Vagabond book reviews
Collected Fictions
by Jorge Luis Borges
translated by translated by Andrew Hurley
- Penguin, 1999
- ISBN: 0140286802
- More information & reviews
There are not many constants in your life but here is one – people complain about translations. “Grievous action!” they cry. “His style is buried!” I don’t know what Borges would say about this volume. I do know he relished the idea of fiction as a maze, sentences as shifting corridors from which the reader could never fully return. Perhaps we should view translations as yet another passage in that maze.
I don’t know why I carried on this way about translations; I think I have nothing to say about this book. I first read it in 2000 and am still speechless.
– CL
In the vestibule there is a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearences. Men often infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite—if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication? I prefer to dream that burnished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite…
– from The Library of Babel
Next review: Collected Poems 1920–1954
