Customer Reviews

Aleph and Other Stories

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I was surprised to find when I picked up this book that it is not the same selection of stories as the earlier published THE ALEPH AND OTHER STORIES 1933-1969, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with Borges himself. Instead, it is a translation of two volumes published by Borges in Argentina, THE ALEPH and THE MAKER (EL HACEDOR), translated by Andrew Hurley.

As for the stories themselves, I can say only that they are some of the most magical tales written in the last hundred years, perhaps even ever. Stories like "The Immortal," "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden," "The Zahir," and "The Aleph" are worthy of being read over and over again.

Since I already have these stories in other form by other translators, I wanted to determine how good Hurley's translation is. To that end, I'll compare some of my favorite passages. Let's start with the title story in the Hurley translation:

"Under the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbelievable brightness. At first I thought it was spinning; then I realized that the movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying spectacles inside it. The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminution in size. Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was inifinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos."

Here di Giovanni with the same paragraph:

"On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbelievable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realized that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I saw it distinctly from every angle of the universe."

I'd say that Hurley did a workmanlike job, but I like di Giovanni, especially with "the dizzying world it bounded," much more idiomatic than "the dizzying spectacles inside it." Now here's Hurley with "A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz":

"As Cruz was fighting in the darkness (as his body was fighting in the darkness), he began to understand. He realized that one destiny is no better than the next and that every man must accept the destiny he bears inside himself."

From di Giovanni's "The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz":

"Cruz, while he fought in the dark (while his body fought in the dark), began to understand. He understood that one destiny is no better than another, but that every man must obey what is within him."

Again, I accept the Hurley, but prefer di Giovanni."Every man must obey" is simpler, more idiomatic than "every man must accept the destiny."

One complaint I have against both translations is that neither bothers to provide translations of quotations from the Latin. This is particularly disturbing in the case of "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden," in which two four-line excerpts are taken from a Latin tomb of a Lombard warrior that turn out to be quite interesting. I finally had to turn to Thomas Hodgkin's THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE to find the whole epitaph Englished.

In summary, it is better to read Hurley than not to read Borges at all; but, given the chance, I would prefer di Giovanni by a slight margin.

Trying to full describe the writings of Jorge Luis Borges is like trying to explain exactly why Leonardo da Vinci's art still captivates. The man wrote works of art.

"The Aleph and Other Stories" includes two different books of Borges', very different in their styles -- one is rich and epic, while the other is sort of short and quirky. But this collection is a shining example of why people enjoy Borges -- magical, rich in language, and lets us glimpse the minds of anything and anyone he can conjure up.

The title story involves a sort of fictional version of Borges, who makes regular pilgrimages to the house of a woman he loved, and encounters her slightly nuts first cousin Daneri, who is composing a horrible epic poem describing the whole world. When Daneri's house is threatened, he reveals how he's composed the poem -- the Aleph, which he discovered as a child, and he allows Borges to catch a glimpse of... everything.

The other stories have tales of heretics and holy men, of a man's last days awaiting an assassin's bullet, of a girl who coldly seeks revenge for her father, and the Zahir (the opposite of the Aleph), which can cause an all-encompassing obsession in the one who sees it, until they shut out reality.

And in the second book, he spins up a long string of very, VERY short stories (some only a paragraph). Some are musings on his toes, and nothing much more. But there are also brief stories of startling depth, such as God speaking to Dante and the "Divine Comedy's" leopard, and assuring them of their literary immortality.

The main flaw with this collection is that it's basically split into two very dissimilar styles -- some of them are short and relatively plain, while the others are dense pockets of philosophy. In fact, all the stories in the first portion of the book are based on the idea of shared experiences and infinite time, where there are no "new" experiences but only repetition.

And Borges wraps these stories in lush, digified prose that takes a little while to wade through, but the richness of the words he uses is worth it ("every generation of mankind includes four honest men who secretly hold up the universe and justify it"). And his writing takes on many different people's selves -- he even makes readers squirm by taking us into the mind of a loyal Nazi.

It's almost like another world, Borgeworld, which is almost like ours, but where magical items are hidden in the cellars, soldiers are forgotten, the Minotaur plays in his maze, and God dreams of mortal lives. The most entrancing foray into Borgeworld is "The Immortal," about a Roman soldier who goes searching for a city of immortals, and finds an ancient poet who seems very familiar.

"The Aleph and Other Stories" is a brilliant collection of Borges' exquisite stories. Magical and gritty, beautiful and haunting -- this collection should be cherished.

This excellent collection of short stories is an example of the "esthetic of the intelligence" of Borges. His metaphysic storytelling always goes beyond the immediate, to other cultures, other frontiers and other realities. Borges seeks to capture the essence of Universe and Time, and as a result, he creates stories with an exquisite poetry and an abismal, even terrifying depth. The ones I like the most are. "The immortal", an overwhelming and disconcerting study of the effects immortality would have on humans; "The theologians", an allegory about personal identity, full of erudition and irony; "Emma Zunz", the only realistic tale in the collection, about a sick and terrible revenge; "In search of Averroes", an attempt at depicting the failure of a philosopher who is unable to distinguish between comedy and tragedy; "The writing of the God", or the aprehension of divinity from a pit, thanks to the signs stamped on a jaguar's skin; "The waiting", anguished tale about a resignation and the transformation of reality into dream; and especially "Aleph", fantastic story about that point in the Universe where all points in the Universe meet; a tale that mixes the remembrance of a woman still loved after death, with the absolute vision af the Absolute: the point from where you can see all points. Simply splendid, Borges's literature stands out alone in the history of all literature. There is nothing to which it can be compared. Check for yourself the dimensions of one literary giant. Come find out what you thought you'd never be looking for.

In these tales , Borges retakes his favorite themes and according to his acustomed inventive modality , gives them a unexpected and shinning threatment. He risks in every page a new imagination of the fantastic universe that he - as anyone else - knew how create among us . It is well reknown his capacity to build estethical metaphors of philosophic trascendence . The fair endings , mathematics never lose its characteristic sensibility . That is why you can state that these tales conform its geometric miracle .
To those who seek the brilliant Borges of the unfinnished mental games , you must name The Zahir , The two kings , The teologhists .
And even if you prefer the walking Buenos Aires Borges of this stage that always is giving background and national perspective to his work you will find friendly pages in The dead man , The wait and Emma Zunz .
Please, make yourself a favour and get into the enigmatic universe , the asimetrical axis , the elusive encounters , the sinister otherness and eliptic dreams of that outstanding writer who was Jorge Luis Borges .

Many people bewail that Borges was not awarded the Noble Prize for Literature because of political reasons. The prize was given to Gabriel Marques, a superb writer, but Borges is better. Borges stories are a delight to read and they have mystical messages. Both Borges and Marques write in the tradition of Spanish magical writers. It is like reading how a person is walking across a bridge and continues by floating across in the air.

This volume has twenty of Borges' short stories, including the title tale The Aleph. The letter aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Its form is very similar to the English letter X. Both can be seen by the mystically-minded as a man pointing simultaneously to the heaven and the earth. But the aleph is the first, the primal letter, and could and did invoke in many ancient minds the idea that all of creation, past, present, and future, can be contained in the small space of this letter, far less than an inch in height and breadth.

Borges story captures this ancient notion. A man enters a house and descends down a cellar and discovers the aleph there. Readers of the tale will ask themselves many questions, such as: What is the significance of descending to gain the knowledge? Isn't knowledge attained by ascending? What is this knowledge? Is it possible that all knowledge can be capsulated into a single small idea? Is all of nature really one, as God is one? Once the man knew what the aleph contained, could he remember it? When we get insights, can we remember them?

This collection of short stories covers a huge array of concepts and ideas, ranging from history and religion, through philosophy to science. One recurring theme involves taking a well known story or idea and looking at it from a different angle or viewpoint.

The translation is well handled and the translator's notes are designed to give a background to place names or people that a non Argentinean would not necessarily know without getting in the way of the text.

This is the first of JLB's books that I have read; I will certainly look out more.

To read Jorge Luis Borges --the Argentinian sage-- is more than a challenge, it is a losing battle with literary reality because Borges erased the borders between the quotidian, the dream, magic realism, hallucination, and eternity.

One can just picture Borges (the man) going to his grave with an impish smile on his lips, thrilled with the knowledge that many of us would endlessly continue to puzzle out his contrived stories.

For example, search as hard as we might, we will never find the 602nd night of the Thousand and One Nights; the night when Scheherazade tells a story about herself telling a story in which she also tells a story about--and so on in an infinite regress.

Forever we will also attempt to decipher the magic of "The Aleph," the point of all points in which we can see all of creation in an instant; much as God did on the seventh day. In the short story--the Aleph--Borges cites similar ideas about creation, such as the Shield of Achilles in which the entire cosmos is depicted.

Closer to our times, contemporary writer Marciano Guerrero situates the Aleph in New York City! In a culminating scene of his novel the Poison Pill, the protagonist Ivon Bates, sees and hears all the languages of the world and their convergence into the Adamic language and God's totality.

Time, Borges thought, is an illusion; a daring hypothesis with an obvious proof: The Borges (not the man but the character) of "Borges and I," will live forever.

The writing techniques I employ in this article are all explained in Mary Duffy's writing manual:

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This new Penguin edition of "The Aleph and Other Stories" was my first voyage to the land of labyrinths and puzzles that Borges is so noted for. I can certainly say now that the trip was more than worth it, and I hope to make many more "le voyage à l'espagnol!"

It was as if in the writing of many stories he was seeking to conceal the fact that he had only one story to write. And in that one story was contained the essence of all stories, so that to read it and understand it was to become the story itself.
So too with the Aleph the single letter in which the whole of the Universe is contained. Once one finds it and reads it and loses oneself in it one has read all stories and need not read any other again.
Yet when the other stories come, and they do come, and they have letters and shapes 'The Aleph' itself does not know,they remind us that basically the 'Aleph ' is at best a metaphor, and in its heart of hearts ,unreal.
All of us today are readers of Borges. And as such we are contained in the Aleph of his work.
But he is far away and above us all.
For he is the great literary genius whose works will be read and reread.
And it is fair to say that the letter 'Aleph' alone is not enough to contain him.