Jorge Luis Borges - COLLECTED Ficciones

Translated by

Andrew Hurley

T

Title: Collected Ficciones

Author : Jorge Luis Borges

Publishers:

Tingle Books

Jorge Luis Borges

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The exercises in narrative prose that constitute this book were performed from 1933 to 1934. They are derived, I think, from my re- readings of Stevenson and Chesterton, from the first films of von Sternberg, and perhaps from a particular biography of the Argentine poet Evaristo Carriego. *Certain techniques are overused: mismatched lists, abrupt transitions, the reduction of a person's entire life to two or three scenes. (It is this pictorial intention that also governs the story called Man on Pink Corner.) The stories are not, nor do they attempt to be, psychological.

With regard to the examples of magic that close the book, the only right I can claim to them is that of translator and reader. I sometimes think that good readers are poets as singular, and as awesome, as great authors them-selves. No one will deny that the pieces attributed by Valryto his pluperfect Monsieur Edmond Testeare worth notoriously less than those of his wife and friends.

Reading, meanwhile, is an activity subsequent to writingmore re-signed, more civil, more intellectual.

J.L.B. Buenos Aires May 27,1935

I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self- caricature. In vain did Andrew Lang attempt, in the eighteen-eighties, to imitate Pope's Odyssey; it was already a parody, and so defeated the parodist's attempt to exaggerate its tautness. Baroco was a term used for one of the modes of syllogistic reasoning; the eighteenth century applied it to certain abuses in seventeenth-century architecture and painting. I would venture to say that the baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources. The baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has said that all intellectual labor is inherently humorous. This humor is unintentional in the works of Baltasar Gradan *but intentional, even indulged, in the works of John Donne.

The extravagant title of this volume proclaims its baroque nature. Softening its pages would have been equivalent to destroying them; that is why I have preferred, this once, to invoke the biblical words quod scripsi, scripsi (John 19:22), and simply reprint them, twenty years later, as they first appeared. They are the irresponsible sport of a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories, and so amused himself by changing and distorting (sometimes without aesthetic justification) the stories of other men. From these ambiguous exercises, he went on to the arduous composition of a straightforward short storyMan on Pink Cornerwhich he signed with the name of one of his grandfather's grandfathers, Francisco Bustos; the story has had a remarkable, and quite mysterious, success.

In that text, which is written in the accents of the toughs and petty criminals of the Buenos Aires underworld, the reader will note that I have interpolated a number of cultured words - entrails, conversion , etc. I did this because the tough, the knife fighter, the thug, the type that Buenos Aires calls the compadre or compadrito, aspires to refinement, or (and this reason excludes the other, but it may be the true one) because compadres are individuals and don't always talk like The Compadre, which is a Platonic ideal.

The learned doctors of the Great Vehicle teach us that the essential characteristic of the universe is its emptiness. They are certainly correct with respect to the tiny part of the universe that is this book.

Gallows and pirates fill its pages, and that word iniquity strikes awe in its title, but under all the storm and lightning, there is nothing. It is all just appearance, a surface of images which is why readers may, perhaps, enjoy it. The man who made it was a pitiable sort of creature, but he found amusement in writing it; it is to be hoped that some echo of that pleasure may reach its readers.

In the section called Et cetera I have added three new pieces.

J.L.B. The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell

Contents

The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro 24

Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities 46

For Anglica Ocampo 72

Man on Pink Corner 81

Et cetera For Nstor Ibarra 93

THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS (1941) 113

Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius 115

The Circular Ruins 157

The Garden of Forking Paths 189

ARTIFICES (1944) 202

The Secret Miracle 240

Three Versions of Judas 248

The End 255

The South 263

The Aleph (1949) 272

I 273

II 276

III 282

IV 285

For Cecilia Ingenieros 292

Surez fires, almost with a sneer. 300

Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden 311

For Ulrike von Khlmann 316

The House of Asterion 327

For Maria Mosquera Eastman 331

Averros' Search 347

Thou too art, oh palm! On this foreign soil... 356

The Zahir 359

For Wally Zenner 369

For Etna Risso Platero 375

The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths 386

The Wait 388

The Man on the Threshold 393

The Aleph 400

Leviathan, IV:46 401

For Estela Canto 418

The Maker (1960) 420

Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram. 421

The Maker* 422

Dreamtigers* 425

A Dialog About a Dialog 426

Argumentum Ornithologicum 429

The Captive 430

The Mountebank 431

Delia Elena San Marco 433

A Dialog Between Dead Men 434

The Plot 437

A Problem 438

The Yellow Rose 440

The Witness 441

Martn Fierro 443

Mutations 445

Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote 447

Devoto Clinic January 1955 448

Parable of the Palace 450

Everything and Nothing* 452

Ragnark 455

Inferno, I, 32 457

Borges And I 459

MUSEUM 461

In Memoriam, J.F.K. 462

Afterword 463

J.L.B. Buenos Aires, October 31,1960 464

J.L.B. Buenos Aires, June 24,1969 467

Pedro Salvadores 470

Legend 473

A Prayer 474

His End and His Beginning 476

Brodie's Report (1970) 478

J.L.B. Buenos Aires, April 19, 1970 482

Unworthy 488

The Story from Rosendo Jurez 496

The Encounter 504

Juan Muraa 512

The Elderly Lady 519

The Duel 527

The Other Duel 534

Guayaquil* 540

The Gospel According to Mark 550

Brodie's Report 557

The Book of Sand (1975) 566

Ulrikke 576

The Congress 581

There Are More Things 602

The Sect of the Thirty 610

The Night of the Gifts 614

The Mirror and the Mask 621

Undr 626

A Weary Man's Utopia 632

The Bribe 640

Avelino Arredondo 648

The Disk 654

The Book of Sand 657

Afterword 663

J.LB. Buenos Aires, Februarys, 1975 666

Blue Tigers 674

The Rose of Paracelsus 687

Andrew Hurley San Juan, Puerto Rico June 1998 710

Andrew Hurley San Juan, Puerto Rico June 1998 713

Preface to the First Edition 715

Preface to the 1954 Edition 716