Harry Mathew's story "The Dialect of the Tribe" is the perfect Borgesian parable of translation. It speaks of a language that can be translated successfully while not revealing any substantive meaning. The story gradually fades out of English, as the narrator uses more and more words from the tribal language he is elucidating. Isn't this true of any language: you can translate it more or less, but none of what made the text valuable in the first place come through in the translation?

The blurb to this book [The Human Country: New and Collected Stories] compares Mathews (remember, only one "t"!) to Pynchon, Gaddis, and Barth. I see him more in the company of Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, and Kenneth Koch. Since he's a novelist, place him with the American postmodern novelists, with whom he has little to do. I see him more as the lost New York school poet. Who is Granville Hicks anyway? Didn't he used to be a well-known critic? The name sounds familiar, but I can't quite place it.