Editors Reads Verdict
The translation that introduced Borges to the English-speaking world, Labyrinths remains the essential single-volume introduction to his work — its selection of stories and essays constituting the most useful map of a mind that made the labyrinth its central metaphor.
What We Loved
- The selection by Donald Yates and James Irby is simply excellent — these are the stories that need to be read, assembled in an order that clarifies their relationships
- The inclusion of ten essays alongside the stories illuminates the thinking that generates the fiction
- This is the translation most English readers encountered first, and its American idiom suits Borges's clean, declarative style
Minor Drawbacks
- Several stories overlap with Ficciones, which can frustrate readers who own both
- The essays, while essential, require some philosophical background that not all readers bring
- The later New Directions translation updates the language in ways some prefer, leaving the question of which edition to own genuinely open
Key Takeaways
- → The labyrinth, the library, and the mirror are Borges's three central metaphors for infinity and self-reference
- → Every choice creates a fork — a path taken and a path untaken — and Borges's fiction insists that both are real
- → A text is not complete when written but when read, and every reader completes it differently
- → The essay and the story are not distinct forms for Borges — the essay can be fiction, the story can be argument
| Author | Jorge Luis Borges |
|---|---|
| Publisher | New Directions |
| Pages | 256 |
| Published | January 1, 1962 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Latin American Literature |
Labyrinths Review
Labyrinths was published by New Directions in 1962, edited and translated by Donald Yates and James Irby, and it introduced Jorge Luis Borges to the English-speaking world with a selection that remains, sixty years later, the best single-volume introduction to his work. The book contains twenty-three fictions and ten essays — a slightly different selection from Ficciones, the Grove Press collection published simultaneously — and its choice of title was apt: the labyrinth is Borges’s central and most recurring image, the architecture of a mind that finds infinity in structures that fold back on themselves.
The collection’s great stories overlap substantially with Ficciones — “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “The Library of Babel,” “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” “The Lottery in Babylon” — but the additions are what make Labyrinths the richer single volume. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is here in the form most English readers know: the story of an encyclopaedia entry for a country that does not exist, which gradually colonises the actual world until objects from Tlön begin appearing in our reality, and finally the fictional country simply replaces the real one. Borges was thirty-nine when he wrote it, and it remains the most concentrated demonstration of what he could do: take a philosophical proposition — idealism’s claim that the world is a projection of mind — and dramatise it as a thriller, a detective story, a horror story, each in sequence, in under thirty pages.
The essays collected here — “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” “Kafka and His Precursors,” “A New Refutation of Time,” and others — are essential for understanding the fiction. “Kafka and His Precursors” makes Borges’s central critical argument: that a great writer creates their precursors, retrospectively transforming earlier work so that it appears to have led toward them. Zeno’s paradox, a specific prose passage of Browning, a Chinese prose fantasy — none of these appear Kafkaesque until Kafka exists; after Kafka, they are unreadably otherwise. This argument is itself a demonstration of the labyrinthine nature of literary time: the influence runs backward as well as forward, and the past is always being revised by what comes after it.
The translation by Yates, Irby, and a team of additional translators has been both praised and critiqued. Borges’s Spanish is notably clean and precise, aiming for a certain eighteenth-century English tone — he was deeply influenced by De Quincey, Stevenson, and Chesterton — and the American English of the 1962 translation catches this better than later versions. The prose reads as if it were written in English, which was probably Borges’s intention: he claimed to have thought in English as much as Spanish, and read in English throughout his life.
Our rating: 4.6/5 — The collection that made Borges available to the English-speaking world, and the one that remains the best single introduction to the most influential fiction writer of the twentieth century’s second half.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Labyrinths" about?
The essential Borges collection for English readers: twenty-three stories and ten essays, including 'The Garden of Forking Paths,' 'Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote,' 'The Library of Babel,' 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,' and 'The Lottery in Babylon.'
What are the key takeaways from "Labyrinths"?
The labyrinth, the library, and the mirror are Borges's three central metaphors for infinity and self-reference Every choice creates a fork — a path taken and a path untaken — and Borges's fiction insists that both are real A text is not complete when written but when read, and every reader completes it differently The essay and the story are not distinct forms for Borges — the essay can be fiction, the story can be argument
Is "Labyrinths" worth reading?
The translation that introduced Borges to the English-speaking world, Labyrinths remains the essential single-volume introduction to his work — its selection of stories and essays constituting the most useful map of a mind that made the labyrinth its central metaphor.
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