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of Borges’s stories, Andrew Hurley – twenty-six years after Christ’s confession of error – could still claim in a statement that is a model of unclarity and equivocation that Gosse’s history is the source given by Borges, but ‘In my view, this attribution is the result of an initial error seized upon by Borges for another of his “plays with sources”; as he subsequently admitted freely, and as many critics have noted, much of this story comes from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition….’ So much for Hurley’s scholarship and his insight into Borges’s mind. So much for the acumen of the Borges estate in specifying that Hurley’s compendium be based on a substandard edition of Borges’s works. So much for the competence of Borges’s Buenos Aires publisher. A mere glance by any of these at the original edition of the work in question would have been enough to correct the typographical error, set the record straight, and bring to an end decades of waffle and absurd supposition. In the preface to one of his story collections, Borges mocked a standard reference work ‘dont chaque édition fait regretter la précédente’ – of which each new edition makes you yearn for the previous one. He laughed when we translated the passage and, with a tinge of sadness, added, ‘My complete works.’

      My point is that these interpreters have been so cowed by Borges that rather than read what is there on the page with a bit of common sense they have instead been overly eager to intellectualize, to construct theories, to pit themselves against Borges in playing a far more complicated game than he ever intended. Blame for this to some extent can be laid to the fact that Borges is often studied in English, in poor translations, without reference to his Argentine roots. English-speaking critics, when they first came across Borges’s work in the early 1960s, appeared to believe that he had sprung from nowhere. Because his work drew on all Western (and Eastern) culture, his admirers often branded him a European writer. So did his detractors at home. Paradoxically, these virulent nationalists – because Borges refused to dabble in local colour, because he displayed maverick qualities such as a fondness for irony and subversion, because he thought for himself and was not afraid to speak his mind – could not see his profound roots in Argentine soil.² My greatest discovery when I went to work with Borges in Buenos Aires was to find that his books could not have been written by anyone but an Argentine.

      Down the years there has been an uncanny and unholy tendency in academic circles – American ones, in particular – to overinterpret. I suppose this came about for two reasons. One is because the grinders out of doctoral theses do not understand how writers write. As a result of the verbal fireworks perpetrated by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake, they erroneously believe that the prose writer’s basic unit is the word, when in fact an author works in ideas, pages, paragraphs, or sentences, all guided by cadences – in short, a flow, a sweep, not a dribble. Towards the end of his life, Borges told a London audience that to him literature was made

      Not just juggling with words. I try to forget the words and to say what I have to say perhaps not through the words but in spite of the words, and if a book is really good you forget the words.

      A second reason for overinterpreting is that the academic, like the politician in office, must perpetuate himself in his position. Therefore, it has been a matter of interpreting or perishing, of putting every word under the microscope and finding the hidden fauna. In Borges exegesis this has often amounted to dwelling on single words and overloading them with significance.

      A favourite anecdote about this brand of overloading concerns a private interview I once had with a professor at a Pennsylvania university. He was teaching a Borges story in English and asked me what the significance of the colour red was on the walls of a particular building in a certain Borges story. I imagine he wanted it confirmed that the hue stood for bloodshed and violence, thus foreshadowing the conclusion of the tale in question. Perhaps it did, though I doubt it. (Perhaps it even had a remote political significance, but I doubt that too.) For one thing, I always noted a concern in Borges not to give his endings away, a tendency that made him shun foreshadowing. Not to give their themes away when he attached epigraphs to at least two of his stories, he quoted no words but cited only the name, chapter, and verse of his sources.

      Chagrined and disbelieving, my professor walked away when I told him that what Borges had described was the actual colour of an actual structure, one that belonged to his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares.³ I knew the place, for once – when Borges was having marital difficulties – he and I had holed up there for a few days. The building, as was common in those parts, was simply red. I never got the chance to tell the professor that the colour, a traditional one, was originally derived from lime wash mixed with the blood of a bull. In fact, in his Spanish, Borges did not employ the general word for red but mentioned a certain vivid red known in the Argentine as punzó. The political comment, if there was one, concerns the use of this particular word. Borges qualified it with a nicely observed detail and said that the place had once been this shade of red but that ‘to its bene fit the years had softened that vivid colour.’ The colour, I prefer to believe, reflects a fact of daily life on the Argentine pampa – as does the fact that the building needed a coat of paint. On two counts, Borges had accurately depicted the structure. Anything else he would probably have looked on as mere cleverness. For the reader of Borges, there is no need to ignore what is before one’s eyes and look for the far-fetched.

      When it becomes difficult to trust that a wall is red because it is red because it is red, we must question the limits of legitimate interpretation. Common sense should apply, just as in rabbinical exegesis, as a safeguard against esoteric and misleading interpretation, the primary meaning of language takes precedence. Writers are admired for pinning down an object, a mood, the ineffable, with precision. Borges’s prose, largely modelled on writers like Stevenson, Wells, and Chesterton, is realistic and as such it is full of sharp definition. Alas, the diction and mistakes of poor translations of Borges into English blur his prose and make it the victim of distortion born of ignorance. A common enough meteorological phenomenon, the red ring around the moon that forecasts rain, comes out in one story as ‘the crimson circle around the moon presaged rain.’ In another, a small kettle used to brew maté – an everyday household utensil on the River Plate – is transmogrified into a ‘soup cauldron’. In another, ‘a growth of tall reeds’, a common detail of the Argentine countryside, is bludgeoned into ‘a field covered in dried-out straw’. (While Borges was fascinated by the exotic in alien cultures, paradoxically he hated exotic descriptions of life in his own country.) In a fourth, the word jineta, which in Spanish means ‘shoulder braid’ or ‘insignia’, is misread for the word jinetes, which means ‘horsemen’ or ‘riders’. In the tale, the hero, a policeman who is about to take the side of the man he is hunting down, is troubled over his rank and uniform – in other words, over his shoulder braid, the emblem of his authority. The translation in question has him troubled about ‘the other cavalry-men’. The wonder was, Borges remarked, that the translator had not taken jinetas for the feminine of jinetes and had the hero troubled about ‘the Amazons’.

      Another stock-in-trade of many interpreters has been the clever game of combing words for double meanings. Not satisfied that the Spanish word fuentes means only ‘fountains’ in a particular instance, one study tells us that the word is more helpfully translated into English as ‘sources’, which is a second Spanish meaning of the word. I grow impatient with this. Borges was writing about public fountains in a place like Trafalgar Square. I do not believe we find ‘sources’ in London squares. Fuente in Spanish can also meaning a serving dish. Why hadn’t that been thrown in for good measure? I am reminded of one translator of a Borges poem who went in for such surrealism when, translating the Spanish word cascos, he opted for ‘helmets’ instead of ‘hoofs’. The poem was about horses. Perhaps in Hieronymus Bosch horses have helmets, but in Borges, on the Argentine pampa, they have hoofs. In this case, the translator – a Latin American and at the time a professor at yet another Pennsylvania university – astonished Borges with his arrogance. The man read his version one day to an audience that included Borges. Afterwards, Borges took him aside and said, ‘Look here, cascos is “hoofs”.’ That evening, the man read the poem out again at another public gathering. Of course, the word had not been changed.

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