Хорхе Борхес - Collected Fictions

PENGUIN BOOKS

COLLECTED FICTIONS

Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 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 Publishers’ 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 is Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, where he also teaches in the Translation Program. He has translated over two dozen book-length works of history, poetry, and fiction, including novels by Reinaldo Arenas. Ernesto Sabato, Fernando Arrabal, Gustavo Sainz, and Edgardo Rodriguez Julia and stories by Ana Lydia Vega, and many shorter works.

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)

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)

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

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, 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 Juárez

The Encounter

Juan Muraña

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

I inscribe this book to S. D. English, innumerable, and an Angel. Also: I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.

Preface to the First Edition

The exercises in narrative prose that constitute this book were performed from 1933 to 1934. They are derived, I think, from my rereadings of Stevenson and Chesterton, from the first films of von Sternberg, and perhaps from a particular biography of the Argentine poet Evaristo Carriego.* Certain techniques are overused: mismatched lists, abrupt transitions, the reduction of a person's entire life to two or three scenes. (It is this pictorial intention that also governs the story called "Man on Pink Corner.") The stories are not, nor do they attempt to be, psychological.

With regard to the examples of magic that close the book, the only right I can claim to them is that of translator and reader. I sometimes think that good readers are poets as singular, and as awesome, as great authors themselves. No one will deny that the pieces attributed by Valéry to his pluperfect Monsieur Edmond Teste are worth notoriously less than those of his wife and friends.

Reading, meanwhile, is an activity subsequent to writing—more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

J. L. B.

Buenos Aires May 27,1935

Preface to the 1954 Edition

I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. In vain did Andrew Lang attempt, in the eighteen-eighties, to imitate Pope's Odyssey; it was already a parody, and so defeated the parodist's attempt to exaggerate its tautness. "Baroco" was a term used for one of the modes of syllogistic reasoning; the eighteenth century applied it to certain abuses in seventeenth-century architecture and painting. I would venture to say that the baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources. The baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has said that all intellectual labor is inherently humorous. This humor is unintentional in the works of Baltasar Gracian* but intentional, even indulged, in the works of John Donne.

The extravagant title of this volume proclaims its baroque nature. Softening its pages would have been equivalent to destroying them; that is why I have preferred, this once, to invoke the biblical words quod scripsi, scripsi (John 19:22), and simply reprint them, twenty years later, as they first appeared. They are the irresponsible sport of a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories, and so amused himself by changing and distorting (sometimes without aesthetic justification) the stories of other men. From these ambiguous exercises, he went on to the arduous composition of a straightforward short story—"Man on Pink Corner"—which he signed with the name of one of his grandfather's grandfathers, Francisco Bustos; the story has had a remarkable, and quite mysterious, success.