THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS by Jorge Luis Borges. 256 pages. Dutton. $6.95.
Jorge Luis Borges is a quiet, delicate, blind old man who lives in Argentina. Though he has been writing for nearly 50 years, hardly anyone in the U.S. had heard of him until a decade ago. Today, especially among the literate young, he is recognized all over the world as a brilliant, exotic and curiously endearing literary figure. Borges is a poet as well as a prose master. But his most characteristic creations are unique short stories, which he calls ficciones. They can be unmistakably identified by their brevity, clear, laconic style, humor, and dependency on such devices as mazes, mirrors, odd beasts, and men who are really other men. In short, they deal in one way or another with the conundrums of art and identity, the treacherous nature of reality, and the silvered labyrinths of myth and imagination.
Like Samuel Beckett, whose name is often coupled with his own as an influential modern writer, Borges enjoys a reputation based upon a very slender body of work. Unlike the reticent, reclusive Beckett, however, Borges is personally accessible. Though he is 70, and deaf in one ear, in addition to being blind, he willingly talks about himself, his work and the world. In recent weeks, he has been drawing standing-room-only audiences on a speaking tour of U.S. campuses. The visit coincided with the publication of the first English translation of The Book of Imaginary Beings. An alphabetically arranged, cross-cultural bestiary of both famous and faintly known monsters and apparitions, Beings is a spin-off from Borges' vast scholarship. The reader is invited to consider such symbolic creatures as the Basilisk, a remote cousin of Medusa, which kills with its stare. Closer to home is the Pennsylvania Squonk, which dissolves in its own tears when captured. There is also that symbol of incongruity—or sheer perversity —the Hippogriff. It is half horse and half griffon. But that is only half of it; the griffon itself is already half eagle and half lion.
Perhaps the most pathetic imaginary being is the Lamed Wufnik of the Jews. One of 36 just men whose existence and virtue is supposed to protect the world from Jehovah's wrath, the Wufnik must justify the ways of the world before God. It is a hard but absorbing job, which lasts as long as the Wufnik does not know that he has it. Once a man discovers that he is really a Lamed Wufnik, he immediately drops dead and the title passes to somebody else.
Beneath the book's attractively arcane surface, Borges makes some fine distinctions. The dragon, for instance, he classifies as a "necessary monster" because in some recurring way "it appeals to the human imagination." The book, moreover, provides an unprcs-sured look at the tastes and concerns that Borges began to develop as a child browsing in his father's well-stocked library in Buenos Aires, and an insight into the grotesque, haunting and often touching forms man has made of his fears and infatuations.