In the preface to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Borges’s Labyrinths, André Maurois writes: “His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound—he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas—but it is vast.”
My favorite story in the collection is ‘The House of Asterion’, which gives Minotaur a background story that is compassionate and sympathetic. He is lonely and isolated and wants to be put out of his solitary misery. Borges is influenced by Ovid’s Theseus and Ariadne story, but gives us the Minotaur’s point of view. He tells us that every nine years a group of men enter his home but fall and die on their own. One of them prophesies Asterion’s escape:
“Since then my loneliness does not pain me, because I know my redeemer lives and he will finally rise about the dust. If my ear could capture all the sounds of the world, I should hear his steps. I hope he will take me to a place with fewer galleries and fewer doors. What will my redeemer be like? I ask myself. Will he be a bull or a man? Will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me?
The morning sun reverberated from the bronze sword. There was no long even a vestige of blood.
‘Would you believe it, Ariadne?’ said Theseus. ‘The Minotaur scarcely defended himself.”
First published in Spanish as ‘La casa de Asterión’ in Los Anales de Buenos Aires, 1947 and collected in El Aleph, Editorial Losada, 1949. First translated by James Irby and Donald Yates and collected in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962
A Personal Anthology 