View Illustrations from Labyrinths
Introduced by Adam Feinstein, Translated by James E Irby, Donald A Yates and others Bound in quater buckram with paper sides printed with a design by Neil Packer. Set in Centaur. Frontispiece and 7 full page colour illustrations.
About this book (Taken from Folio website).
‘In a bronze chamber, before the silent handkerchief of the strangler, hope has been faithful to me, as has panic in the river of pleasure,’
Writers and critics queue up to praise Borges, the Argentine writer who carved a new niche in literature with his playful short stories and essays. Along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, Borges was one of the wave of Latin American writers whose experiments with form and content took the literary world by storm in the second half of the 20th century.
Labyrinths was the collection which brought Borges to international audiences. The fantastical worlds in his spell-binding tales reflect and distort our own; ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ takes us to an alternate reality where activities are decided by an all-powerful National Lottery and in the Circular Ruins’ a man’s dream of a boy can be made flesh, and we ourselves turn out to be a figment of somebody else’s imagination. Just when we appear to have returned to more familiar surroundings, Borges gives reality a nudge: in ‘Death and the Compass’ a detective becomes convinced that three murders are connected by the secret name of god and in ‘The Secret Miracle’ a writer stands before a firing squad, but at the moment the bullets fly time stops and he is granted a year that nobody else will experience in order to complete his work. In a similar vein, Borges’s essays and parables are models of erudition worn lightly and playfully. The overlapping of fantasy with what we consider to be real parodies our notions of reality, challenging our most basic assumptions with consummate wit and verve.
This new edition brings together the finest translators of Borges. It is a notoriously challenging task, since, as Eric Ormsby comments, ‘His fictions require of the translator the care and subtlety of ear which ought to be brought to the translation of poetry’. This range of translations, however, captures the spare, whipcord quality of Borges’s prose, while the illustrations by artist Neil Packer, are dense with symbolism and often have exactly the same sly humour as Borges himself.