Volume 3, Number 7 · November 19, 1964
A Modern Master
By Paul de Man
Dreamtigers
by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Mildred Boyer, by Harold Morland
University of Texas, 95 pp., $4.00
Labyrinths
by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Donald Yates, by James E. Irby
New Directions, 260 pp., $1.90 (paper)
Although he has been writing poems, stories, and critical essays of the highest quality since 1923, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges is still much better known in Latin America than in the U. S. For the translator of John Peale Bishop. Hart Crane. E. E. Cummings. William Faulkner, Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Penn Warren, and Wallace Stevens, this neglect is somewhat unfair. There are signs however, that he is being discovered in this country with some of the same enthusiasm that greeted him in France, where he received major critical attention, and has been very well translated. Several volumes of translations in English have recently appeared, including a fine edition of his most recent book El hacedor (Dreamtigers)[1] and a new edition of Labyrinths, which first appeared in 1962. American and English critics have called him one of the greatest writers alive today, but have not as yet (so far as I know) made substantial contributions to the interpreation of his work. There are good reasons for this delay. Borges is a complex writer, particularly difficult to place. Commentators cast around in vain for suitable points of comparison and his own avowed literary admirations add to the confusion. Like Kafka and contemporary French existential writers, he is often seen as a moralist, in rebellion against the times. But such an approach is misleading.
Review, 3175 words
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