Reading Borges backward

SEARCHING for something to do in the wake of the horrible events of September 11, which seem to have left everyone I know in a sort of sub-aqueous state, I decided to re-read the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. In his randomly violent, unexpected, sparse, metaphysical stories I hoped I would find something that would give me a way of managing my disquiet, a path out of the horrifying images that played across our TV screens. It was a technique I had used to work my way out of the despair that a lot of us felt when the Babri Masjid was torn down, and Bombay blew up, and while music had taken me out of those unforgivable acts perpetrated by some of the filthiest elements of our race, this time I reached for Borges. Specifically, the latest (and, in my view, the finest, conflict of interest notwithstanding) translation of his fiction by Andrew Hurley, which was published by Viking three years ago. I have written about the massive Viking project to translate Borges in these columns, so to do something different I decided to read Borges backward - that is to say I started with stories in his last collection, Shakespeare's Memory published in 1983, three years before his death at the age of 87, and working my way forward to his first collection, A Universal History of Iniquity published in 1935.

In his introduction to his brilliant anthology of international short stories, The Art of the Tale, Daniel Halpern writes that many people believe that the age of the modern short story coincided with the translation of Borges's Ficciones. If this is disputable, and I for one do not see why, then there is no denying the contention that the Argentine story-teller is one of the top two or three short story writers of our time. One measure of his greatness may be noted from the fact that as many as 17 translators have translated his works. I have read some of these translations, but this is the first time that all the stories have been rendered into English in a single volume. The translation was published to coincide with Borges's birth centenary as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the first appearance of Borges in English in 1948.

There are 101 stories in this volume, taken from the seven collections Borges published - namely A Universal History of Iniquity, 1935, Fictions, 1944 (which included The Garden of Forking Paths, 1941, and Artifices, 1944), The Aleph, 1949, The Maker, 1960 (which included Museum), In Praise of Darkness, 1969, Brodie's Report, 1970, The Book of Sand, 1975 and Shakespeare's Memory, 1983.

As I have said, I began working my way through these stories in reverse order of their appearance. In a way that had not occurred to me before I began, this appealed to me, for some of my favourite stories appeared in the later collections, when Borges, that master of economy and precision had dispensed with the baroque style of his earliest works.

As everyone who has read the master knows, there were some themes that preoccupied Borges throughout his life - chance, casual violence, the presence of the Other, the nature of language, imaginary worlds, metafiction, labyrinths, dreams, metaphysics and most famously, tigers. He swore by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Schopenhauer, de Quincey, Mauthner, Shaw, Chesterton, Leon Bloy, and Kipling (who gave him a window into India which he continually visits in these stories although I am unaware if he actually set foot here). As might be imagined the writers who influenced him as well as his own obsessions have resulted in his stories resembling almost nothing in contemporary fiction - they are fantastical, bizarre, philosophical, almost absurdly learned. There are detective stories that read like nothing in the genre, fables that are so novel that you have to adjust your reference points in order to understand them, conjured up worlds that the best fantasy writers would have difficulty conceiving, reviews of imaginary books that are so plausible you have to stop yourself from looking them up and endlessly mesmerising literary puzzles and speculations that demand to be pondered over in some tranquil hour.

I do not intend to review the stories in exhaustive detail but will limit myself to my favourite four - "Blue Tigers" from Shakespeare's Memory, "The Book of Sand" taken from the eponymous The Book of Sand, "The Gospel According to Mark" from Brodie's Report and "The South" from Artifices. The last two, incidentally, were in the author's view, his best stories.

"Blue Tigers" combines two of Borges's favourite subjects - tigers and the metaphysical world. The action is set in North India (which bears more than a passing resemblance to Kipling's India). In the story the author writes,

"I have always been drawn to the tiger. I know that as a boy I would linger before one particular cage at the zoo; the others held no interest for one. As the years passed, this strange fascination never left me." Early in 1904, the narrator (a university professor in Lahore) receives news that a new variety of tiger, a blue tiger, has been discovered in a village some miles distant from the Ganga. When he gets there, a series of events take place that must rank among Borges's finest moments as a fantasist. It is a story I have always loved.

I have The Book of Sand in which the central character comes to possess a magical object that at first sight is worth coveting, but whose cost finally proves too much to bear.

"The Gospel According to Mark" is a terrifying story. It is one of the stories which possess a Borges hallmark, the surprise ending, in the very last paragraph or sentence. A bookish young man from the city goes to the country, where he gets embroiled in some decidedly strange goings-on. It is a perfect short story, brilliantly translated.

"The South" is somewhat similar, with a man transplanted from his natural environment into a strange place that will prove his undoing. An early effort, it is not as accomplished as "The Gospel According to Mark" but it is nevertheless a great story.

I would like to end by quoting a short short story, a fragment really, that not only gives the reader a glimpse into another of Borges's obsessions, that of the other, but also shows off the excellence of this translation :

"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, 17th-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. So my life is a point- counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling way - 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".

DAVID DAVIDAR

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