The master's testament

Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley

Penguin Press, #20

IN A year overdressed with anniversaries one centenary is worthy of celebration. These Collected Fictions of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges commemorate his birth in 1899.

In conscious parody this review opens in June 1982. In a corner of the tearoom in Dublin's Sherbourne Hotel two men sit, improbably erect, in high-backed chairs. They are elderly. This is an edgy first meeting between Borges and the Irish novelist Francis Stuart. Hovering between them is the Taoiseach's cultural adviser Anthony Cronin. Beyond the chairs, eavesdropping journalists lie.

The great, the good, and the academic had gathered in Dublin to commemorate Bloomsday and the centenary of Joyce's birth. Elsewhere, carnage is imploding in the Falklands/Malvinas conflict. ''Brits'' want ''Argie'' to comment. Imperiously Borges pronounces: ''Two bald men fighting over a comb.'' This moment of tension, literary collaboration, and political conceits could fill and focus a typical Borges fiction. In his 1970 introduction to Labyrinths, James E Irby noted that Borges claimed the basic devices of all fantastic literature are only four in number: the work within the work, the contamination of reality by dreams, the voyage in time, and the double.

Again and again in this new translation one is reminded of the master's testament. Andrew Hurley has tried to ''render'' the Borges style. Compared with earlier attempts by Anthony Kerrigan and Norman Thomas di Giovanni he comes across too stringent, too exact, and somewhat staid. He also fails to give either biographic or bibliographic information, limiting himself to historical footnotes at the end of this massive tome. None the less this is a marvellous book, bringing together for the first time nine collections of short fictions in English ranging from A Universal History of Iniquity (first published in 1935) to the posthumously translated Shakespeare's Memory (1983).

Jorge Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, in Palermo, a seedy rundown area of Buenos Aires. He came of ''Spanish, English and, very remotely, Portuguese Jewish origin''. His maternal grandmother came from Northumberland. His parents were of the intellectual middle class and descended from military and political figures prominent in the nineteenth-century Argentinian struggle for unity and independence.

As a child he was taken to Europe and educated in Geneva and ''Mother-Land'' Spain. Until the mid-30s he wrote and published only poetry. Following a severe illness he turned to ''filleting'' the literature of others for his own short ''fictions''. The first novel he ever read was George Douglas Brown's The House With The Green Shutters. But he himself never attempted the longer format of a novel.

A librarian by profession, he was expelled, due to political criticism, by Peron, who quaintly reappointed him poultry inspector. After the dictator's fall he was reinstated as director of the national library in Buenos Aires. From 1953 his sight began to fail and he ceased to write, instead choosing to ''dictate'' the ever-reductive parables which made him famous.

His first English translation was in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in August 1948. Fourteen years later his first book-length collection of stories appeared in English. It was followed by Dreamtigers, Fictions, The Aleph, Doctor Brodie's Report, and others. His final work, Atlas, was written in collaboration with his long-time companion, Maria Kodama, whom he married a month before his death on June 28, 1986, in Geneva.

In 1961 he shared the Prix Formentor with Samuel Beckett. In 1966 he was awarded the fifth biennial Jerusalem Prize. His self-styled ''Conservative'' politics, often voiced as opposition to US ''cultural imperialism'', meant that, like his admirer Graham Greene, he was often nominated but never awarded the Nobel Prize.

Unfortunately, Professor Hurley does not allow space for most of these facts. A loss for the new reader, an irritant for the lazy reviewer. In the paperback edition may I recommend he annotates with Ronald Christ's interview in the Paris Review of 1967. This lucid and funny encounter was punctuated by Borges's secretary continually interrupting to announce a Mr Campbell was waiting. Eventually, propriety drove the blind writer to dismiss his interviewer with the words: ''The Campbells are coming, the Campbells are coming. They are supposed to be a ferocious tribe. Where are they?''

However, the absence of diverting anecdote and illuminating new translation cannot detract from Borges's greatness. The continual representation in his fictions of a blind Homer in this age of barbarism, and Beowulf in the dark ages, indicate his sense of purpose. Ideas he dismissed. In the Paris Review interview he categorically stated: ''Ideas are not important

. . . a writer should be judged by the enjoyment he gives and the emotion one gets.''

Back to Dublin in 1982. Earlier that day both Borges and Stuart had been virulently and erroneously labelled ''fascists''. The Argentinian tapped Stuart on the knee and gestured towards Cronin. ''Is he one of us?'' ''Yes,'' says the Irishman.

Exit political courtier followed by cackling malice.