Books: 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....