Conspiracy

To the Editors:

In your Contributors column of August 21, you note that “Jorge Luis Borges’s first book in nine years, In Praise of Darkness, will be published next month.” Although any Borges bibliographer must labor in a hall of mirrors—and fun-house mirrors at that—no part of this statement is strictly correct.

The last book by Borges published in Spanish was El Libro de los Seres Imaginarios (Buenos Aires, 1967), a fanciful bestiary which Dutton is publishing in an expanded English version this coming November under the title The Book of Imaginary Beings. Borges’s first completely new work since El Hacedor (1960; English translation Dreamtigers, 1964) consists of some thirty poems and five prose pieces, including the piece “Pedro Salvadores” which you published. This indeed will be out in Buenos Aires within the month under the title Elogio de la Sombra, but the English translation In Praise of Darkness is some months in the future. Meanwhile the first comprehensive selection of Borges’s short stories, covering his writing from the 1930s to the present, will be available in English in June 1970.

Marian Skedgell

Editor

E.P. Dutton & Co.

201 Park Avenue South

New York City