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Mar. 7th, 2010 02:02 amBorges fetishism news: snagged discarded review copies of the two new poetry collections by mail from Housing Works for $15 total. Looks like all five volumes of this year's Penguin relaunch are edited by Suzanne Jill Levine, the weirdest and presumably least reliable of the three translators of the otherwise totally great Selected Non-Fictions volume from ten years ago (Esther Allen, who got to do the Dante essays in that and was probably the best of them, is presently selecting and translating Bioy Casares' Borges diaries). I'd say after the Garden of Forking Paths volume--a.k.a. the 1st half of Ficciones--the most crucial Borges book is that one. Not that I don't love the poems, but Borges is up there with Bloom, Hazlitt and no one else in his literary speculations. And he probably annoys far fewer people than those two. They're pugnacious, he's usually sly.
These two new ones have an annoying degree of overlap with Penguin's Selected Poems, also from ten years ago--which in turn carried over a lot of translations from the c. 1970 one. Allegedly the three upcoming prose volumes, On Writing, On Argentina and On Mysticism are also composed mostly of reprints from Non-Fictions. I'll buy them anyway, since new Borges is my heroin, but I'm not sure why others would; English-language publishing of Borges makes Calvino's situation look clean.
Even leaving aside the translation issue, there's no true "selected" volume, whether of stories or overall, even though it looks like there's so many selections. Borges' own selection, A Personal Anthology, did get translated, but he admitted picking its contents less with quality in mind than not wanting to bore people with anything over-erudite or complicated--i.e. Borgesian. He put out a New Personal Anthology a little bit later as a corrective, after all his admirers complained. Presumably the ideal Selected volume, through the early '70s anyway, would combine those two (as a start), but the second was never translated. Well, maybe not ideal--Borges was a bit overfond of his own knife-fighting stories.
Labyrinths has only a sprinkling of essays and essentially no poems; it also has way too many stories from the Spanish language Aleph (though inexplicably excluding the title story) and not enough from his first volume, since it was prepared in competition with Grove's Ficciones and each needed a selling point. The Aleph and Other Stories (English) only looks like a selection; it's Borges' and DiGiovanni's translations of all the stories that still hadn't been, as well as their retranslations of the few stories they could get permission to from the Ficciones and Labyrinths teams.
You'd think Borges: A Reader would come closest, but there's such crucial omissions there, too, that copyright issues clearly swayed the selection. And, like Aleph etc., the volume's way out of print.
Basically if you love Borges you end up buying all these books to get the tiny number of items in each unavailable elsewhere. I guess Penguin has picked up on this fact and is knowingly extending and exploiting the chaos earlier publishers created inadvertently. Naughty Penguin.
These two new ones have an annoying degree of overlap with Penguin's Selected Poems, also from ten years ago--which in turn carried over a lot of translations from the c. 1970 one. Allegedly the three upcoming prose volumes, On Writing, On Argentina and On Mysticism are also composed mostly of reprints from Non-Fictions. I'll buy them anyway, since new Borges is my heroin, but I'm not sure why others would; English-language publishing of Borges makes Calvino's situation look clean.
Even leaving aside the translation issue, there's no true "selected" volume, whether of stories or overall, even though it looks like there's so many selections. Borges' own selection, A Personal Anthology, did get translated, but he admitted picking its contents less with quality in mind than not wanting to bore people with anything over-erudite or complicated--i.e. Borgesian. He put out a New Personal Anthology a little bit later as a corrective, after all his admirers complained. Presumably the ideal Selected volume, through the early '70s anyway, would combine those two (as a start), but the second was never translated. Well, maybe not ideal--Borges was a bit overfond of his own knife-fighting stories.
Labyrinths has only a sprinkling of essays and essentially no poems; it also has way too many stories from the Spanish language Aleph (though inexplicably excluding the title story) and not enough from his first volume, since it was prepared in competition with Grove's Ficciones and each needed a selling point. The Aleph and Other Stories (English) only looks like a selection; it's Borges' and DiGiovanni's translations of all the stories that still hadn't been, as well as their retranslations of the few stories they could get permission to from the Ficciones and Labyrinths teams.
You'd think Borges: A Reader would come closest, but there's such crucial omissions there, too, that copyright issues clearly swayed the selection. And, like Aleph etc., the volume's way out of print.
Basically if you love Borges you end up buying all these books to get the tiny number of items in each unavailable elsewhere. I guess Penguin has picked up on this fact and is knowingly extending and exploiting the chaos earlier publishers created inadvertently. Naughty Penguin.
