The Widow Ching-Pirate

by Jorge Luis Borges

Borges became famous as a writer of short stories that contained new realities: elaborately conceived, ingenious and gamesome précis of impossible worlds or imaginary books. In these five stories there is danger on the high seas, an ungracious teacher of etiquette and an encyclopedia of an unknown planet - and Borges's unique imagination and intellect play throughout.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Historical Fiction, Magical Realism, Literature, Modern Classics

75 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2011

About the author

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph (transl. The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
Born in Buenos Aires, Borges later moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind by the age of 55. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. By the 1960s, his work was translated and published widely in the United States and Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages.
In 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971, he won the Jerusalem Prize. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by the growing number of English translations, the Latin American Boom, and by the success of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. Writer and essayist J.M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists."

Reviews

[Srividya Vijapure]

“There are many men adept in those diverse disciples, but few capable of imagination – fewer still capable of subordinating imagination to a rigorous and systematic plan.”

So says Borges in one of the short stories, perhaps the best of the lot, which I believe reflects true of the man as well. In this really short book, comprising of just 5 stories, we are given a whiff of the genius that is this man, Borges.

I have been meaning to read Borges for a long time but was reluctant to do so as he is touted, and rightly so, as an author who isn’t that easy to read. The numerous allegories, metaphors and other inner hidden meanings that his works have, make it difficult for one who isn’t ready for them, ready to go beyond the written word into the unwritten thought. And frankly speaking, I wasn’t ready at all, despite my having read other authors who are quite similar in their way of writing to Borges. I guess I just had this huge apprehension which ruled my reading abilities. However, this small book, with its simple stories, has given me the courage to deal with the other works by the author.

This book has three stories which are historical in nature, historical fiction if you want to call it that, about a female pirate, a thug and Japanese etiquette. It also contains two stories, which are pure fantasy, where one is about a world that is created in its entirety and the other is about an author wanting to rewrite Don Quixote. When you read the first three historical stories, you are lulled into believing that the author isn’t as difficult as he is presented but then you enter the world of fantasy and you see the genius of this man. In these two tales, especially the one about recreating an entire world, you can see how he takes a simple idea and transforms it into something sublime, still simple and yet complex, with a dash of mystery, making it a quest, for both the reader as well as the characters living within the tale.

In short, this is a wonderful place to start if you haven’t read any Borges as this would give you a taste whilst whetting your appetite for more.

[Fatemeh]

ششمین اثر از مجموعه کلاسیک های مدرن :

شروع بورخس برای من با کتاب اولریکا بود؛ شروع ناجالبی که نزدیک به ۴ سال باعث شد دیگر سمت بورخس نروم و هرکس را که طرفدار او بود، سریعا در قالب یک مرد ۴۰ ساله با کلاه و سیگار در کافه‌های مرکز شهر ببینم که سعی دارد با این موضوع که بورخس را می‌فهمد، مخ دختر روبه‌رویش را بزند. اما اشتباه می‌کردم و بورخس بزرگ‌تر از آن است که بشود با گفته‌های من یا آن مرد چهل‌ساله کوچک شود.

در این کتاب، مرز واقعیت و افسانه در تمام داستان‌ها از بین می‌رود. گاهی با خودت فکر می‌کنی این شخصیت یک شخصیت تاریخی بزرگ است که اگر اسمش را گوگل کنی کلی مقاله درباره‌اش می‌بینی، یا صرفاً زاییده ذهن نویسنده است.

هر داستان در واقع پیام مشخصی ندارد، اما در کمال تناقض پر از مفهوم است. داستان‌ها در ابتدا ساده‌اند، اما به شکل عجیبی پیچیده می‌شوند. با اینکه خواندن نوشته‌های بورخس هنوز هم سخت است، اما دیگر حس نفرت را در من زنده نمی‌کند.

ادبیات لاتین شبیه معشوقی سمی است؛ با دست پس می‌زند و با پا پیش می‌کشد. کلنجار رفتن با این موجود وحشی، سخت نفس‌گیر اما در عین حال طراوت‌بخش است.

[Brian]

Borges makes me wish I had a set of encyclopedias. When I read his short stories I believe what he is saying is the truth. It is the truth. What would Borges have thought of google? Bullshit!!! That's what he would of thought. Any Tlön would tell you that the Internet and anything posted on it is nothing but words written in a past that no longer exists. I love Borges. He teaches me things no one taught me in school. He taught me that life is now and only now. And there are many of my lives coexisting. Thanks Mr Borges.

[Mark Easton]

There's always an inherent danger in reading Borges as his short fiction carries with it an intrinsic risk of exploding, each story being an impenetrable and enigmatic mass of chaos plucked from the depths of his cavernous imagination and bound in heavy and endless threads of language.

This short collection of five stories is no exception. Covering a range of themes-including piracy, thuggery, Japanese etiquette, false knowledge, and unoriginality of art-each story has, at its heart, a brilliant kernel of an idea, to which Borges adds one or more metaphysical twists, and then finally wraps in the referential but labyrinthine language of an academic.

If it weren't for his ineluctable qualities of creativity and mystery, I have no doubt his verbosity would put off even the most ardent of readers, but as it stands his stories tantalise, leaving the reader as intrigued as they are uncomfortable, and, above all, absolutely uncertain about what boundaries, if any, should be placed on literature, let alone reality.

[Serge]

In a noisy Macao tavern, where Portuguese beer flowed and heavy tables shook under the blows of mahjong dice — I saw her. Dressed in silk, with flowers in her gray but salt-stiffened hair. Thin, yet regal, surrounded by old cutthroats. Armless, eyeless men, soaked in the Southeast Asian sun, their skin laced with scars and lashes from an old ship’s whip.
Many years have passed since then, and the world has changed twice, maybe three times — but even now, through the lace of cigarette smoke, I can clearly see the eyes of a fox.
The one who once challenged the power of the dragon himself

[Anna]

This is the perfect little book to have in your bag just in case, for example, you have to wait 25 minutes at the dentist. It weighs virtually nothing and contains five stories by Borges, of the invented historical and literary anecdote type. Each is beautifully crafted, but my favourite is 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', which I've read before in another collection. It's an account of an imaginary simulacrum of a world that proves more fascinating than the real one. As with most Borges stories, it gives you a vertiginous sense of how fragile reality can be.

[Robert]

Some of it very interesting, the rest of it either went completely over my head or quite dull. Not smart enough to tell which.

[Sohail]

This is a review of the eponymous short-story, not the short-story collection.

Borges explores the psychological power of storytelling and the games that can be played with the minds of people. A powerful army is forced to surrender by mere suggestion of a story.

[Paul]

The thing I love about Borges is that, even in the case of this collection where some of the stories start off seeming inscrutable and cavernous, they always, without fault, probe some fascinating realm that only he and a rare few individuals could ever conceptualise. And they're genuinely enjoyable, unexpectedly touching on some concept or other that you'll never quite see coming until he gets there.

[Justin Drown]

Borges does a great job here making his weird fiction feel like non-fiction. It gives the story extra gravity.

[Ronan]

Amazing and pointless. Borges writes somewhere in this little book that every purely intellectual exercise is ultimately pointless. He also writes about how wonderful it is that a particular writer can excel at espousing the exact opposite of his own point of view, and thus not offend the target of his criticism because they're both in on the joke (=profoundly ridiculous). One short story is about an author who tries to write Don Quixote... 300 years later. ..but exactly the same (!). He destroys all evidence of these mammoth attempts adding to Monty Python levels of absurdity. Another story about an imaginary country (or is it?) inserted into an edition of an encyclopedia, later upping the stakes to a 1001 page tome about an entire planet, is it fabrication or alternate reality? Does it matter? Nope, not a jot. It's funny but dense stuff written in a mocking satirical literary academic style, mixing imaginary and real references just for the craic.

[Jacqui]

Memorable Quotes

The Widow Ching-Pirate
“Be cruel, be just, be obeyed, be victorious.”

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
“…the present is undefined and indefinite, the future has no reality except as present hope, and the past has no reality except as present recollection"

“…while we sleep here, we are awake somewhere else, so that every man is in fact two men.”

[Irwan]

Nerdy. Surprisingly entertaining read for seemingly pointless stories.

[Peter Longden]

Borges compelling brilliance!

This collection of short stories shows Borges at his most creative, enigmatic and intelligent.
As John Updike wrote about Borges's writing: his ''driest paragraph is somehow compelling.'' This is true in these short stories which give us adventure on the high seas, as well as reimagining a classic while exploring an imaginary world through its ‘real’ encyclopaedia. Borges is entertaining in a philosophical and largely untruthful way, not wanting to deceive the reader, only to encourage us to open our eyes to other possibilities, to contemplate how magical difference can be and revise our understanding of the world’s literary opportunities (for ‘world’s’ think real and imagined).
Such delightful prose, Borges brings his stories to life with precise and beautiful description as well as incisive observations. To read one Borges is to want to read more.

[Mihai]

I always find amusing how people try to create some logical, factual basis for the stories invented by Borges. Some thread which can be untangled logically. This is not possible. The main purpose of its stories is to create a journey through the labyrinthine paths of knowledge.

Is it working? We have a new imaginary world created by imaginary authors. Or the metaphor of the useless effort to rewrite Don Quixote by copying it word by word, itself a metaphor of the same useless effort. Or the outliers: pirates, gangsters, murderers, heroes for some, criminals for others.

I think it is working. The labyrinth is there.

[Sanoop]

This is my first experience with Borges.It would be a lie to say I understood all layers of these stories.Three short stories-'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote', 'The Widow Ching – Pirate' & 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'- infused some kinda intellectual and mental pleasure while reading this book, which consist of five stories.Looking forward to reading him more. :)

[Enrique]

I love Borges' short stories and these ones are also very good. Specially the third one. They are a good introduction to Borges world. And if you enjoy these 5 stories I would recommend you the complete short stories book.

[Dave Williams]

Of the five short pieces collected here, the title one – which they put up front – seemed the least interesting to me; it was a bit "so what?"
The best was "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", but with a title like that, I can see why they didn't use it as the overarching name for the book.

[Rachel]

I can’t do 50 words sentences with my millennial brain🙃
The uncivil teacher of court etiquette kotsuke no suke was my fave but also 3/5 forgettable. Definitely not recommended after reading Ted Chiang.

[Eva Amsen]

The last two stories were by far my favourite, especially the one about the man who dedicated his life to writing "the" Quixote. (Essentially, plagiarising, but in the most convoluted way!)

[Cristina Chițu]

Be cruel, be just, be obeyed, be victorious.

...truth, whose mother is history

Fame is a form- perhaps the worst form- of incomprehension.

[Nilan]

love borges (laia's recommendation)

every short story of his is a jewel to be re-read and re-interpreted

[Esther Van Esbroeck]

pompeus

[Gregory Allan]

A few short stories which the first couple were enjoyable but then later lost my interest and didn’t give anything memorable to me.

I read this because I’ve heard good things about this author. I would however like to read whatever other people recommend as his best book.

[The Idle Woman]

One of the Penguin Mini Modern Classics series, this is like a little collection of curios - five stories displaying different aspects of Borges's writing. Fittingly, there are examples of fantasy recounted with the gravity of history, and history told with the elaboration of fantasy. Three studies focus on lesser-known figures from history: the 'doughty' Widow Ching, who ran a formidable pirate fleet in the seas around China; the New York gang boss Monk Eastman, with his unexpected affection for cats; and the Japanese etiquette master whose arrogance led to the sworn vengeance of the 47 Ronin. The collection rounds off with two more fanciful tales: the story of an encyclopedia which describes an entirely invented world, which threatens to become more real than reality itself; and the story of a man who sets out to rewrite Don Quixote in the original words. For me, the first three stories in this collection were the most enjoyable: I found the last, on the 'Author of the Quixote', rather baffling because I simply couldn't see the point. Is Borges is making a point about the folly of modernist literary criticism and the arrogance of modern writers? Or, as I always fear with Borges, am I just too daft to understand?!

This is a very short taster of Borges - 75 pages in total - but if you haven't read him before, it will introduce you to his erudite and playful approach to the short story. If you are a newcomer, hopefully you'll be tempted to seek out some of his other books, because while this is a fair introduction it doesn't do justice to his imagination. I have to say that I didn't enjoy it as much as Penguin's collections of his longer, more elaborate stories - Labyrinths, for example - but it was at least an introduction to some unfamiliar, but intriguing historical figures.

[Peter Dunn]

I acquired this as part of the Penguin Mini Modern Classics 50-volume box set. Sadly as I write this I can see that this out of print box set is only now available via Amazon at a huge prize so don’t bother looking for it, but do watch out for future similar efforts by Penguin.

It is a great way of pushing you to read outside one’s comfort zone as you feel obliged to read them all as you have bought them and their small size means they take hardly any time to read. Each one I've read in the collection so far has tempted me to read more of that author, but not this time. It may be a poor translation, it may be that the stories are ripped out of context but these stories just didn't grab me as a whole

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is the exception. It packs a lot of ideas into a very short story and there are probably a host more ideas and allusions therein that I am missing as I know very little about Latin American culture.

[Ryan]

This was my first reading of Borges, and while I was pleasantly surprised by how creative and amusing some of the stories are, I haven't yet figured out how to approach his work in general. Clearly there's are larger significance within the fabric of his extremely short fictions, but without looking at more of his work its hard for me to put the ideas together. It's ironic that I need to read much more of his work to understand the stories here, because otherwise the variety covered is perfect for the mini modern classics line.

[The Book]

Overall, not my favourite collection of stories by Borges. I usually find that I enjoy the concepts in his stories but on occasion the language and style gets in the way of my enjoyment of them. I find his fist person narrative style overly fussy in Pierre Menard for example, and didn't want to finish reading it. Then again, I enjoyed The Uncivil Teacher (...) which has a different, calmer narrative style.

[Ruth Brumby]

Fascinating writing. I knew about the female pirates, so I knew that first story was accurate, even unadventurously so. Then gradually I moved to Tlon, real or unreal? An enthralling comment on times and thought, making me want to research people who may not actually exist. Andrew Hurley's writing is great; I don't know how his translation compares with the original, but his word choices are excellent.

[Steven Pilling]

this made me realise that when it comes to fiction I'm not as clever as I think I am. parts were good but most floated past my head leaving only bafflement.
borges has a beautiful turn of phrase some humour and well I think this collection fits my view of jazz in that the creator enjoyed it way more than the reader.