Borges's Labyrinths: A Writer in the Mirror, a Translator in Isfahan

A man creates another human being in a dream, and in the end discovers that he himself is nothing but someone else's dream. This nested world takes shape in "The Circular Ruins", a story V. S. Naipaul calls intricate and almost science fiction, and one of the best known works of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. According to the daily Shargh, Ahmad Mir-Alaei translated the story into Persian in 1345 (1966–67) and published it in Jong-e Esfahan. "The Circular Ruins" was among the first of Borges's stories to reach Persian, marking an early introduction of Borges to Persian readers: a writer who kept moving the borders between reality, imagination, time and identity.

Borges (1899–1986) is one of the influential figures of twentieth-century literature. His short stories are known for endless libraries, mirrors, labyrinths, invented histories and characters who doubt their own identity. But his literary world is not limited to philosophical games. Coetzee writes of Borges's more realistic stories about the lives of gauchos and street toughs, set in the poor outskirts of Buenos Aires at the turn of the twentieth century: a world of knife fights and duels, pride, courage and death.

Ahmad Mir-Alaei introduced part of this world to Persian readers in Hezartooha-ye Borges (Borges's Labyrinths), a collection of stories and poems which, according to A Catalogue of Printed Books Translated into Persian, from the Beginning to 1370, was published by Zaman in Tehran in 1356 (1977–78). The book is not a complete translation of the English collection Labyrinths. According to Jalil Doostkhah in Encyclopaedia Iranica, Mir-Alaei drew on two English collections, Labyrinths and The Aleph and Other Stories, to select and translate Borges's work. The first of these was published in the United States in 1962, edited by Donald Yates and James Irby, and was one of the books that introduced Borges to English-speaking readers.

Knives, Dreams and Unstable Identities

The contents of Borges's Labyrinths include stories such as "Streetcorner Man", "The End of the Duel", "The Encounter", "The Dagger", "The Shape of the Sword", "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero", "The Circular Ruins" and "The Aleph". Poems such as "A Man" and "A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suárez" sit alongside the stories.

This selection places two different sides of Borges's world before the reader. On one side are stories that tell of the violence and courage of Argentine men; on the other, stories that build the question of truth and identity into the structure of the narrative itself. As Paul de Man tells it, in "The Shape of the Sword" the narrator reveals his true identity at the end: he is not the hero but the traitor of the story. In "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero", again as de Man tells it, a revolutionary leader who has betrayed his comrades must be executed, and his execution is staged after a play by Shakespeare; history and theatre blend so thoroughly that it becomes hard to tell the real event from its literary reconstruction.

In "The Circular Ruins" dream takes the place of reality, and in "The Aleph", as de Man describes it, there is a spot in a house from which the whole universe can be seen.

In Borges's stories, the truth is often not revealed at the end of the narrative; instead it gives way to another truth. The reader has to rebuild what came before in the light of a new understanding. In "The Shape of the Sword", the narrator's unmasking changes the meaning of the whole story; in "The Circular Ruins", the final discovery calls even the creator's place into question. This reversal is not only the subject of the story but part of its construction.

According to Iranketab's description, Mir-Alaei also included in an appendix an interview with Borges by César Fernández Moreno, a piece by V. S. Naipaul titled in Persian "Ta'biri az ro'yaha-ye Borges" (An Interpretation of Borges's Dreams), and an essay by Houshang Golshiri titled "I Have Not Lived; I Want to Be Someone Else". Their presence shows that the collection was also prepared to acquaint readers with Borges's thought and literary standing.

Paul de Man: Stories About the Making of Style

Paul de Man, the Belgian-born literary critic, in his November 1964 essay "A Modern Master" in The New York Review of Books, notes the limited reception of Borges in the United States and sees him as a writer whose standing had not yet been properly recognised.

In de Man's view, Borges's stories should not be read as moral tales or psychological narratives. His criminal and deceitful characters serve the artistic structure of the story more than they stand for moral evil. In this world, deception and forgery become devices for creating style.

From this angle de Man writes: "His stories are about the style in which they are written." He sees Borges's work as closer to the philosophical tales of the eighteenth century, especially Voltaire's Candide, than to Kafka's stories. Characters and events in these works make it possible to stage an idea.

To explain this quality, de Man turns to "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", the story of an imaginary writer who, as de Man describes it, takes on the strange project of re-creating Don Quixote word for word. De Man points to the close reading of two identical passages of Don Quixote in the story and, as he writes, Menard's Quixote is aesthetically more complex than Cervantes's.

According to de Man, this mirror-like multiplication of images is, for Borges himself, a sign of poetic success, and it arrives at an ordered picture of reality that holds all things within it, subtly changed and enriched. Yet de Man also calls this outcome, successful as it is, deceptive.

J. M. Coetzee: Renewing the Language of Fiction, and Its Limits

Thirty-four years later the South African novelist and critic J. M. Coetzee offered a broader assessment of Borges's work in "Borges's Dark Mirror". The essay appeared in October 1998, on the publication of Borges's collected stories in Andrew Hurley's translation.

Coetzee finds Borges's influence on Latin American literature striking. As he writes, Borges did more than anyone to renew the language of fiction, and Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso and Mario Vargas Llosa have all acknowledged their debt to him.

Even so, Coetzee does not rate all of Borges's work equally. He counts "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and "The Library of Babel" as the finest stories of The Garden of Forking Paths, and writes that the model for these two is not the tale but the critical essay. "Funes, His Memory", in his view, is the most astonishing story of Borges's 1944 collection: the story of a country youth who forgets nothing and, because he cannot form general concepts, cannot, as Coetzee puts it, think.

On "Pierre Menard", however, Coetzee does not agree with de Man. He considers it, as fiction, the least satisfying story of that collection, though he finds its intellectual daring remarkable.

Coetzee goes on to note the change in Borges's way of writing. In Brodie's Report, labyrinths and mirrors give way to simpler, more local narratives full of violence and masculinity. He judges the late work, including The Book of Sand, weaker in creative power than the stories of the writer's peak years.

Coetzee gives the final part of his review to Hurley's translation, a discussion of particular weight for readers of this book, who read Borges through translation. In his view, Hurley's versions are on the whole excellent and precise in their choice of words, but the translator's sense of how formal an English word is cannot always be trusted, and at times he creates a colloquial tone that the original does not have. Coetzee calls one of Hurley's changes a disturbing revision: in "The Circular Ruins", which Coetzee reads as a story about male generative power and male birth, Borges writes of every father's concern for the sons he has begotten, and Hurley turns father and sons into parent and children.

Coetzee also does not side with the method of the translations Borges made together with Norman Thomas di Giovanni. As he writes, the two tried to rethink every sentence in English, softened Borges's characteristic adjectives, and among other things cut half a page of dated satire from "The Aleph"; whereas, in Coetzee's view, the Borges we want to read is not necessarily one who sounds as if English were his native language. This discussion also touches Mir-Alaei's book: the volume published in 1970 as The Aleph and Other Stories was di Giovanni's translation, made together with Borges himself. Still, Coetzee's judgements on the English translations allow no conclusion about the Persian one; which version the Persian "Aleph" follows can only be settled by examining the printed book.

V. S. Naipaul: A Writer's Greatness and the Myth of Fame

V. S. Naipaul, the Trinidad-born writer, looked at Borges's fame from a different angle in "Comprehending Borges", published in The New York Review of Books in October 1972.

Naipaul calls Borges a great writer and a gentle, melancholy poet. But he quickly separates the worth of Borges's work from the image built around him in the English-speaking world. In Naipaul's opinion, Borges's reputation there as a blind, elderly Argentine is so inflated and false that it hides his greatness.

Of Borges's stories he considers about a dozen successful. Many of the others he sees as intellectual jokes that cannot always bear the metaphysical readings attached to them.

Naipaul, by contrast, stresses the value of Borges's poetry: poems about military ancestors, death, the passing of time and old Buenos Aires, which in his view have an accessible and at times romantic language.

Naipaul's criticism is also aimed at Borges himself. As he writes, every Borges interview resembles all the others. He sees a clear gap between the mythic Argentina of Borges's poems and the country he saw at close hand, where he found signs of crisis and dysfunction.

For all the sharpness of his criticism, Naipaul does not deny Borges's standing. His objection is mainly to the way international fame can build a simplified image of a writer and bury the work under a mass of interpretation.

Three Readings of One Writer

De Man, Coetzee and Naipaul all acknowledge Borges's importance, but they do not locate its source in the same place. De Man looks for it in the mirror-like structure of the stories and the making of style; Coetzee in the transformation of the language of fiction and the joining of philosophical thought to narrative; and Naipaul in his accessible poetry and his dozen or so successful stories.

The disagreement over "Pierre Menard" is a clear example of this difference. What for de Man is a complex and brilliant instance of literary creation does not, for Coetzee, fully succeed as a story, despite its intellectual daring.

These three reviews deal with different collections and different periods of Borges's career, and none of them is a review of Mir-Alaei's Persian edition. Still, reading them alongside the Persian selection helps one grasp the variety of Borges's work, from stories of knives and duels to worlds made of books, memory and dream.

Ahmad Mir-Alaei: Borges in Persian

Ahmad Mir-Alaei was one of the translators who, from the 1960s on, helped widen the horizons of Persian-speaking readers and writers through a deliberate choice of works of modern world literature. Translating Borges was part of a broader effort for him that took in Latin American literature, modern poetry and contemporary Western fiction, from Octavio Paz's Sun Stone to works by Graham Greene and William Golding. After studying English literature at the University of Isfahan and the University of Leeds, he worked in translation, editing and running cultural journals. His name is tied to Jong-e Esfahan, Ketab-e Emruz, Farhang va Zendegi and Ayandegan-e Adabi.

Mir-Alaei gave great weight to the choice of text and to accuracy in translation. According to Jalil Doostkhah in Encyclopaedia Iranica, he believed that not translating at all is far better than an imperfect translation, and that a good translation is as effective as the original.

In Borges's Labyrinths, the choice of varied stories and poems and the addition of critical writing can be seen as a sign of the same outlook. The reader meets a writer whose work resists a single style or theme and invites many different readings.

Naipaul's connection with Mir-Alaei adds a striking historical dimension. According to the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, in 1995 Naipaul went to Isfahan during his trip to Iran, and Mir-Alaei, who had earlier translated his book India: A Wounded Civilization, served as his guide and interpreter for three days. Naipaul later wrote about this trip and his meetings.

A few months later, on 2 Aban 1374 (24 October 1995), Ahmad Mir-Alaei's body was found in an alley near his workplace in Isfahan. Human rights sources and writers count his death among the suspicious political killings of that period, and according to the Boroumand Center the authorities never officially accepted responsibility for it. Mir-Alaei was one of the signatories of the letter of 134 writers protesting censorship, and according to Iranica he faced interrogation and death threats in the last months of his life.

From the publication of "The Circular Ruins" in Jong-e Esfahan to the compiling of Borges's Labyrinths, Mir-Alaei played a part in introducing one of the most important writers of the twentieth century to Persian readers. Alongside translating Borges, he also opened the way to differing critical views of him.

In Borges's world, a writer sometimes turns into another character in the mirror of his own work, and writings take on a life of their own. In the real world, their survival also depends on the translators, publishers and readers who carry works from one language into another. Borges's Labyrinths is a legacy of one such effort in the history of literary translation in Iran.

Three Reviews, Three Approaches

Paul de Man, "A Modern Master", The New York Review of Books, 19 November 1964. Read more

J. M. Coetzee, "Borges's Dark Mirror", The New York Review of Books, 22 October 1998. Read more

V. S. Naipaul, "Comprehending Borges", The New York Review of Books, 19 October 1972. Read more

Sources:
Jalil Doostkhah, "Mirʿalāʾi, Aḥmad", Encyclopaedia Iranica, 15 December 2008. https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/miralai-ahmad/
Payam Heidar-Ghazvini, "Masaf ba namomken-ha" (Confronting the Impossible), Shargh, 1 June 2022 (11 Khordad 1401). https://www.sharghdaily.com/بخش-روزنامه-100/847652-مصاف-با-ناممکن-ها
Mousa al-Reza Bashtani, Mahin Fazaeli Javan and Abbas Keyhanfar, Fehrest-e ketab-ha-ye farsi-shode-ye chapi az aghaz ta sal-e 1370 (A Catalogue of Printed Books Translated into Persian, from the Beginning to 1991), vol. 1, Islamic Research Foundation, Astan Quds Razavi.
Iranketab, "Hezartooha-ye Borges" (Borges's Labyrinths). https://www.iranketab.ir/book/35656-labyrinths
Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, "Ahmad Mir-Alaei", memorial page. https://www.iranrights.org/fa/memorial/story/-7011/ahmad-miralai