Greatest in Spanish

LABYRINTHS (248 pp.)--Jorge Luis Borges--New Directions ($5.50).

FICCIONES (174 pp.) -- Jorge Luis Borges--Grove Press ($3.50).

The greatest living writer in the Spanish language is a little-known Argentine named Jorge Luis Borges.

Borges (pronounced Bor-hess) has been neglected because he has long been considered too complex to survive translation.

Now two collections of his short stories have been published for the first time in English, and it is clear that both the complexity--and the startling beauty--of his writings derive from the fact that Borges rates poetical insight a good deal higher than analytical thought. "To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions," he writes. "There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless." Seeing Sharply. Borges' stories take place in a world that is half commonplace, half fantastic. Dreams occur within dreams; time loses its significance. What counts is momentary impulse and observation. A story mysteriously titled Tloen, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius concerns a mythical planet where people have no conception of material objects. Things have no names; they are described as they appear at the moment. People call the moon, for example, "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky." Life has dissolved into pure poetry.

In another story, a gaucho is confined to bed for the rest of his life after being thrown by a horse. He hardly cares. The fall has miraculously sharpened his perception so that his memories are boundless: "He knew by heart the forms of the Southern clouds on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising." Borges contrasts this world of heightened perceptions with the real world of clumsy generalizations. In Deutsches Requiem, a commandant of a Nazi concentration camp becomes an example of an overthinking man. Stifling his feelings and perceptions, he justifies the slaughter of Jews because he believes that war purifies mankind. He rationalizes Nazi defeat by the same philosophy. "We taught the world violence and the faith of the sword," he exults, as the Allies close in.

"Now that sword is slaying us. Many things will have to be destroyed in order to construct the New Order; now we know that Germany is one of these things." Since every event is unique, nobody is permanently good or evil in a Borges story. A traitor at one time becomes a hero at another, a friend an enemy. Reputations are strangely inverted. In one story, a theologian reasons that Judas was actually God, because God would have chosen the "vilest destiny of all" to redeem mankind. In another, the fearsome Minotaur of Greek legend turns out to be sad at being hated by men, and longs for death at the hands of Theseus.

Freed by Blindness. Born in Buenos Aires, Borges stayed to live and write, though there was plenty of reason for a writer to move. As a young lyric poet, he was condemned by the hidebound traditionalists who dominated Argentine literature. Later, when writing prose, he ran afoul of pro-Nazi Dictator Juan Peron, who banned his books. But by doggedly pursuing his writing, Borges has brought literary excitement to a country that experiences it only rarely. He has also established his own reputation among small but demanding groups of readers in Argentina and around the world. Plagued by an inherited eye disease, he is now, at 62, totally blind, but continues to write. "Blindness is no handicap for a writer of fantasy," he says. "It leaves the mind free and unhampered to explore the depths and heights of human imagination."

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