Borges is a world of complex and paradoxical perceptions and dimensions. He can be seen as an author of purely archetypal literary texts; as a bookish and almost unreal individual; as a harbinger of major trends in structuralist, poststructuralist and post-modern thought; as a cosmopolitan, universal writer; as an essentially Argentine author deeply concerned with both his country's literary classics and its history; as a writer engaging with the historical and ideological issues facing the Western world from the twenties to the Cold War. A glance at a number of these dimensions may serve as a preliminary and impressionistic introduction to the phenomenon of Jorge Luis Borges. An essay, ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, will serve to introduce Borges's use of paradox and polemics, his preoccupation with cultural transmission and translation, his quirkily irreverent use and misuse of others’ texts, and his thoughts on the status of Argentine, and Latin American, culture.

Read in France in the early fifties in the translation of Roger Caillois, or as Labyrinths in the USA in the sixties, the stories of Ficciones and El Aleph seemed almost eternal, rounded, and mysterious: perfect intellectual fables without precedent or provenance. Symptomatically, Caillois excised texts with specifically Argentinian themes, such as ‘The South’, ‘El Sur’, from his edition.1 The truth is that they emerge, miraculously but laboriously, from the vast nebula of Borges's previous production, firmly grounded in the literary and political reality of Buenos Aires: poetry, literary and political polemics, four published collections of essays, intense if eclectic reading of the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the endless slog of literary reviewing over two decades. Borges edited journals such as Proa and Prisma, produced a string of influential anthologies (of ultraísta poetry, of fantastic literature, of detective fiction), penned endless short introductions to world literary figures in the pages of the popular women's magazine El Hogar, and reviewed an inconceivable number of texts in the pages of journals as diverse as Nosotros and Martín Fierro. Borges was a professional reader before he became the successful story-writer, and these two dimensions are inseparable in his thought and literary practice. The stories emerge as a genetic mutation almost, when the literary review becomes story, mystical quest and metatextual game in 1939, with ‘The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim’, ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’.