Al-Ahram Weekly 12 - 18 August 1999 Issue No. 442
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

---

Monthly supplement Books for a burning month Holiday reading and what the writers read Translating Egypt Hala Halim finds consummate translation skills and less compelling ethnography in Ahdaf Soueif's most recent counter-narrative Extract from The Map of love By Ahdaf Soueif Metropolitan musings A new French translation of a Gamal El-Ghitani novel appeared last month. David Tresilian, in Paris, interviews the translator and meanders through the novel Francophone readers I know what you read this summer All writers and artists intereviewed by Hala Halim An elusive graveyard Ra'ihat Al-Burtuqal (The Smell of Orange), Mahmoud El-Wardani, Cairo: Maktabat Al-Osra (Family Library), GEBO, 1999. pp115 A century of fantasy Awalim Borges Al-Khayaliya (Borges's Universe of Fantasy), translated and introduced by Khalil Kalfat, Cairo: Afaq Al-Tarjama (Translations) Series, Cultural Palaces Organisation, July 1999. pp140 Author and character without disguise Manamat 'Amm Ahmed Al-Sammak (The Dreams of 'Amm Ahmed the Fishmonger), Khairi Shalabi, Cairo: Al-Hilal, 1999. pp285 What the winter said Youssef Rakha discusses Salah Abdel-Sabour's Layla wal-Majnoun, now part of the Kitab fi Garida Series, a joint project of Al-Ahram and UNESCO, translating an extract from the play Thus spoke the Ustaz To see other book supplements go to the ARCHIVES index.    Illustrations courtesy of International Commitee of the Red Cross "Folk drawings and tales", Cairo, 1996

A century of fantasy

Reviewed by Youssef Rakha

This month the world is celebrating the centenary of the birth of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Joining in the celebrations, the Cultural Palaces Organisation has dedicated the latest book to appear in its "Translations" series to the world's foremost master of the literary puzzle by publishing an anthology of articles dealing with various aspects of Borges. Selected by the translator, Khalil Kalfat, the articles are written by six major authorities on the life and works of the Latin-American writer.

The celebrated French critic André Maurois of the French Academy is represented by his classic preface to the first major English-language collection of texts by Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York, 1964). Introducing the work of the then not-so-well-known Argentinian, Malraux presents Borges as a great writer who, while he had written only a few shorter pieces and essays, nevertheless could confidently, if paradoxically, be called great. In the French critic's view, Borges was not only a writer who seemed to have read and absorbed almost everything, including works of great obscurity, but he was also a writer who had an intimate relation with modernity, at least as that was represented by the great European moderns. Franz Kafka, whom Borges was among the first to translate into Spanish, obviously finds his way into the Argentinian writer's work, but so too do Baudelaire and Mallarmé (Borges was fascinated by the French symbolists and later the Surrealists), and even Edgar Allan Poe, from the American continent, had some attraction for him. Borges, whose early life was spent as a librarian cataloguing books in Buenos Aries, was nothing if not omnivorous in his tastes.

According to John King, a professor of Latin-American culture, Borges's texts are difficult to define. He ignored established ideas of genre and wrote instead famously teasing literary puzzles that, like Magritte's paintings in the visual sphere, examine narrative and fictional conventions while challenging them. He was famously concise. Why spend 500 pages on the explication of an idea that, in verbal communication, need not take more than a few minutes, Borges once asked. King shows how Borges championed a new literary genre, being one which managed to be simultaneously of philosophical or critical and also of narrative, or fictional, interest. These works, he explains, are the exercises of an intelligent mind in possession of both intellect and imagination; in the last section of King's article, Borges is depicted as the man who still puzzles -- and delights -- many an agile intellect the world over. No Umberto Eco without Borges. And if, in the 1930s, Borges could remark, self-deprecatingly, that his books sold only 37 copies each, King points out that by the mid-1960s he was the most famous Latin-American writer in the world, who had had an enormous influence not only in drawing world attention to other Latin-American writers, particularly of course to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but had also invented a style of fiction ("Borgesian") recognisable the world over.

It is perhaps slightly paradoxical that at a time when Borges was coming to be known as Latin America's leading writer, he had actually substantially abandoned the fiction for which he was most famous in favour of poetry. It was only in 1970, as Latin-American writing began to acquire its present wide popularity outside the Spanish-speaking world, that Borges returned to fiction, producing his Dr Brodie's Report.

Between 1970 and1986, the year of his death in Geneva, a city in which, as a teenager, he had learnt new languages and broadened his unorthodox intellectual interests, new stories by Borges were few. Yet to this day for many he embodies the quintessence of Latin-American fiction, overshadowing many of the more prolific Latin-American writers who both preceded and followed him.

The volume under review contains an interesting article by the celebrated Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa that situates Borges in the Latin-American context, showing the influences that link him with other writers, such as the Columbian Garcia Marquez. Llosa writes that Borges's view that a work of fiction should have a "metafictional" character -- that is, that it should comment on itself internally and on the processes of its composition and consumption -- is, while unnecessarily prescriptive in dealing with fiction in general, illuminating about Borges in particular. His notion that fiction should aim to be a variety of intellectual discourse that puts forward, or rather examines, various possible hypotheses, is clearly related to various contemporary critical and narrative trends.

The article by Borges's English translator, James Airby, should probably have been placed at the beginning of the collection, since it constitutes a compact introduction to the Borges world. His discussion of the relationship between the seemingly "dehumanised" character of many of Borges's mental exercises, and the way he nevertheless manages to bring in the human element, which is, after all, the traditional concern of fiction, is a valuable one, as is his discussion of the problems of translating Borges's prose. Famously compressed and elliptical as it is, the translator's remarks cannot but help those reading Borges's writing to a deeper understanding of his work.

Irene Bessière's article, "Le récit fantastique" (Fantastic Narrative), concentrates by contrast on the fantastic elements of Borges's world. She argues that his texts work on the reader in a special way as "mental stimuli" that bring harmony to elements of the mind that are in disarray. This draws on a frankly traditional and humanist notion of the literary text, developed, in our century, by various European formalist schools. Bessière nevertheless successfully makes the argument that Borges's presentation of logical puzzles and impossibilities "trains" the mind in a certain kind of agility and multi-sidedness. His phantasmagorias are never wholly threatening and without logic; in fact rather like Freudian dreams, it is all a question of finding where the logic lies, she writes. She manages to present a convincing view of the logical bases of fantasy, which has everything to do with rearranging the known in new arrangements, asking questions and looking for answers. Rather like the mathematical and logical "nonsense" of Lewis Carroll, the last thing Borges's writing is is non-sensical.

Beatriz Sarlo, in the last article in this book, contributes a sensitive reading of three of Borges's best-known stories: "Tlon,Uqbar,Orbis Tertius"; "The Lottery in Babylon" and "The Library at Babel". Her explication of the first story's chronology will be very helpful to those unused to the master's ways, while her obvious affection for the writer and her insight into his work provides the reader with plenty of reference material.

In short, Borges's Universe of Fantasy is a neat and compact Borges reader, in which Khalil Kalfat, the translator, has succeeded in rendering the six articles that make up the book in a lucid and elegant Arabic. He has also supplied a useful introduction and various supplementary materials providing chronological, biographical and bibliographical data on the author. For all those Arab readers who have been waiting for an opportunity to read Borges in the company of an authoritative and sympathetic guide, this is the book to buy.

	weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg