Borges Audio – Audiobooks
- At August 13, 2019
- By Great Quail
- In Borges
- 0
Borges Audio: Audiobooks
This section profiles Borges on audiobook, from old-school “books on tape” to compact discs and digital audiobook. For it to qualify, it must be audio only, and feature more than a single story. YouTube videos that narrate single stories are located on their own section.
The Aleph and Other Stories
Read by Alexander Scourby.
Length: 10 hours and 36 minutes.
Talking Books, 1972, Cassettes.
[Listen on YouTube]
Originally recorded as a “cassette book” intended to help bring literature to the blind, The Aleph and Other Stories is read by Alexander Scourby, an American actor who became famous for his recording of the King James Bible. He brings the same resonant voice to Borges, and his dramatic readings of these stories have the theatrical appeal of a bygone radio show. Although Scourby’s Aleph has yet to be released on Audible, the entire “cassette book” has been uploaded to YouTube for all to enjoy.
Collected Fictions
Collected Fictions (Abridged)
Translated by Andrew Hurley.
Read by George Guidall.
Produced & abridged by John McElroy.
Length: 5 hours and 14 minutes.
1. Penguin Audiobooks, 1999, ISBN 0-14-086848-8, 4 Cassettes.
2. Penguin Audiobooks, 2010, ISBN 978-0142428085, 5 Compact discs.
3. Penguin Audio, 2010, Digital audiobook.
Released to support Viking’s Collected Fictions, this selection of readings contains the following stories and prose pieces:
• Man on Pink Corner
• The Lottery in Babylon
• The Garden of Forking Paths
• Death and the Compass
• The Aleph
• The Maker
• Dreamtigers
• Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote
• The Story of Rosendo Juarez
• Borges and I
• The Zahir
• August 25, 1983
• Shakespeare’s Memory
• The Circular Ruins
• The Library of Babel
• The Immortal
• The Encounter
Although the audiobook is advertised as “abridged,” this refers to the limited selection of stories from Collected Fictions, not to the stories themselves, which are read in full. Robert Rodriguez offered this review to the Garden in 2001:
This collection of four audio cassettes is quite out of print, as e-mails to several Web merchants confirmed, one indicating that even their OP contact had never seen them. Of course, who would still have them unsold, or what owner of them would part with them?
Guidall is a consummately intelligent reader, his skill and voice aptly suited to the precise yet abstract quality of Borges’ fiction. Guidall does not condescend to contrived accents or dramatizations. His expression and intonation strike the perfect note. Hence, the tense inscrutability of the Chinese narrator in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the guttural German of “Death and the Compass,” the arrogant civility of Argentinos in “The Aleph,” and the quiet consternation of the narrator in “The Aleph,” “The Zahir,” “Shakespeare’s Memory” and “Borges and I.” All the favorites are here, though I wonder how an Irish accent in “Shape of the Sword” or the Arabic of “The Mirror of Ink” would read with Guidall. Only in “Man on Pink Corner” does Guidall use a street-wise Spanish accent, which, however, accords perfectly with this “realistic” story.
I listened to a copy borrowed as an interlibrary loan from my local public library. Somewhere in the Library of Babel are multiple copies of this wonderful collection of audiotapes that are inaudible or hopelessly scrambled, and certainly no one can own.
NOTE: In “Borges and I,” Guidall reads “seventeenth” century typefaces, not Hurley’s “eighteenth.” My original (Obras completas, Emecé, 1974) clears says “siglo XVIII.”
Additional Information
The original cassette tapes are very difficult to obtain, less so the compact disc version, which nevertheless sells for a ridiculously inflated amount. The most common format is now an Audible Audiobook, which is available from Amazon.com or Audible’s Collected Fictions page, which contains numerous helpful reviews. If you are interested in the narrator—who also has Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to his credit!—you can visit the George Guidall homepage or the George Guidall Wikipedia page.
Ficciones
Translated by Anthony Kerrigan.
Read by Joseph Voelbel.
[Listen on YouTube]
Joseph Voelbel is an American YouTube artist who has produced a complete and unabridged recording of Ficciones. According to his YouTube abstract, his project represents:
A gnostic concatenation of neo-realism meets metaphor, wrapped in a letter, composed between ellipses of a 1,001 nights, a product of Babylon, of the Company, a lost encyclopedia of Tlön reflected in a looking glass, the Schopenhauer in all of us, that every man was Shakespeare, a splash of Kafka, the mathematical precision of a footnote, the journey out of a labyrinth by always going left, an Oxford man, the cult of the Phoenix (or more accurately the secret), the four letter name for God, the obverse side of a twenty centavo coin, a Greek Diana, a learned Librarian, that Garden of Forking Paths, which journeyed to the center of the soul, the metaphysical and everyday implications of memory—Memorious, Imagination, the journey to see the seer, the space inside a hidden chest at the bottom of a bottomless sea, the educated man, the belief that Don Quixote was the author of Cervantes. The Odyssey in the form of a book report of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
His readings are quite accessible, unpretentious and delivered with a minimum of fuss.
Borges on Audio
Main Page — Return to the “Borges on Audio” main page and index.
Borges in His Own Voice — Poems, stories, and lectures read by Borges himself.
YouTube Readings — Readings of Borges set to music, video, or animations and placed online.
Commentary — Audiobooks and online readings about Borges, or that make extensive mention of Borges.
Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 14 October 2019
Main Borges Page: The Garden of Forking Paths
Contact: quail(at)shipwrecklibrary(dot)com