THE BOOK OF FANTASY
Edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, and Adolfo Bioy Casares
New York: Viking, 1988
384 pp., $19.95
THE DREAM OF HEROES
Adolfo Bioy Casares
New York: E.P. Dutton, 1988
244pp., $17.95
As old as fear itself, fantastic fictions antedate the written word. There are ghosts in all the literatures of the world--in the Zend-Avesta, the Bible, Homer, and the Thousand and One Nights. The Chinese may well have been the first specialists in the genre: The admirable Dream of the Red Chamber, erotic, realistic novels like the Chin P'ing Mei and the Shui Hu Chuan, and even Chinese philosophic texts abound in ghosts and dreams. But the editors of this anthology simply do not know how typical these books are of Chinese literature; ignorant, we do not know that literature first hand and must content ourselves with what luck (our oh-so-learned professors, cultural rapprochement committees, Mrs. Pearl S. Buck) supplies us. Limiting ourselves to Europe and the Americas, we can say that as a more or less defined genre, fantastic literature appears in the nineteenth century and in the English language. There were, of course, precursors; we might mention the Spanish prince Don Juan Manuel in the fourteenth century; Rabelais in the sixteenth; in the seventeenth, Quevedo; in the eighteenth, Defope and Horace Walpole; in the nineteenth, Hoffman.
Thus begins Adolfo Bioy's prologue to what he, his wife Silvina Ocmpo, and their friend Jorge Luis Borges called the Anthology of Fantastic Literature, first published in Buenos Aires on December 24, 1940. Viking has now issued a translation of that volume, retitled The Book of Fantasy, without Bioy's prologue but with an introduction by Ursula Le Guin. Publishing that 48-year-old anthology in the English-speaking world is no less bizarre than it was back then, and like everything translated, this anthology has acquired an entirely new meaning.
What the three editors intended in 1940 is not clear, although Bioy makes the following point:
In compiling it, we followed a hedonistic criterion; we did
not begin with the intention of publishing an anthology.
One night in 1937, we were talking about fantastic
literature, arguing over which stories seemed best; one of
us said that if we were to gather them together and add the
fragments of a similar nature we had noted down in our
commonplace books, we would have a good book. We composed
that book…[and] this volume is, simply, a collection of the
texts from the corpus of fantastic literature that we think
best.
Twenty-five years later, Bioy would note in a postscript to his prologue that the editors (all of them,
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