Labyrinths is a collection of short stories and essays by the writer Jorge Luis Borges. It was translated into English, published soon after Borges won the International Publishers' Prize with Samuel Beckett. It includes, among other stories, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "The Garden of Forking Paths", and "The Library of Babel", three of Borges' most famous stories. The edition, published only in English, was edited by James E. Irby and Donald A. Yates, with a Preface by André Maurois of the Académie française and an Introduction by Professor Irby.
Contents
Besides the different stories and essays by Borges described below, the book also contains a preface and introduction, an elegy for Borges, a chronology of Borges' life, and a bibliography.
in the Preface of Labyrinths provides a critical overview of Borges' work. He makes three main points: first, that Borges was highly influenced by his wide and obscure reading, making the assertion that, "His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound ― he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas ― but it is vast.". Second, that Borges has many precursors, but is in the end, almost entirely unique - "... once these relationships are pointed out, it must be said that Borges's style is, like his thought, highly original". In this Maurois notes that to some extent, "'Every writer creates his own precursors'", finally noting that Borges' stories can be described by "'an absurd postulate developed to its extreme logical consequences'", making "a game for mind". This, he claims, reflects Borges' interest in metaphysics and philosophy, and leads to his style of magical realism.
Translators
Labyrinths principal editor and translator is James Irby, Professor Emeritus at Princeton. Irby's work on Labyrinths includes the book's Introduction and translations of the stories Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, The Circular Ruins, The Library of Babel, Funes the Memorious, Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, Three Versions of Judas, The Sect of the Phoenix, The Immortal,The Theologians, Story of the Warrior and the Captive, The House of Asterion, Averroes' Search, and The Waiting: fourteen titles in all, and by far the lion's share of the translation work for the book. The balance of the translations are by Donald A. Yates, Professor Emeritus of Spanish American literature at Michigan State University; John M. Fein, Professor Emeritus, Spanish, in the Department of Romance Languages at Duke University; Julian Palley of the University of California, Irvine; and author and prize-winning translator Harriet de Onís.
On the book's release, the journalist Mildred Adams at The New York Times wrote of it, "The translations, made by various hands, are not only good they are downright enjoyable. They make it finally possible, after all these years, to give Borges his due and to add North Americans to his wide public." In 2012, the novelist Jake Arnott observed in The Independent, "Like many of my generation, I first encountered him in the Penguin edition of Labyrinths, a collection of stories, essays, parables and poetry. An excellent compendium, it's a sort of collection of collections which I find a little frustrating. More recently, there has been the reissue of all of his short stories: Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. But this new translation, commissioned by his estate after his death, has proved controversial. The battle over Borges's legacy in English has become as Daedalian as one of his faux literary essays. It's hard to know where to begin rereading." The essayist Alberto Manguel writes in The Guardian that, "since the first American translations of Borges, attempted in the Fifties by well-intentioned admirers such as Donald Yates and James Irby, English-speaking readers have been very poorly served. From the uneven versions collected in Labyrinths to the more meticulous, but ultimately unsuccessful, editions published by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, from Ruth Simm's abominable apery of 'Other Inquisitions' to Paul Bowles's illiterate rendition of 'The Circular Ruins', Borges in English must be read in spite of the translations."
Awards
In 2008 the London Society of Authors selected Labyrinths as one of the fifty outstanding translations from the last fifty years.
