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TUESDAY, 18 OCTOBER 2011 10:46

Working for the Future

Most of the French novelist Stendhal’s work was written in the 1830s. One of the many impressive things about him was his clear-sightedness. He knew, and never fails to inform us, that he was writing not for the contemporary reader but for readers fifty years hence. He was of course proved right.

I myself have been engaged in an enterprise that I will never see published in my lifetime. In my case, I have been working with an eye to the year 2037. That is the year in which the work of Jorge Luis Borges comes out of copyright.

What in fact is my project? When I started it ten years ago I called it the Millennium Borges, a name which in 2037 will have no meaning. What I wrote as a description, or an advertisement, of the enterprise is the following:

The Millennium Borges is a new presentation in English of Jorge Luis Borges’s complete prose fiction from 1935 to 1985. Set out here in the order the work was written rather than in the haphazard and often arbitrary way it was later issued, the body of Borges’s stories can now be read with greater ease and understanding. The present series, in thirteen handy volumes, leads off with a brief autobiography planned specifically to introduce an English-speaking readership to Borges’s life and writing. The collection includes the three volumes of tales he wrote with Adolfo Bioy Casares, thereby making available a larger share of Borges’s fiction than has ever before been offered the public. Further highlights of this baker’s dozen are the careful translations, with short introductions, and an intimate format in which Borges can be savoured – as suits him – in small measures.

The work has consisted of a scrupulous revision of all my existing – or once existent – translations of Borges’s fiction, largely made in collaboration with him, with new versions filling in certain gaps.

Now as all the reading world knows, thanks to the efforts of the purported Borges widow María Kodama and the New York agent Andrew Wylie, the whole of my previously published work with Borges has been abolished, airbrushed out of existence, consigned to the dustbin of literary history. The closest I came to receiving an explanation for the rejection of my collaboration with Borges and the unilateral breaking of long-standing contracts was given me in a letter from Kathryn Court, of Penguin USA, dated 19 December 1990: ‘ . . . the estate would not allow us to republish Borges under the old Dutton terms.’ The old Dutton terms, which had initially been laid out by Borges himself, were that I received 50% of the royalties of my English translations. (That, I am afraid, is another and too long a story to go into here.)

What Wylie and Kodama cannot do is prevent me from carrying out my project in private. Nor can they prevent me from publishing on this website, which I shortly intend to do, my little introductions to the Millennium Borges.

3 COMMENTS | ADD COMMENT

THURSDAY, 17 NOVEMBER 2011 02:12

Eric Edelman said ...

Although I knew your Borges translations had been allowed to go out of print, it always saddens me to hear it again.

Your translations are magnificent. The current English versions of Borges's works I find unreadable, and I refuse to buy them.

I will do my best to last until 2037, and in the meantime will content myself with reading your introductions to the MILLENNIUM BORGES.

Thank you for very much for your splendid translations, and for your dedication to this project.

THURSDAY, 17 NOVEMBER 2011 02:12

Eric Edelman said ...

SATURDAY, 22 OCTOBER 2011 14:18

Jeremy Osner said ...

This is very exciting news! I will be on pins and needles for the next 26 years... I would be very interested to know the order in which the fictions were written -- could you please post your table of contents on this site?