When Anglophone readers think of “magical realism,” they generally think of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and other practitioners of this subgenre in Latin America during the mid-20th century. Borges, known for his brain-twisting, reality-bending stories, published two texts in English in 1962: Ficciones and Labyrinths. Both question what it means to be a writer or creator, and both investigate different perspectives (like that of the Minotaur in the Labyrinth) in order to push the boundaries of human knowledge.
Borges’s first published collection in Spanish, A Universal History of Infamy (1935), wasn’t translated into English until 1972, but it includes stories that made one of the reviewers cite the text as the first work of magical realism. Here, Borges explored the world of fake citations, crafting fictionalized accounts of actual criminals and their crimes and sourcing them with often false information, thus undermining the concept of citation as “truth.”
It wasn’t until 1962 that Anglophone readers were first treated to Borges’s unique fiction. Ficciones includes the famous stories “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” and “The Library of Babel,” and it has been called one of the most important books of the 20th century. In “Tlön,” Borges uses the mise-en-abîme technique of the double-mirroring effect: An imaginary encyclopedia somehow creates the nation of Uqbar, which in turn creates a literature of the fantastic. The eponymous protagonist of “Pierre Menard” insists that he has created a “new” Don Quixote merely by rewriting it word for word. The other stories in Ficcionesexplore similarly dizzying and unsettling themes, including a library with infinitely recursive corridors and a game of chance that sounds like what we would call “reality.”
Labyrinths, another of Borges’s collections of overtly fantastic or magical realist stories, includes essays and stories about everything from the aforementioned Minotaur to pieces on Kafka, Pascal, Cervantes, and Borges himself. Several of the stories in Ficciones are included in Labyrinths, ironically commenting on Borges’s playfulness with texts, mirrors, and doubles.
Borges would go on to have several more collections in English, including The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969 (1970), Borges: A Reader (1981), The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory (1998), and The Garden of Forking Paths (2018). His work is considered foundational to understanding the development of speculative fiction and literature in general in the 20th century.