When you read, translate, publish the "Complete Works" of Jorge Luis Borges, this major and, of course, more universal author of the 20th century, you are not just communicating with a life's work, but with a work-life; you feel that you are entering a world that seems unfamiliar yet familiar, in a wonderful labyrinth that, with each visit, appears as if it has renewed its twists and turns, inhabited by ideas and themes-Minotaurs: the illusory nature of human existence; the deceptive nature of the natural world; the almost inevitable arbitrariness of rational thought; the infinite and infinite possibilities; the idea that even the smallest thing or event encompasses the entire universe; that whatever we can imagine or has already happened or is about to happen; that every person is simultaneously another, if not all other people; the idea of the world as a personal projection of will, hence, often, in Borges' work, victim and perpetrator are identified; the idea of man as the creature of someone else's dream; the idea of a divine moment in time where an entire life is condensed and/or justified; the idea of the world as a library where we all wander seeking an unimaginable index of indexes in which meaning-design may have been deciphered; the idea that everything has already been written and that we do nothing but mumble what has been written; the -related- idea that one literature differs from another in the way it is read, hence the scandalous "Every writer creates his own precursors"; the -also related- idea that the writer does not express the reality in which he writes, but invents the reality in which he is expressed; the idea that literature is a game with opposing mirrors where fictions are reflected in a dizzying repetition, and that this game allows (if not demands or imposes) inspired variations, such as, for example, the intrusion of fiction itself into itself, as if it were transfusing its own blood; finally(?), the confusion of boundaries and the blurred threshold between life and death, in stories where the hero is dead and does not know it, or is reborn only to die "as he should".

A. K.