Collected Fictions (79 page)

* Maldonado:
The Maldonado was a creek that at the time of this story (and many others of JLB's stories) marked the northern boundary of the city of Buenos Aires. The neighborhood around this area was called Palermo, or also Maldonado. This story evokes its atmosphere at one period (perhaps partly legendary); the Maldonado (barrio) was a rough place, and the creek was terribly polluted by the tanneries along its banks.

* Don Nicolas Paredes... Morel:
Paredes was a famous knife fighter and ward boss for the conservative party in Palermo; Morel was another famed political boss, or caudillo.

* I couldn't say whether they gutted him:
Here and elsewhere in Borges (one thinks, of course, especially of the story tided " The Story from Rosendo Juárez" in the volume
Brodie's Report
and the story in this volume tided "The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell"), a corpse is gutted, or somebody thinks about gutting it. This, according to folk wisdom, is to keep the body from floating up and revealing the murder before die culprit has had good time to get away. Apparently a gutted body did not produce as much gas, or the gas (obviously) would not be contained in an inner cavity. Thus there is an unacknowledged "piece of information" here that the ruffians of the Maldonado and other such neighborhoods tacitly shared—tacitly because it was so obvious that no one needed to spell it out.

A THEOLOGIAN IN DEATH

*
Attribution: The Swedenborg Concordance: A Complete Work of Reference to the Theological Writings
of Emanuel Swedenborg, based on the original Latin writings of the author,
compiled, edited, and translated by the Rev. John Faulkner Potts, B. A., 4 vols. (London: Swedenborg Society, 1888). The text quoted here appears in the index (p. 622 of the appropriate volume) under "Melancthon" and is a mixture of the entries indicating two different Swedenborg texts:
A Continuation of the Last Judgment
and
The True Christian Religion.
The reader may find the text under "C. J. 47" and
"1.797,
1-4." The full entry on Melancthon in the Concordance runs to p. 624.

THE CHAMBER OF STATUES

* Attribution:
Freely taken from Sir Richard Burton's
Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night
(New York: Heritage Press, 1934 [1962] ), pp. 1319-1321. The reader is referred to A Note on the Translation for more detailed comment on JLB's and the translator's uses of translations.

THE STORY OF THE TWO DREAMERS

*
Attribution:
This is freely adapted from a different version of the
1001 Nights,
Edward William Lane's
The
Arabian Nights Entertainments
—or
The Thousand and One Nights
(New York: Tudor Pubi.,1927), p. 1156. There are several other editions of this work, so the reader may find the tale in another place; Lane does not divide his book quite in the way JLB indicates.

THE MIRROR OF INK

* Attribution:
One would not want to spoil JLB's little joke, if joke it is, but others before me have pointed out the discrepancy between this attribution and the fact. This story appears nowhere in Burton's
Lake Regions
and only sketchily in the volume that di Giovanni and many others give as the source: Edward William Lane's
Manners and
Customs of the Modern Egyptians
(1837). Nonetheless, where Borges does seem to be translating (or calquing) the words of the last-named book, I have incorporated Lane's wording and word choices.

MAHOMED'S DOUBLE

*
Attribution:
Emanuel Swedenborg,
The True Christian Religion, containing the Universal Theology of the New
Church, foretold by the Lordm Daniel VII, 13, 14, and in the Apocalypse XXI, 1, 2,
translated from the Latin of ES (NewYork: American Swedenborg Printing and Publishing Society, 1886),ÎJ.829-830.

* Source for "The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro":
The source given by Borges here is the PhilipGosse book
The
History of Piracy;
as one can clearly see, it is the same source cited for "The Widow Ching—Pirate," just below it. In my view, this attribution is the result of an initial error seized upon by Borges for another of his "plays with sources"; as he subsequently admitted freely, and as many critics have noted, much of this story comes from the
Encyclopcedia Britannica,
Eleventh Edition, in the article titled "Tichborne Claimant." Here again, where JLB is clearly translating or calquing that source, I have followed it without slavish "transliteration" of JLB's Spanish.

* Source for "The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan":
Neither the Walter Noble Burns book nor the Frederick Watson book contains anything remotely approaching the story given by Borges here. Some details are "correct" (if that is the word), such as Billy's long and blasphemous dying, spewing Spanish curses, but little in the larger pattern of the "biography" seems to conform to "life." While Borges claimed in the "Autobiographical Essay" (written with Norman Thomas diGiovanni and published in
The Aleph and Other Stories
[1970]) that he was "in flagrant contradiction" of his "chosen authorities]," the truth is that he followed the authorities fairly closely for all the characters herein portrayed
except
that of Billy the Kid. He did, of course, "change and distort" the stories to suit his own purposes, but none is so cut from whole cloth as that of this gunfighter of the Wild West. The lesson in the "Autobiographical Essay" is perhaps that JLB's predilection for the red herring was lifelong.

* Title:
First published as
Ficciones
(1935-1944) by Editorial Sur in1944, this book was made up of two volumes:
El
jardín de senderosque sebifurcan
("The Garden of Forking Paths"), which had originally been published in 1941-1942, and
Artificios
("Artifices"), dated 1944 and never before published as a book. Each volume in the 1944 edition had its own title page and its own preface. (In that edition, and in all successive editions,
The Garden of Forking Paths
included the story"El acercamientoa Al-motasim" (The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim"), collected first in
Historia de la
eternidad
("History of Eternity"), 1936, and reprinted in each successive edition of that volume until 1953; this story now appears in the
Obras Completas
in
Historia de la eternidad,
but it is included here as a "fiction" rather than an "essay") In 1956 Emecé published a volume titled
Ficciones,
which was identical to the 1944 Editorial Sur edition except for the inclusion in
Artifices
of three new stories ("The End," "The Cult of the Phoenix," and "The South") and a "Postscript" to the 1944 preface to
Artifices.
It is this edition of
Fictions,
plus "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," that is translated for this book.

* The eight stories:
The eighth story, here printed as the second, "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," was included in all editions subsequent to the 1941-1942 original edition. It had originally been published (1936) in
Historia de la
eternidad
("A History of Eternity"). Ordinals and cardinals used in the Foreword have been adjusted to reflect the presence of this story.

* Sur:
"[T]he most influential literary publication in Latin America" (Rodriguez Monegal, p. 233), it was started by Victoria Ocampo, with the aid of the Argentine novelist Eduardo Malica and the American novelist Waldo Frank. Borges was one of the journal's first contributors, certainly one of its most notable (though
Sur
published or discussed virtually every major poet, writer, and essayist of the New or Old World) and he acted for three decades as one of its "guardian angels." Many of JLB's fictions, some of his poetry, and many critical essays and reviews appeared for the first time in the pages of
Sur.

*
Ramos Mejia:
"A part of Buenos Aires in which the rich had weekend houses containing an English colony. It is now an industrial suburb" (Hughes and Fishburn).

*
Bioy Casares:
Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914- ): Argentine novelist, JLB's closest friend and collaborator with JLB on numerous projects, including some signed with joint pseudonyms. In their joint productions, the two men were interested in detective stories, innovative narrative techniques (as the text here hints), and tales of a somewhat "fantastic" nature. Unfortunately rather eclipsed by Borges, especially in the English-speaking world, Bioy Casares is a major literary figure with a distinguished body of work; a description of the reciprocal influence of the two writers would require (at least) its own book-length study.

*
Volume XLVI:
The
Obras completas,
on which this translation is based, has "Volume XXVI," which the translator takes to be a typographical error, the second
X
slipped in for the correct
L

* Johannes Valentinus Andrea in the writings of Thomas de Quincey:
It is perhaps significant that de Quincey credits Andrea (1586-1654) with "inventing" the Rosicrucian order by writing satirical works (and one especially:
Fama Fraternitatis of the meritorious Order of the Rosy Cross, addressed to the learned in general and the
Governors of Europe)
describing an absurd mystico-Christian secret society engaged not only in general beneficence and the improvement of mankind but also in alchemy and gold making. The public did not perceive Andrea's satirical intent, and many rushed to "join" this society, though they could never find anyone to admit them. At last, according to de Quincey, a group of "Paracelsists" decided that if nobody else would admit to being a Rosicrucian,
they
would take over the name and "be" the society.

*
Carlos Mastronardi:
Mastronardi (1901-1976) was "a poet, essayist, and journalist [in Buenos Aires], a member of the group of writers identified with the avant-garde literary magazine
Martín Fierro"
(Fishburn and Hughes). Balderston
(The Literary Universe of JLB:
An Index... [New York: Greenwood Press], 1986) gives some of his titles:
Luz
de Provincia, Tierra amanecida, Conocimiento de la noche.
Mastronardi was one of JLB's closest friends throughout the thirties and forties (Borgestoo was closely associated with
Martín Fierro),
and Rodríguez Monegal reported in his biography of JLB that Borges was still seeing Mastronardi as the biography (pubi.1978) was written; it seems safe to say, therefore, that Borges and Mastronardi were friends until Mastronardi's death.

*
Capangas:
Overseers or foremen of gangs of workers, usually either slaves or indentured semislaves, in rural areas, for cutting timber, etc., though not on ranches, where the foreman is known as a
capataz.
This word is of Guaraníor perhaps African origin and came into Spanish, as JLB indicates, from the area of Brazil.

* Néstor Ibarra:
(b. 1908) "Born in France of an Argentine father who was the son of a French Basque émigré, M went to the University of Buenos Aires around 1925 to complete his graduate education. While [there] he discovered Borges' poems and ... tried to persuade his teachers to let him write a thesis on Borges' ultraist poetry"(Rodríguez Monegal, p. 239). Ibarra's groundbreaking and very important study of JLB,
Borges et Borges,
and his translations of JLB (along with those of Roger Caillois) into French in the 19505 were instrumental in the worldwide recognition of JLB's greatness. Among the other telling associations with this and other stories is the fact that Ibarra and Borges invented a new language ("with surrealist or ultraist touches"), a new French school of literature, Identism, "in which objects were always compared to themselves," and a new review, tided
Papers for the Suppression of Reality
(see "Pierre Menard," in this volume; this information, Rodriguez Monegal, pp. 240-241). The
N. R. F.
is the
Nouvelle Revue Française,
an extremely important French literary magazine that published virtually every important modern writer in the first three decades of this century.

* Ezequiel Martínez Estrada:
Martinez Estrada (1895-1964) was an influential Argentine writer whose work
Radiografiade la pampa (X-ray of the Pampa)
JLB reviewed very favorably in 1933 in the literary supplement
(Revista Multicolor de los Sábados
["Saturday Motley Review"] ) to the Buenos Aires newspaper
Crítica.

* Drieu La Rochelle:
Pierre-Eugene Drieu La Rochelle (1893-1945) was for a time the editor of the
Nouvelle Revue Française;
he visited Argentina in 1933, recognized JLB's genius, and is reported to have said on his return to France that
"Borges vaut levoyage"
(Físhburn and Hughes).

* Alfonso Reyes:
Reyes (1889-1959) was a Mexican poet and essayist, ambassador to Buenos Aires (1927-1930 and again 1936—1937), and friend of JLB's (Fishburn and Hughes). Reyes is recognized as one of the great humanists of the Americas in the twentieth century, an immensely cultured man who was a master of the Spanish language and its style ("direct and succinct without being thin or prosaic" [Rodriquez Monegal]).

* Xul Solar:
Xul Solar is the nom de plume-turned-name of Alejandro Schultz (1887-1963), a lifelong friend of JLB, who compared him favorably with William Blake. Xul was a painter and something of a "creative linguist," having invented a language he called creol: a "language ... made up of Spanish enriched by neologisms and by monosyllabic English words ... used as adverbs" (Roberto Alifano, interviewer and editor,
Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges,
trans. Nicomedes Suárez Araúz, Willis Barnstone, and Noemi Escandell [Housatonic, Mass.: Lascaux Publishers, 1984], p. 119). In another place, JLB also notes another language invented by Xul Solar: "a philosophical language after the manner of John Wilkins" ("Autobiographical Essay," *
The Aleph and Other Stories: 1933-1969
[New York: Dutton, 1970], pp. 203-260). JLB goes on to note that "Xul was his version of Schultz and Solar of Solari." Xul Solar's painting has often been compared with that of Paul Klee;"strange" and "mysterious" are adjectives often applied to it. Xul illustrated three of JLB's books:
El tamaño de mi esperanza
(1926),
El idioma de los argentinos
(1928), and
Un
modelo para la muerte,
the collaboration between JLB and Adolfo Bioy Casares that was signed"B. SuárezLynch." In his biography of Borges, Emir Rodríguez Monegal devotes several pages to Xul's influence on JLB's writing; Borges himself also talks at length about Xul in the anthology of interviews noted above. Xul was, above all, a "character" in the Buenos Aires of the twenties and thirties and beyond.