THIS essay is for those of you who choose to believe that Jorge Luis Borges actually translated, in 1939, a novel of William Faulkner's called The Wild Palms. In your support there is, of course, the artifact, published in October 1940, by Editorial Sudamericana, entitled Las palmeras salvajes, with a notation on the title page that reads: "Traducció n de Jorge Luis Borges." There is also the vaguely disquieting recollection in his "Autobiographical Essay" of 1970 that some time between 1937 and 1946 (the nine-year span is too broad to offer us much comfort), while on holidays from his work as municipal librarian, he "translated Faulkner and Virginia Woolf." And there is his comment to Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in Borges on Writing: " I remember when I translated Faulkner's Wild Palms, that people told me the sentences were far too involved, and I was blamed for that."

Against your belief there is, sadly, this distressing information about Borges' mother, in the "Autobiographical Essay": "She translated some of Hawthorne's stories, one of Herbert Read's books on art, and she also produced some of the translations of Melville, Virginia Woolf, and Faulkner that are considered mine."

The American South fascinated Borges, to be sure: one has to look no further than "El Espantoso Redentor Lazarus Morell" ("The Fearful Redeemer Lazarus Morell") in the Historia universal de la infamia (1935) to find him speaking with awe of the Mississippi River and the barbaric land through which it ran; but it is nonetheless difficult to imagine stranger literary bedfellows than the meticulous, lapidary miniaturist