![]() ![]() His English presence was so stirring that he came to be regarded almost as an English writer who, with characteristic perversity, lived in and wrote about Buenos Aires. ![]() ![]() His books continued to come out haphazardly in translation, and Borges himself appeared on the scene, a frail, blind, and somehow heroic figure, speaking his courteous English and lending himself to interviews on all sides with an acquiescent modesty that both charmed and teased interviewers and readers. ![]() He became distortingly fashionable and, as in Spanish, there sprang up around him a thicket of criticism far exceeding the small compass of his own writing. The recurring ironies and the tangible paradoxes in his work led him to be invoked, often along with Nabokov, in a variety of misleading ways. Even so, his writings had no chronology and, as so often happens in Borges’s case, disparate critics would grab possibly a single story of his and run with it to unlikely latitudes. His work first appeared piecemeal in the Fifties, a poem here, a story there, until, in 1961, he shared the International Publishers Prize with Samuel Beckett, a recognition that propelled two volumes of his work into English, translated by various hands-first, Ficciones, his most important volume of stories, and then Labyrinths, a selection of poems, essays, and stories. Borges has come from Spanish into English in a rather haphazard fashion. ![]()
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