Transtextual Paths: <i>Dream of the Red Chamber</i> as a Source of Borgesian Labyrinth

Abstract With a book review published in the Argentine magazine El Hogar in 1937, Jorge Luis Borges was arguably the first author to introduce the Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦) to the Spanish-speaking world. By investigating Borges’s under-examined book review, this article starts with a comparative analysis of the German translation and Borges’s reception of Dream . First, I demonstrate how omissions and interpretations by the German translator Franz Kuhn contribute to Borges’s partial reading of this Chinese novel. Next, leveraging Gérard Genette’s concepts of transtextuality, my analysis situates Dream of the Red Chamber as a hypotext of Borges’s canonical short story “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” (“The Garden of Forking Paths”). I argue that “El jardín” not only inherits the narrative and philosophical essence of its Chinese source, but the figurative labyrinth created therein transcends Borges’s initial equivocations about the translated text. Ultimately, I contend that Borges’s ‘transreading’ of Dream of the Red Chamber shapes the crucial themes of dream and doubleness in his later works. Although the translator’s mediation results in Borges’s partial interpretation of the Chinese novel, the Argentine writer constructs a unique labyrinth – his philosophical and literary quintessence – in his creative rewritings and adaptations.