On a wet Tuesday in March, in a basement room at the Instituto Cervantes on Eaton Square, Mariana Belgrano read four pages of her new Borges to thirty-one people who had brought their own copies of Andrew Hurley's 1998 edition. She did not refer to Hurley once. She said only that the new book, Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Fictions, was a record of nineteen years of disagreement with the page in front of her.
Granta Books published the volume on 2026-04-21. It runs to 614 pages and gathers thirty-eight stories from Ficciones, El Aleph, and El informe de Brodie, with a thirty-page translator's preface and a closing essay by the Argentine novelist Pola Oloixarac.
Belgrano is forty-six. She teaches at the Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires and has spent most of her professional life on a single author. Her doctoral thesis, submitted in 2009, was on Borges's prose rhythm, and the new translation reads like a thesis carried into practice.
The most quoted sentence in Borges in English is the first line of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Hurley gave us, "I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia." Belgrano writes, "To a mirror and an encyclopaedia, jointly, I owe the discovery of Uqbar." The inversion is not flourish. The Spanish places the agents first and the verb at the end, and Belgrano has chosen, against the grain of English, to keep that shape.
She does this often. The reader who comes to her Borges from Hurley will at first feel that the prose has been slowed down on purpose. After thirty pages, the slowness reveals itself as attention.
There is a small footnote, on page 187, that records a single word change in The Library of Babel. Hurley had "gallery." Belgrano has "hexagonal chamber." The footnote explains that Borges revised the Spanish in 1956 to insist on the geometry. Hurley translated from the 1944 text. Belgrano has worked from the variorum edition prepared by Daniel Balderston in 2010.
This is the book's quiet argument. The earlier English Borges was made in a hurry, from settled Spanish texts that were not, in fact, settled. Belgrano has read the manuscripts at the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires, and the surviving correspondence with Bioy Casares, and a small archive of Borges's dictations to María Kodama from the 1980s. The footnotes record what she found.
The danger of such an approach is reverence. A translator who has lived in a single writer's sentences for two decades can begin to translate the writer's reputation rather than the writer. Belgrano avoids this by being willing, in three places, to call a Borges sentence ugly.
On page 312, in The Aleph, she translates a list of fifty-eight things the narrator sees in the basement. Borges piles up the items in deliberate excess. Belgrano keeps the excess. Hurley had pruned. The result is a list that is harder to read and more like the Spanish.
She is less successful with the late stories. El informe de Brodie contains some of Borges's plainest writing, and Belgrano's instinct for slowness occasionally weighs the plainness down. The title story in particular feels heavier in her English than it does in any Spanish edition.
Oloixarac's closing essay is the book's only real misstep. It is fourteen pages on Borges's politics, written in the manner of an op-ed, and it sits oddly against the patient translator's preface. A reader who buys the book for the stories will skip it. A reader who buys it for the apparatus will be disappointed.
Granta has produced a handsome volume. The endpapers are a reproduction of a 1949 map of Buenos Aires from Borges's own collection, donated to the Fundación San Telmo in 2008. The text is set in Adobe Garamond at 10.5 on 14, which is generous for a book of this length.
The cloth is a deep blue called, in the catalogue, "South American midnight." The dust jacket carries a single photograph of Borges in 1973, taken by Pepe Fernández at the Café La Biela in Recoleta. The photograph has not been printed before.
The price is twenty-eight pounds. NYRB Classics has held the rights to the Hurley translation in North America since 2007, and that book remains in print. Readers who have it will not need to throw it away. Belgrano's version is not a replacement. It is a second opinion.
Two questions remain. The first is whether the Borges estate, which has been litigious since 1990, will permit a paperback edition. The Granta editor Sigrid Rausing has said only that negotiations are ongoing. The second is whether Belgrano will go on to translate the essays.
The essays are the harder book. Otras inquisiciones has never had a fully satisfactory English version. Esther Allen's selected essays, published by Penguin in 1999, is excellent but partial. Belgrano told the audience at Eaton Square that she has begun on Historia de la eternidad. She would not say when it would be done.
Reading her preface, one suspects she does not know. She writes that the great task of a Borges translator is to resist the urge to be Borges. She quotes a sentence from her own first attempt, in 2007, and crosses it out in print, and offers a new version that she says is also wrong.
This is the right mood for a Borges translator. The book is honest about its provisional nature. It admits that the Spanish is not finished and that the English cannot be.
It is also a book that rewards rereading. The reviewer has read seven of the stories twice and one of them, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, three times. Each pass turned up a small decision that the first reading missed. A footnote on page 91 explains why Belgrano has used "audacious" rather than "audacious" for audaz. The note runs to four sentences and is convincing.
Whether the book will sell is another matter. Granta has printed an initial run of 6,500 copies in the UK, with 4,000 more bound for distribution by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States from June. That is a cautious print run for a major translation.
Hurley sold steadily for two decades on the strength of being the only available English Borges. Belgrano enters a market with at least two competing texts and a generation of readers who have moved on. Her best hope is the long sale: a book that finds its readers slowly, by recommendation, over years.
It deserves to be that book. It will not displace Hurley in the classroom for some time, because the Hurley is cheaper and shorter. It may, in twenty years, be the version that academic editors prefer.
For now it sits, in its blue cloth, on the desk of one reviewer who has not yet finished it and does not feel any hurry to.