Fictions is a collection of short stories by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges, produced between 1941 and 1956. The English translation of Fictions was published in 1962, the same year as Labyrinths, a separate compilation of Borges's translated works. The two volumes lifted Borges to worldwide literary fame in the 1960s and several stories feature in both. "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" originally appeared published in History of Eternity.
Background
Publication
In 1941, Borges's second collection of fiction, The Garden of Forking Paths was published. It contained eight stories. In 1944, a new section labeled Artifices, containing six stories, was added to the eight of The Garden of Forking Paths. These were given the collective titleFicciones. Borges added three more stories to the Artifices section in the 1956 edition.
Translation
In 1948, the story "The Garden of Forking Paths" was translated into English by Anthony Boucher and published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. In 1962, an English translation of Ficciones was published by Grove Press. Edited and introduced by Anthony Kerrigan, the other translators were Anthony Bonner, Alastair Reid, Helen Temple, and Ruthven Todd.
Ficciones emphasizes and calls attention to its fictional nature. The choice and use of literary devices are conspicuous in the stories. Naomi Lindstrom explains that Borges saw an effort to make a story appear natural "as an impoverishment of fiction's possibilities and falsification of its artistic character."
Themes
The labyrinth is a recurring motif throughout the stories. It is used as a metaphor to represent a variety of things: the overwhelmingly complex nature of worlds and the systems that exist on them, human enterprises, the physical and mental aspects of humans, and abstract concepts such as time. The stories of Borges can be seen as a type of labyrinth themselves. Borges often gives his first-person narrators the name "Borges." While he imparts many of his own characteristics in them, he does not idealize them, and gives them human failings as well. English phrases appear intermittently in his Spanish stories. Occasionally, the title is in English. Borges often puts his protagonists in red enclosures. This has led to analysis of his stories from a Freudian viewpoint, although Borges himself strongly disliked his work being interpreted in such a way. In fact, he called psychoanalysis "la triste mitología de nuestro tiempo", or "the sad mythology of our time". Borges loved books and gives detailed descriptions of the characteristics of the fictional texts in his stories. In The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim, he indirectly suggests that a librarian is even holier than a saint. Other themes throughout his stories include: philosophical issues; deterioration and ruination; games of strategy and chance; conspiracies and secret societies; and ethnic groups, especially those in his own ancestry.
