Volume 25, Number 21 & 22 · January 25, 1979
In Borges's Labyrinth
By Alastair Reid
Jorge Luis Borges, A Literary Biography
by Emir Rodriguez Monegal
Dutton, 502 pp., $19.95
Borges has come from Spanish into English in a rather haphazard fashion. His work first appeared piecemeal in the Fifties, a poem here, a story there, until, in 1961, he shared the International Publishers Prize with Samuel Beckett, a recognition that propelled two volumes of his work into English, translated by various hands—first, Ficciones, his most important volume of stories, and then Labyrinths, a selection of poems, essays, and stories. Even so, his writings had no chronology and, as so often happens in Borges's case, disparate critics would grab possibly a single story of his and run with it to unlikely latitudes. The recurring ironies and the tangible paradoxes in his work led him to be invoked, often along with Nabokov, in a variety of misleading ways. He became distortingly fashionable and, as in Spanish, there sprang up around him a thicket of criticism far exceeding the small compass of his own writing. His books continued to come out haphazardly in translation, and Borges himself appeared on the scene, a frail, blind, and somehow heroic figure, speaking his courteous English and lending himself to interviews on all sides with an acquiescent modesty that both charmed and teased interviewers and readers.
Review, 3356 words
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