SOURCE: “Stranger Than Ficción,” in Lingua Franca, Vol. 7, No. 5, June-July, 1997, pp. 41-9.

In the following essay, Howard discusses the nature of Borges's collaboration with Norman Thomas di Giovanni, one of his English translators.

“In the long run, perhaps,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges in 1971, “I shall stand or fall by my poems.” The intervening years have failed to vindicate that claim: The great Argentine writer's ficciones are required reading in short story courses, his essays and metaphysical games cited in countless monographs on every imaginable subject, his name—and its adjectival form, Borgesian—invoked by scores of journalists to explain bizarre phenomena, from the afterlife of Eva Perón to the vastness of the Internet. Borges's poetry, on the other hand, has long since been overshadowed in the English-speaking world by his persona and fame; the poems are largely remembered and read today because they were written by...