagrantly, hiring the literary agent Andrew Wylie to orchestrate a centenary (Borges was born in 1899), by bringing together his vastly influential oeuvre in English under the imprimatur of a single publishing house and in new translations. Viking, already one of Borges's English-language publishers, is the beneficiary of this re-accommodation. It has responded with an ambitious multi-volume campaign. Collected Fictions, a volume of short stories translated by Andrew Hurley, is its first instalment; it is to be followed by a selection of Borges's poems edited by Alexander Coleman, which will mix existing translations by Merwin, Reid and others with fresh ones; then there is to be a selection by Eliot Weinberger of retranslated essays; and, finally, the project is to be crowned by a major biography (one of several in progress) by Edwin Williamson.

Such compartmentalization seems wrong. After all, this most cosmopolitan of Argentinians, whose personal life was as ordinary as his mind was extraordinary, spent his career advancing the promiscuity of literary genres: “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote” is modelled as an éloge; “The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim”, which first appeared as a book-review of a work which Borges claimed had just been reprinted in London with a foreword by Dorothy L. Sayers, so inspired its readers that more than one requested the book from its publisher Victor Gollancz; and many parts of The Maker (1960) read more like poetry than prose. The overall order of the Viking project seems to be an idiosyncratic gesture of the Anglo-Saxon mind. Bookshops in the Hispanic hemisphere do not separate their literature sections into fiction, non-fiction and poetry; they simply organize titles alphabetically. The authoritative three-volume Obras Completas, on which Andrew Hurley's translation is based, is structured chronologically, not generically. This, I am convinced, is the approach to Borges that does him justice. He himself was instrumental in shaping the Spanish edition.

How authoritative that Spanish edition really is is another issue. Time has cleansed errors and other infelicities from it, but it still has no overseeing editor's mind, no explanation of its rationale and no footnotes. There is a particular danger in producing a scholarly version of Borges. Should an author who delighted in quoting obscure, tangential sources, one engaged in selecting his own audience by alienating those uninitiated in the labyrinths of metaphysics, be clarified, and therefore made more accessible than he ever wanted to be? The excellent two-volume Pléiade edition—the second one still in preparation—edited by Jean-Pierre Bernès, is by far the most intelligent edition available, including as it does a sharp introduction, well-informed notes and variants. Without being intrusive, it is the closest readers have to a scholarly edition. (It includes the translations done by Roger Caillois, which were responsible for Borges's early reputation in France and much of Europe.)

One criticism of the Emecé Spanish volumes, which are ordered sequentially, can also be applied to the projected Viking edition. Borges loved Emerson, Oscar Wilde, Hawthorne, Melville and Stevenson. The frequency with which he quotes Shakespeare outdoes that of any other individual author with the exception of God. Shouldn't the English reader have a better thought-out, better-informed edition? Shouldn't the language as a whole pay him a more suitable tribute? This is not to say that Hurley's efforts at retranslating Borges are not anything but heroic. His versions are concise, elegant, crystalline, if also self-conscious. The mere thought of producing a version that will compete with Donald Yates's “Emma Zunz” and “Death and the Compass” is daunting.

Hurley succeeds quite well in capturing the stiffness of the original. Minor lapses do occur, but the overall style is admirable. The fear of sounding too much like his predecessors makes him take unwonted routes sometimes, but his command of the language is enrapturing. He is, however, expansive and sometimes needlessly verbose. Compare the following portions of “Borges and I”. First Irby's translation:

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs not to one, not even to him, but rather to the language and tradition. … Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

Now Hurley's:

It's Borges, the other one, that things happen to. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause—mechanically now, perhaps—to gaze at the arch of an entryway and its inner door; news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson; Borges shares those preferences, but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accoutrements of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that our relationship is hostile—I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges can spin out his literature, and that literature is my justification. I willingly admit that he has written a number of sound pages, but those pages will not save me, perhaps because the good in them no longer belongs to any individual, not even to that other man, but rather to language itself, or to tradition. … Years ago I tried to free myself from him, and I moved on from the mythologies of the slums and outskirts of the city to games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now, and I shall have to think up other things. So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away—and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.

I am not sure which of us it is that's writing this page.

Hurley uses twenty-six words more than Irby; he mistakes siglo dieciocho for the seventeenth century; has a preference for ambiguous synonyms remote from the original (“accoutrements,” “point-counterpoint,” “fugue”); italicizes where the meaning is already clear; and editorializes too much. But the result is a worthy one; he does not attenuate but emphasizes the affectation of the whole translating enterprise and, as a result, makes Borges more baroque. Hurley's English readers can appreciate the Argentinian writer from behind a thicker mantilla, thus allowing for a better appreciation of his convex meanings and bright colours.

A few of his title choices make me uncomfortable: “Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities”, “Funes, His Memory”, “The Interloper”. There are, on the other hand, lucid clarifications in his version, such as the title of Jaromir Hladík's book in “The Secret Miracle”. Harriet de Onís, its previous translator, believed he had written a single book, when actually the title and subtitle refer to two different works, The Enemies and Vindication of Eternity. And some of Hurley's renderings are simply superior, as in “The Aleph” which for the most part is given cleaner treatment. Here is the opening sentence:

The same sweltering morning that Beatriz Viterrbo died, after an imperious confrontation with her illness in which she had never for an instant stooped to either sentimentality or fear, I noticed that a new advertisement for some cigarettes or other (blondes, I believe they were) had been posted on the iron billboards of the Plaza Constitución; the fact deeply grieved me, for I realized that the vast, unceasing universe was already growing away from her, and that this change was but the first in an infinite series.

The translation of the Aleph itself is a tour de force:

[I] saw the Aleph from everywhere at once, saw the earth in the Aleph, and the Aleph once more in the earth and the earth in the Aleph, saw my face and my viscera, saw your face, and I felt dizzy, and I wept, because my eyes had seen that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no man has ever truly looked upon: the inconceivable universe.

A fine translator is not only as close as we get to the perfect reader but also the author's unremitting attorney. Perhaps the most instructive example of Hurley's re-elucidation is his approach to “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote”, a pseudo-essay in which a translator appears as protagonist:

It is a revelation to compare Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for example, wrote the following:

(Part 1, Chapter IX)

… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future's counsellor.

This catalogue of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the “ingenious layman” Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard on the other hand writes:

… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future's counsellor.

History the mother of truth!—the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as delving into reality but as the very fount of reality. Historical truth for Menard is not “what happened”; it is what we believe happened.

The same paragraph in James E. Irby's translation reads:

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astonishing. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what happened; it is what we judge to have happened.

Again Hurley needs more words to deliver the job. His explanation of Menard's triumph is none the less unequivocal: “delving into reality” is more cryptic than “an inquiry into reality; “a fount of reality” darkens the easier “origin”. Hurley's view of reality is as a deep reservoir, whereas Irby sees it as a reflecting surface.

Aside from the translation, Hurley has been trusted by Viking with an editorial job he only half-heartedly endorses. He acknowledges his intention to be the production of a “reader's edition”, neither an annotated nor a scholarly one, but he fills the last forty pages with a stream of dispensable notes. “These notes”, he writes, “are intended only to supply information that a Latin American (and especially Argentinian or Uruguayan) reader would have and that would color his or her reading of the stories.” But for the most part, they are inadequate and unbalanced, lengthy explanations of a character's name, partial listings of secondary studies on Borges.

All in all, this refurbishing of Borges, while the result of an ill-thought-out marketing exercise, is quite attractive and can be recommended. Its full triumph will only come, however, if Viking allows its other translations—at least the volume Labyrinths, first published in Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics in 1970 and reprinted two dozen times since then—to remain available, for Borges in perfect order is Borges distorted. But even if they aren't, even if order gives the appearance of triumph, I am not worried; an intelligent reader learns to discriminate.

Thus, the Borges tradition marches on. I have heard its source depicted, bizarrely, and I'm afraid without a nod to Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz, as the most esteemed export from Latin America since cacao—esteemed first and foremost abroad, where it has been masterfully repackaged as an invaluable parable of the whole of Western civilization, and then sold back to the Americas at a much higher price. This reversal angers some, but it has no real consequence, for quality cannot be copyrighted. Besides, didn't this most un-Argentinian of Argentinians once suggest that originals have a way of being unfaithful to their translations? And yet, only in translation is Borges truly appreciated.