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Text: copyright © 2013 (Eric Brotchie). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Image: (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Andrea Reyes Elizondo.
Illustration: Andrea Reyes Elizondo.
Labyrinths:
Taking a chance on translated metafiction
eric brotchie Lovers of books come in many guises. Jorge Luis Borges, the author of Labyrinths, is doubtless one of the most celebrated bibliophiles. A keen and insightful student of history, a journalist, an editor, a translator, a librarian, a poet, a teacher, an essayist and a traveller, the man we know today as Borges loved books, and lived them in equal measure.
More than any of Borges’ other collections, Labyrinths represents the intersection of the author’s other works. Earlier compilations, notably Anthony Bonner’s 1962 translation of Borges’ eminent Ficciones (1944), fall short of appreciating the full scope of Borges’ vision, one which combines literary history, sociology, and a range of political and economic discussions which perhaps ground Borges beyond his oft touted metaphysical persona. Collected Fictions (1998), translated by Andrew Hurley, follows the same pattern, unfortunately focusing more on Borges’ fictional philosophical musings and perhaps mislaying his literary contributions to his native Argentina, its cultures and traditions, which offer a commanding critique of the South American nation. That being said, if there is anything missing from Labyrinths it is excerpts from Borges’ poetry, which the author had also mastered.
It is in the sharp juxtaposition and interplay between physics and metaphysics that the book finds both its main inspiration and its socio-historical importance. Argentina was a murky political battleground for most of Borges’
life; it was only in 1980 that he was able to speak out against the injustices of war, fascism, poverty and the fanatical factionalism that had plagued his country for so long. Literature in Argentina in Borges’ time was indeed dominated by traditionalist writers. Seeking to present to the international community a national homeland of realism, class division, the countryside, hardship and struggle, Borges’ imaginations fell outside of the traditionalists’ scope and his writing suffered because of it. Somewhat ironically, his musings have
retrospectively enabled Argentinians to understand their turbulent history more
founded in 1936 by James Laughlin (a then twenty-two-year-old Harvard student) under the guidance of Ezra Pound, whom he later published extensively. Coming off the back of strong successes in successive decades with Tennessee Williams’
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1951) and Henry Miller’s Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1960), New Directions had successfully navigated the Beat Generation craze and was seeking talent outside the US in its statement to provide ‘a place where experimentalists could test their inventions by publication’. With Kennedy in office, a Cold War mentality focusing US attention on the increasingly unstable Cuban Missile Crisis, and Latin American communism at large, the time was ripe to pluck Borges from the relative literary ether. Penguin bought the rights to publish in the United Kingdom relatively late in 1970 and have published Labyrinths in a number of softback serials since.
New Directions entrusted the first edition of Labyrinths to two young academics who had previously been graduate school classmates at Michigan State University, Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. Irby was brought into the project by Yates, whose dissertation on South American detective fiction had led to considerable correspondence with Argentinian writers, who pointed him in the direction of Borges. At the time, Irby was completing his own dissertation on the literary structures of Borges’ short stories. Both men contributed to the translation, although Irby’s particularly scholarly interest in Borges himself was of greater impact to the final copy provided for Labyrinths. Both men went on to become long-standing and subsequently emeritus professors in Spanish American Literature (Yates) and Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures (Irby), the latter holding this post at Princeton University.
The initial publication of Labyrinths in 1962 was met with a degree of uncertainty in the Western audience it was designed for. In The Saturday Review in New York, Saul Maloff explained the jumbled collection as rational nightmares,
‘eerie emblems of the world we apprehend by the imagination’. Time could also do little more, it appears, than exhibit a series of clichés about Borges’ style, telling readers the stories ‘take place in a world that is half commonplace, half fantastic. Dreams occur within dreams; time loses its significance. What counts is a momentary impulse and observation’. In a far more considered article published in 1964, the second year of its own illustrious history, Paul de Man in The New York Review of Books wrote ‘the success of these poetic worlds is expressed by their all-inclusive and ordered wholeness. Their deceitful nature is harder to define, but essential to an understanding of Borges’. Analysis of these texts, it appears, did little to capture the imagination of the public.
Since then, however, there has been more widespread recognition of Borges, and Labyrinths has become a seminal, if not perfect, edition to a better understanding of Borges, his life and works, and the indelible mark he has left on
Argentinian and world literature. In 2007 a remastered translation by Yates and Irby was published, forty-five years after the first edition, with a new introduction by contemporary speculative fiction novelist William Gibson (the original editions are introduced by André Maurois of the Académie française). Such an edition re-emphasises the importance of Labyrinths and its continuing importance as an artefact of literature in a world increasingly demanding a metaphysical perspective.
Bibliography
“Books: Greatest In Spanish.” Time Magazine. 22 June 1962. 11 Nov. 2012 <http://www.time.com/time/
magazine/article/0,9171,870003,00.html>.
Maloff, S. “Eerie Emblems of a Bizarre, Terrifying World.” The Saturday Review. 2 June 1962: 34. 11 Nov.
2012 <http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1962jun02-00034>.
Man, P. de. “A Modern Master.” The New York Review of Books. 19 November 1964. 11 Nov. 2012 <http://
www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1964/nov/19/a-modern-master/>.
Yates, D. “Remembering Borges by Donald Yates.” John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Newsletter. June 2012. 11 Nov. 2012 <http://www.gf.org/news-events/Newsletter-June-2012/
Remembering-Borges-by-Donald-Yates>.
