Borges Collaborations
- At July 31, 2018
- By Great Quail
- In Borges
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This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
Borges Works: Collaborations with Others
Borges enjoyed collaborating with other writers, translators, and artists. He began his career by translating Oscar Wilde, helped his father write a historical novel named El Caudillo, and worked closely with his sister Norah Borges to illustrate his early poems. He produced dozens of works with Adolfo Bio Casares, some including Silvina Ocampo and Xul-Solar. Borges frequently struck up friendships with his translators, and his work with Norman Thomas di Giovanni is considered definitive by many English readers. His penultimate work was a travelogue written with his future wife, María Kodama.
The works below are arranged in chronological order, and represent all of his collaborations available in English. His work with Bioy Casares is myriad enough to warrant its own section. Clicking the image of a book takes you directly to Amazon.com; except for original editions, which merely enlarge the image.
The Book of Imaginary Beings
With Margarita Guerrero
Manual de zoología fantástica
Mexico: Fonda de Cultura Económica, 1957.
El libro de los seres imginarios
Buenos Aires: Editorial Kier S.A., 1967.
El libro de los seres imginarios
Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1978.
The Book of Imaginary Beings
Translation and revisions by Norman Thomas di Giovanni.
New York: E.P. Dutton, 1969.
The Book of Imaginary Beings
Translation by Andrew Hurley
Viking, 2005.
Inspired by Borges’ childhood visits to the zoo, The Book of Imaginary Beings is a whimsical bestiary of creatures drawn from myth, legend, and fiction, ranging from the “A Boa A Qu,” the spiritual incarnation of a staircase in Rajasthan, to the “Zaratan,” an island-sized leviathan that gobbles up careless mariners. Each creature is presented with a brief history and notes, written with Borges’ usual seamless blend of fact, fiction, and legend. Because his “facts” here concern mythical creatures, the sketches are even more ambiguous than usual, and one is never quite sure when Borges is faithfully reporting, freely adapting, or cheerfully inventing. Of course, that’s part of the charm, and Borges’ introduction urges his readers to approach his bestiary with all the curiosity, confusion, delight, terror, and fun of a childhood visit to the zoo; to “dip into it from time to time, in much the same way one visits the changing forms revealed by a kaleidoscope.”
The metaphor is perhaps more apt that intended. The Book of Imaginary Beings has a dizzying and fractured history, and exists in more incarnations than any other work by Borges. Indeed, its most recent translator Andrew Hurley spends several pages just outlining its tortuous publication history. Even the book’s coauthor Margarita Guerrero is mysterious, and no one knows her exact role, or the extent and nature of her collaboration!
To summarize as concisely as possible, The Book of Imaginary Beings began life in 1957, when it was published in Mexico and Buenos Aires by Fonda de Cultura Económica as Manual de zoología fantástica, or “Manual of Fantastic Zoology.” The Manual featured a preface by its authors and eighty-two entries loosely arranged in alphabetical order. A decade later, a revised edition was published by Kier in Buenos Aires. Featuring thirty-four additional entries, the book was retitled El libro de los seres imginarios, given a new preface, and illustrated by Silvio Baldessari.
Silvio Baldessari’s Cheshire Cat
New York publisher E.P. Dutton acquired the English rights, and in 1969 Norman Thomas di Giovanni worked with Borges to produce a “revised, enlarged, and translated” version. Four new entries were included and several others expanded, but poor Margarita Guerrero had her name misspelled, and was dropped from the new preface altogether. In 1978, Borges’ Argentine publisher Emecé Editores issued a version similar to the 1967 Kier paperback. In order to avoid copyright infringements, the entries were jumbled around, the book lacked illustrations, and none of the English material was included.
When it came time for the Borges Centennial in 1999, Andrew Hurley was naturally selected to produce a new translation. Deciding to honor the most “recent” Emecé version and omit the additional material included in the Norman Thomas di Giovanni translation, the book was slated to be released by Viking with illustrations by the incomparable Edward Gorey. Tragically, Gorey’s death in 2000 placed this book in the category of “heartbreaking might-have-beens,” a tantalizing library of the imagination that includes Jodorowski’s film of Dune and Wagner’s opera about Jesus. With Gorey struck with an axe or devoured by mice, Viking tapped Czech-American illustrator Peter Sís for the task.
Like all of Hurley’s translations, his Book of Imaginary Beings is concise and direct, and is wholly consistent with his excellent work on Collected Fictions. While I lament Hurley’s decision to drop the four “American” entries, his welcome “Translator’s Note” offers a lucid and detailed description of the book’s tortuous history. He also includes a useful section of end notes, a valiant attempt to track down and annotate Borges’ original sources.
I wish I could be as positive about Peter Sís’ quirky illustrations. I know that some readers consider them charming, but I find them overly precious, the work of a children’s illustrator whose actual audience is sophisticated parents. While nobody could have competed with Edward Gorey, and Baldessari’s illustrations scream “avant-garde sixties Euro-art!”, I would have preferred modern illustrations with more character, detail, and humor. (My personal choices would have been Gahan Wilson, Erol Otus, Jason Thompson, or John Kenn Moretnsen.) I also question the criteria used to select which “imaginary beings” received artistic embellishment; especially because the book contains only a handful of illustrations. Why depict such well-known creatures as the minotaur and the dragon? Surely the six-legged antelope and the squonk would have been more imaginative choices?
Additional Information
The Wikipedia Page for The Book of Imaginary Beings gives the complete table of contents, with links to Wikipedia entries for each creature.
An Introduction to American Literature
With Esther Zemborain de Torres
Introduccion a la literatura Norteamericana
Buenos Aires: Editorial Columba, 1967.
An Introduction to American Literature
Edited and translated by L. Clark Keating and Robert O. Evans.
1. University Press of Kentucky, 1971.
2. New York: Schocken, 1974.
This introduction to American literature contains fourteen essays:
- Origins
- Franklin, Cooper, & the Historians
- Hawthorne and Poe
- Transcendentalism
- Whitman & Herman Melville
- The West
- Three Poets of the Nineteenth Century
- The Narrators
- The Expatriates
- The Poets
- The Novel
- The Theater
- The Detective Story, Science Fiction, & the Far West
- The Oral Poetry of the Indians
- Appendix: Some Historical Dates
- Notes
Additional Information
This book can be “borrowed” from the Internet Archive. I have not read the work, so any additional information or reviews are welcome.
Atlas
With María Kodama.
Atlas
Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana S.A., 1984
Atlas
Translation by Anthony Kerrigan
New York: E.P. Dutton, 1985
Soon after Borges’ divorce from Elsa Astete Millán, he developed an acquaintance with a student who attended his lectures—María Kodama, an Argentine with Japanese ancestry. She agreed to work as his secretary, and eventually their association blossomed into a collaborative friendship. Throughout the seventies and early eighties, Borges and Kodama traveled the world, trips she documented through her camera, while he recorded his thoughts and impressions. In 1983 the poet Alberto Girri suggested Kodama’s photographs and Borges’ prose could be “interwoven into a prudently chaotic book,” and Enrique Pezzoni, the literary advisor to Penguin’s Editorial Sudamericana and Spanish translator of Moby-Dick, heartily agreed. The end result was Atlas, published in 1984 and immediately translated into English by Anthony Kerrigan.
Presenting their travels as a mythic journey of discovery through time and space, Atlas is the aesthetic and spiritual successor to 1960’s El hacedor (Dreamtigers), and includes dreams, parables, poems, and reflections. Some of these refer directly to accompanying photographs and locations, while others are decidedly disconnected. When Borges’ text and Kodama’s photographs are in close alignment, such as the pages describing their balloon ride in California, Atlas reads like a diary, offering a rare glimpse into the couple’s private life. When word and image are only tenuously linked, the book becomes dreamy and contemplative, the space between the their perceptions revealing the borders between interior and exterior worlds. Often this sense of dislocation approaches the melancholy, and death is frequently on the poet’s mind. Indeed, the strongest piece in Atlas is “A Dream in Germany,” an extension of a theme Borges first expressed in the poem “Límites” from El hacedor. Eliciting wonder and sadness in the same setting, it is worth quoting in full:
Early this morning I dreamed a dream which left me confounded; only later could I put it in some order.
Your forebears engender you.
On the far frontier of the deserts stand dusty classrooms or, if one prefers, dusty storerooms, with parallel rows of worn-out blackboards whose length is measured in leagues, or in leagues of leagues. The precise number of storerooms in not known; doubtless they are many. In each one there are nineteen rows of blackboards and someone has covered them with words and with Arabic numerals written in chalk. The door to each classroom is a sliding door, in the Japanese manner, and made of rusted metal. The writing starts in the left-hand margin of the blackboard and begins with a word. Under it is another and hey all follow the strict alphabetic order of encyclopedic dictionaries. The first word is, let us say, Aachen, the name of a city. The second, immediately below it, is Aare, the river of Bern. In third place is Aaron, of the tribe of Levi. Then come abracadabra, and Abraxas. After each one of these words is affixed the precise number of times you will see, hear, remember or use it during the course of your life. The number of times you will pronounce, between the cradle and the grave, the name of Shakespeare or of Kepler, is indefinite, but certainly not infinite. On the last blackboard in a remote classroom is the word Zwitter, German for hermaphrodite, and under it you will use up the number of images of the city of Montevideo which has been assigned to you by destiny, and you will go on living. You will use up the number of times assigned to you to articulate this or that hexameter, and you will go on living. You will use up the number of times your heart has been assigned a heartbeat, and then you will have died.
When this happens the chalk letters and numbers will not immediately be erased. (In each instant of your life someone modifies or erases a figure.) All this serves a purpose we will never understand.
Another standout piece in Atlas is even more personal. Called “My Last Tiger,” Borges begins by enumerating his lifelong fascination with tigers, then describes his experience in a “zoological garden” named Mundo Animal. As the guest of honor, Borges is carefully seated while the zookeeper delivers a living tiger for him to pet. The narrative is certainly charming for any reader familiar with Borges’ fondness for tigers, but its ambiguous title is what really strikes home. It’s possible that “My Last Tiger” acknowledges the flesh-and-blood animal as the capstone and culmination of a lifetime of fictional tigers, painted tigers, and dream tigers. However, one can’t avoid the more obvious meaning. Borges’ awareness of his diminishing years—the erasure of the final chalk tiger from his blackboard—seems more genuine that his reflections on Turkey, which conclude with the witty and hopeful paradox, “Doubtless we should return to Turkey to begin its discovery.”
Atlas reproduces María Kodama’s photographs in black and white, and while they certainly contribute to the book, the majority fall into the category of “Borges looking at something,” or simply depict common monuments and landmarks. Only a few transcend the ordinary vacation photo to capture something essential. The first shows Borges looking up at the Hagia Sophia. Well-framed and expertly composed, the photo is animated by Borges’ unfeigned expression of childlike wonder. The second shows the writer’s hand resting on the inscriptions carved into a Shinto shrine, a subtle but reverent evocation of the accompanying parable—“the visages of divinities are undecipherable kanji.”
The third is inarguably the best photograph in Atlas. Occupying the entire page facing Borges’ remarks on the Cretan Labyrinth, the photograph shows a weary Borges taking a quick rest, leaning on his cane as he seats himself on the crumbling ruin. His hair is tousled, his hands are seamed with age, and his mouth seems open in mid-sentence; or perhaps he’s just catching his breath. It is the one moment in Atlas where the photograph renders the accompanying text superfluous; in this photograph, María Kodama says more about “the labyrinth of time” and “being Borges” than anything else in the book.
Two years later, Jorge Luis Borges and María Kodama were married. On June 14, 1986, at the age of 86, Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer in Geneva, a city he commemorated in Atlas by declaring, “I know that I will always return to Geneva, perhaps after the death of my body.”
Borges Works
Main Page – Return to the Borges Works main page and index.
Fictions and Artifices – Short stories; the core Borges works.
Nonfiction – Collections of essays and criticism.
Collaborations with Bioy Casares – Fiction and anthologies written or edited with Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Poetry Compilations — Selections of Borges’ verse translated into English and published as compilations.
Poetry I — Early post-ultraísmo poetry, 1923 to 1943.
Poetry II — Mid-career collections from 1944 to 1969.
Poetry III — Late poetry books from 1969 to 1985.
Lectures, Conversations, and Interviews – Collections of Borges’ lectures, conversations, and interviews.
Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 7 August 2019
Main Borges Page: The Garden of Forking Paths
Contact: quail(at)shipwrecklibrary(dot)com