Collected Fictions By Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley Viking. 565 pp. $40 Reviewed by Michael Dirda, a writer and editor for Book World. Sunday, September 27, 1998; Page X05

As soon as he returned home, the Arab gathered his armies, attacked Babylonia, and razed its castles. After capturing his rival, he tied him across a camel and led him into the desert for three days. Then he spoke:

" 'In Babylonia didst thou attempt to make me lose my way in a labyrinth of brass with many stairways, doors and walls; now the Powerful One has seen fit to allow me to show thee mine, which has no stairways to climb, nor doors to force, nor wearying galleries to wander through, nor walls to impede thy passage.'

"Then he untied the bonds of the king of Babylonia and abandoned him in the middle of the desert, where he died of hunger and thirst."

This suggestive story, "The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths," appears in Borges's collection, "The Aleph" (1949), and may be read as a farewell to the kind of "ficciones" that, translated into English and other languages, brought the Argentine writer world renown in his blind, old age. In fact, from the 1960s until his death, Borges often pooh-poohed his most famous works, referring to himself as having become "a kind of factory producing stories about mistaken identity, about mazes, about tigers, about mirrors, about people being somebody else, or about all men being the same man or one man being his own mortal foe. . . . there's no reason why I should go on doing it."

Instead he pressed the claims of his poetry, of prose-poems like "The Maker" (a meditation on Homer discovering his vocation), and of naturalistic tales of Buenos Aires low-life (especially the early "Man on Pink Corner") and the late parables of gaucho violence such as "The Interloper." In this last, two brothers, finding their lives upset by their growing rivalry for the woman they share, kill her to restore fraternal harmony.

Yet as much as one honors the aesthetic of simplicity, and as much as one would like to point to some neglected masterpiece in the second half of this nearly 600-page book, the great Borges stories remain those of the period 1938 to 1952, those of "Fictions" (1944) and "The Aleph." In these antiquarian fairy tales and mysteries, one finds that distinctive style in which, as Borges once observed, "every detail is an omen and a cause." During a dozen or so years this shortsighted, mother-coddled librarian managed to turn metaphysics into a branch of fantasy.

In "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" – generally regarded as his greatest story – "the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia" leads to the discovery of an alien world, one that seems to be gradually contaminating the Earth with its artifacts and culture. In "Funes, His Memory" Borges tells us about the unfortunate Funes who, following an accident, discovers that he can no longer forget anything. In some instances, even a story's title shimmers with a sinister attractiveness: "The Garden of Forking Paths," "The Lottery in Babylon," "The Immortal." To explain the character of these often essay-like fictions, Borges asserted that it was madness to compose a vast book, to set out "in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them." So, in "Pierre Menard, Author of the 'Quixote,'" a somewhat obnoxious scholar simply presents a brief memoir, with bibliography, of a minor French writer who decides to rewrite – no, re-create! – "Don Quixote" word for word.

Borges is sometimes compared with Kafka (whom he translated). But where the Prague fabulist evokes an ominous sense of claustrophobia – the door will never open, the trial will never take place – the Argentine prefers to induce a sudden feeling of vertigo. In the basement of a pedantic, self-important buffoon, Borges discovers the Aleph, a small, shining sphere in which one can see everything that exists. The cursed Zahir, in the story of that name, takes the form of a common 20-centavo coin which the narrator learns is utterly unforgettable; it will gradually drive out every idea from a person's mind until nothing is left but the image of the Zahir. Similarly, one shudders before the overwhelming sensual overload suffered by Funes, who "could continually perceive the quiet advances of corruption, of tooth decay, of weariness . . . He was the solitary, lucid spectator of a multiform, momentaneous and almost unbearably precise world." Finally, in a particularly vertiginous flourish, at the very end of "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain" – the account of an experimental writer obsessed with mathematical regression – we are told by Borges that from (the imaginary) Quain's "The Rose of Yesterday" he had "ingenuously" extracted "The Circular Ruins," a real story that can be found "in my book The Garden of Forking Paths." Yet that is the very book we are now reading. And it also contains "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain." Surprisingly, Borges probably never saw the pictorial work of M.C. Escher.

The first collections of Borges in English appeared in 1962 – "Ficciones," translated by Anthony Kerrigan, and "Labyrinths," a selection of stories and essays, translated by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. These books, particularly the latter, soon became standbys of college campuses. In the 1970s, though, Borges took a liking to a young scholar named Norman Thomas di Giovanni, and the pair embarked on a series of translations together, first of the poetry, then of old and new works. The most important of these was certainly "The Aleph," which appeared with a substantial autobiographical essay. That volume and its companions were intended to provide definitive English versions, but Borges unexpectedly fell out with his zealous American translator.

Then, just before his death in 1986, Borges married a young Japanese Argentine woman named Marie Kodama, to whom he left control of his entire estate. A controversial figure, Kodama has since established a Borges foundation and entered into an agreement with Viking to publish, in three volumes, her late husband's major works. "Collected Fictions" is the first installment. Borges enthusiasts hoping for an English equivalent to the French Pleiade edition of the writer, which brims with notes, bibliographical information, appendices and other scholarly aids, will be disappointed. This is basically a reader's edition, with only a few clarifying endnotes chosen seemingly at random. Hurley will tell you, for instance, that Leopoldo Lugones is a famous Latin American poet, but he expects everyone to remember that Josef Korzienowski is the Polish name of Joseph Conrad.

Mario Vargas Llosa has said that Borges demonstrated that Spanish could avoid its tendency to baroque excess and become an instrument of precision and conciseness. In an afterword to the "Collected Fictions," Hurley – a professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico – reminds us that Borges nonetheless often uses odd-sounding adjectives, sometimes to emphasize their Latinate roots. For example, the first sentence of "The Circular Ruins" is, in Hurley's version, "No one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night." That use of "unanimous," we eventually realize, should make us think of words like anima (soul) and animate (enliven), both central to this story. I think that Hurley is exceptionally attentive to such nuances. When reading "The Aleph," I paused at this sentence: "He holds some sort of subordinate position in an illegible library in the outskirts toward the south of the city." I checked the Spanish original and indeed the phrase is "una biblioteca ilegible." Di Giovanni's version is similar, though he recasts the sentence in the past tense and adds a bit of clarifying detail: "He held a minor position in an unreadable library out on the edge of the Southside of Buenos Aires."

Still, there are some oddities in Hurley, recognizable even for those of us with minimal Spanish. When Borges sets down in "El Muerto" ("The Dead Man") the phrase "atributos o adjetivos" why does Hurley translate "attributes (adjectives)," which looks like a mistake, instead of using "or"? In his version of "The Immortal" Hurley writes "With the depraved water of the watering holes others drank up insanity and death," while Irby, in "Labyrinths," renders this "in the corrupted water of the cisterns others drank madness and death." The Spanish actually reads "en el agua depravada de las cisternas otros bebieron la locura y la muerte." So Hurley keeps the odd-sounding "depraved" rather than smoothing it to the more sensible "corrupted," but how did the cisterns become watering holes? And in "The Zahir," a story from the 1940s, would a person really say "tackiness"?

Serious students of Borges must obviously still learn their Spanish, but the rest of us can be reasonably satisfied with Hurley's "Collected Fictions." Yet I wish it had been a fuller, more scholarly book, its versions more convincingly definitive and superior to earlier ones. That said, it nonetheless contains the major work of probably the most influential Latin American writer of the century, from the early tales of "iniquity" to such classics as the subtly humorous "Death and the Compass" and the blatantly despairing "Library of Babel" to all the very last stories. If you haven't ever read them, here's your chance.