Everything and Nothing is a collection of Jorge Luis Borges’ writings, released in a New Directions Pearl edition.  I’m a huge fan of the Pearls – they’re throwbacks to a time when paperbacks came in 4-1/2″ x 7″ format and fit handily inside your jacket pocket.  Ficciones holds a special place in my heart.  But this particular collection is beautiful, compact and contains some of the author’s best work.  If you already know & love Borges, it is the perfect vehicle to become reacquainted.  If you’ve yet to have the pleasure of reading Borges’ sublime (truly!) prose, Everything and Nothing is a powerful introduction to the best of the short stories, lectures and essays.

Borges is one of the few writers I’ll read over and over again.  His prose style is clean, succinct.  It nicely balances out against the complexity and cerebral quality of his subject matter.  The Lottery in Babylon is a story about a society ruled entirely by chance.  At first it seems ridiculous, – a city in which all decisions are made through lottery.  But as the story progresses, the plot inverts and life in Babylon becomes eerily familiar.  The Garden of Forking Paths is spy vs. spy, a labyrinthine espionage tale with a twist at the end you’ll never see coming.  Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is supposedly about the internet… but I, personally, don’t see it.  For me it’s a much more straightforward narrative on the manipulation of reality and history by a small group of individuals.  My absolute favorite of the collection, Blindness, is a lecture Borges gave in the 1970’s.  If I am ever stranded on a desert island I want it with me.

For me to live without hate is easy, for I have never felt hate.  To live without love I think is impossible, happily impossible for each one of us.  But the first part – “I want to live with myself, / I want to enjoy the good that I owe to heaven” – if we accept that in the good of heaven there can also be darkness, then who lives more with themselves?  Who can explore themselves more?  Who can know more of themselves?  According to the Socratic phrase, who can know himself more than the blind man?

A writer lives.  The task of being a poet is not completed at a fixed schedule.  No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six.  Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.  I suppose a painter feels that colors and shapes are besieging him.  Or a musician feels that the strange world of sounds – the strangest world of art – is always seeking him out, that there are melodies and dissonances looking for him.  For the task of an artist, blindness is not a total misfortune.  It may be an instrument.

Four separate translators worked on the stories and essays that make up Everything and Nothing.  Donald A. Yates, who also wrote the introduction; James E. Irby; John M. Fein and Eliot Weinberger.  This is worth mentioning because Borges voice remains consistent from piece to piece, regardless of who is translating.

I don’t speak or read Spanish.  But in the past I’ve read multiple works of a single author, each interpreted by a different translators.  The substitution of one translator for another can be glaringly obvious.  After reading a book translated by Lucia Graves  I went looking for more novels by its Spanish author.  The next book I picked up was (unfortunately) done by a different translator in whose hands the characters became flat and two-dimensional.  I never bothered with that author again.  To the point: With great power comes great responsibility.  The credit for the smooth flow of this collection is a testament to the skill of the translators.  And while I know it must be so, how could the original Spanish possibly be any better?

Please forgive the poor metaphor, but I find reading Borges’ soothing. Comparable to watching words float by on a stream.  Every so often you fish out an idea like so much flotsam.  Sometimes to keep, sometime to throw back.  You can spend hours doing this.  Days.  Possibly weeks.  And be perfectly content the entire time.

Now, if you’ll excuse me?  It’s time to crawl back under my table.

Publisher:  A New Directions Pearl, New York (2010)
ISBN:  978 0 8112 1883 2