SOURCE: “Borges's Dark Mirror,” in New York Review of Books, Vol. 45, No. 16, October 22, 1998, pp. 80–82

In the following review of Collected Fictions, a new translation of Borges's short fiction, Coetzee traces the development of Borges's stories, evaluates the new translation, and discusses the peculiar problems that arise when the author has translated some of his own work.

1.

In 1961 the directors of six leading Western publishing houses (Gallimard, Einaudi, Rowohlt, Seix Barral, Grove, Weidenfeld and Nicolson) met on the Mediterranean island of Formentera to establish a literary prize that was meant to single out writers who were actively transforming the world literary landscape, and to rival the Nobel Prize in prestige. The first International Publishers' Prize (also known as the Prix Formentor) was split between Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges. That same year the Nobel Prize was awarded to the Yugoslav Ivo Andri'c, a great novelist but no innovator...