Borges loses weight: the new 'complete works' cross out half a book

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Borges’s survival (the very thing, so much his own, that obsessed him), administered by increasingly detached third parties, is doing no favors to his work. For a writer who spent his life crossing and dissolving genres, making that practice a genre of his own and a winning card, it is regrettable that his complete works are not reissued today (as Emecé once did) respecting the individual books chronologically, without dividing them into short stories, essays, and poetry, thus deconstructing a labyrinth that took him nearly a century to build. This simplifying subdivision, like so many editorial decisions, perhaps obeys the naive illusion of believing that volumes become more marketable or giftable this way. There is another detail, no less unforgivable.

In the most recent edition (by Alfaguara, in January of this year in Spain and in April in Argentina) "complete" must be placed between immediate quotation marks: they have added (to an author historically besieged by errata, precarious editions, and erratic criteria for publishing printed, translated, and unpublished works) a mutilation, a withdrawal of collaboration, a gratuitous blind spot: the first 50 pages (in prose) of El hacedor  do not appear in any of these three volumes; they only printed the second half of that book, in the seemingly corresponding volume. It feels like a mean joke inflicted by a cretin upon someone who lost his sight: stealing an asset right in front of him with absolute impunity.

Thus, a novice reader, in the making, newly arrived to Borges, who innocently paid a pretty penny for these brand-new volumes, would not even be able to read the piece that gives El hacedor its title, the one that inaugurates the series and which indirectly and secretly anticipated these outrages: "una terca neblina le borró las líneas de la mano." Nor will they be able to read others, equally irreplaceable, such as "Dreamtigers," "Los espejos velados," "Una rosa amarilla," "Martín Fierro," "Parábola de Cervantes y de Don Quijote," "Everything and Nothing," "Ragnarök," and "Borges y yo," no less.

‍Poesía completa  retains the prologue to the book, which underscores even further the leap and the void into "Poema de los dones," which now opens the severed section of El hacedor. Several of the omitted texts are dreams, of ambivalent placement, of course, but so are or include so many other pages by Borges. The fact is so nightmarish and implausible that any reader who discovers it will inspect it over and over again, distrusting their own sense of sight before a shamelessly undone Borges.

It is a fault (in every sense of the word) so conspicuous that it would be almost sanctimonious to relegate it to the category of what he himself once called "accidental errors" or to attribute to the anonymous editor an aesthetic judgment no less fabulous and alarming. Especially because the astonishing part is that El hacedor was not the only book Borges articulated with prose and verse. He repeated it, for instance, in the subsequent La cifra and in his last, Los conjurados , and it catches the attention (to put it mildly) that in this new edition they are indeed reproduced in their entirety.

Bitter posthumous ironies for someone who dedicated no small number of pages to the uncertain destiny of texts of a certain antiquity. With time for gimmicks but not for the examination of an oeuvre with "necrological piety" or, in the words of José Bianco, with "typographical veneration," the advertisement for the new volumes reads: "You get out of the labyrinth by reading." At this point, the subtext and the counter-order should be obvious: "You enter the labyrinth with respect." These are reissued and painful displays of the appalling collapse of modesty (of which Borges was a supreme example), in whichever field one looks: from neglect, apathy, and brazenness, to insolence, outrage, and vandalism.

Another absence, perhaps less grave but no less inexplicable, forces one to delve even deeper into distasteful journalism: there is no signatory or incognito figure to elucidate or justify the general guidelines and particular maneuvers underlying this triptych. To be clearer: faced with a publication of this caliber and relevance, the reader has no reason to supply information on their own or make speculative inferences (as if it were a novel and the editor a reticent author) about whether, for example, the editor resolved to follow Borges's decision to publish his Obra poética (1977) without those texts. In any case, at the current stage, that eventual alibi is invalidated because this is a complete, ostensibly total work, and those missing texts should be in one of the volumes, since Borges did not express that he disowned them as texts. And that presumed caveat is likewise unauthorized by another decision of the editor himself: that of including the prose fragments of La cifra and Los conjurados (as mentioned, books of similar characteristics), now indeed claiming authorial prerogatives of a contradictory nature. A reader does not come to a book (much less to the complete works of the greatest Argentine author and one of the greatest of the twentieth century) to play at guessing unstated reasons, or to set about interpreting the muteness of an editor or of fortuitous rightsholders as if they were hidden gods.

The beautiful cover photos attempt to disguise the reticence of these enigmas, which dilute their gestures in editorial silence and in the cast of the copyright: Mariana del Socorro Kodama, Martín Nicolás Kodama, María Victoria Kodama, Matías Kodama, and María Belén Kodama. The paths continue to fork, but the garden seems to be missing a landscaper.

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_{Published in Revista Ñ on 5/25/2026}

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