Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (46 page)

Afterword

It is a known fact that the word “invention” originally stood for “discovery,” and thus the Roman Church celebrates the Invention of the Cross, not its unearthing, or discovery. Behind this etymological shift we may, I think, glimpse the whole Platonic doctrine of archetypes—of all things being already there. William Morris thought that the essential stories of man’s imagination had long since been told and that by now the storyteller’s craft lay in rethinking and retelling them. His
Earthly Paradise
is a token of the theory, though not, of course, a proof. I do not go as far as Morris went, but to me the writing of a story has more of discovery about it than of deliberate invention.

Walking down the street or along the galleries of the National Library, I feel that something is about to take over in me. That something may be a tale or a poem. I do not tamper with it; I let it have its way. From afar, I sense it taking shape. I dimly see its end and beginning but not the dark gap in between. This middle, in my case, is given me gradually. If its discovery happens to be withheld by the gods, my conscious self has to intrude, and these unavoidable makeshifts are, I suspect, my weakest pages.

“The Intruder,” the first written of these new stories of mine, haunted me for some thirty years before I set it down. At first, all I had was the idea of two brothers and a woman, loved by them both, who in the end had to be sacrificed to their friendship. Initially, I wanted a California setting, but as I knew—and so would my readers—that my knowledge of California was merely bookish, the credibility of the tale would have been impaired. I finally kept to Buenos Aires.

In my Preface, I mention a hidden link between two of the stories. Now I can say openly that I meant “Juan Muraña” and “The Meeting.” Underlying both of them is the fancy that a weapon, in time, may have a secret life of its own. In “Juan Muraña,” we also get the idea of a man, after death, becoming a thing— of a knife fighter being his knife.

Three of the stories are taken from life. The elder lady who presides over one of these was—may I confide this to the reader?—a great-aunt of mine. In another, a certain duel is still being fought with a fine grace by the two antagonists. The tale of the two gauchos whose throats were cut and who were then made to run a race actually took place a century ago in Uruguay.

“The Unworthy Friend” is really a confession. During my schooldays in Geneva, a companion whom I looked on as a hero offered me his friendship. I thrust it aside thinking his offer was a mistake, since I did not deserve it. Out of that personal experience came the tale of the Jewish boy in a Buenos Aires slum.

“Rosendo’s Tale” is, I think, a fair rendering of what actually happened, or might have happened, in an early and all-too-famous extravaganza of mine called “Streetcorner Man.” In the new version I have done my best to hark back to sanity.

“Guayaquil” can be read in two different ways—as a symbol of the meeting of the famous generals, or, if the reader is in a magical mood, as the transformation of the two historians into the two dead generals.

In most cases, my stories are woven around a plot. In “The Elder Lady” and in “The Duel” I have attempted something else. I have tried, after the manner of Henry James, to build these tales around a situation or a character.

Since 1953, after a longish interval of composing only poems and short prose pieces, these are the first stories I have written. 

Buenos Aires, December 29, 1970J. L. B.

The Garden of Branching Paths

Prologue

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote

The Lottery in Babylon

A Glimpse Into the Work of Herbert Quain

The Library of Babel

The Garden of Branching Paths

Prologue

The eight pieces of this book do not require extraneous elucidation. The eighth piece, "The Garden of Forking Paths," is a detective story; its readers will assist at the execution, and all the preliminaries, of a crime, a crime whose purpose will not be unknown to them, but which they will not understand — it seems to me — until the last paragraph. The other pieces are fantasies. One of them, "The Babylon Lottery," is not entirely innocent of symbolism.

I am not the first author of the narrative titled "The Library of Babel"; those curious to know its history and its prehistory may interrogate a certain page of Number 59 of the journal
Sur
,
¹
which records the heterogeneous names of Leucippus and Lasswitz, of Lewis Carroll and Aristotle. In "The Circular Ruins" everything is unreal. In "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," what is unreal is the destiny imposed upon himself by the protagonist. The list of writings I attribute to him is not too amusing but neither is it arbitrary; it constitutes a diagram of his mental history ....

The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary. Thus proceeded Carlyle in
Sartor Resartus
. Thus Butler in
The Fair Haven
. These are works which suffer the imperfection of being themselves books, and of being no less tautological than the others. More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books. Such are "
Tlön
, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain," "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim." The last-named dates from 1935. Recently I read
The Sacred Fount
(1901), whose general argument is perhaps analogous. The narrator, in James's delicate novel, investigates whether or not B is influenced by A or C; in "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" the narrator feels a presentiment or divines through B the extremely remote existence of Z, whom B does not know.

Buenos Aires, November 10, 1941

- J. L. B.

(1)
The great South American literary journal edited in Buenos Aires by Victoria Ocampo. —
Editor's note.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

I

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the concurrence of a mirror and an encyclopaedia. The mirror unsettled the far end of a corridor in a villa in Gaona Street, in the Buenos Aires suburb of Ramos Mejía; the encyclopaedia, fraudulently entitled
The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia
(New York, 1917), is an exact, if belated, reprint of the 1902 edition of the
Encyclopædia Britannica
. All this took place four or five years ago. Bioy Casares had dined with me that evening and we'd lingered over a discussion on the mechanics of writing a novel in the first person, in which the narrator omitted or distorted events, thereby creating discrepancies that would allow a handful of readers — a tiny handful — to come to an appalling or banal realization.

From
along the corridor the mirror spied on us. We found out (inevitably at such an hour) that there is something unnatural about mirrors. Then Bioy recalled that one of Uqbar's heresiarchs had said that mirrors and copulation are abominable because they multiply the number of men. When I asked him the source of this pithy dictum, he told me it appeared in the article on Uqbar in
The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia
. The villa, which we were renting furnished, had a copy of the work. Towards the end of Volume XLVI we found an entry on Uppsala and at the beginning of Volume XLVII one on Ural-Altaic languages, but nowhere was there a mention of Uqbar. Somewhat bewildered, Bioy scoured the index. He tried all conceivable spellings — Ukbar, Ucbar, Ooqbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr, and so forth. Before he left that night, he told me that Uqbar was a region of Iraq or Asia Minor. I took his word for it, but, I must confess, with misgivings. I suspected that, in his modesty, Bioy had invented the unrecorded country and the nameless heresiarch to give weight to his statement. A fruitless search through one of Justus Perthes's atlases only confirmed my suspicion.

The
next day, Bioy phoned me from Buenos Aires. He said he had before him the entry on Uqbar, in Volume XLVI of the encyclopaedia. The article did not name the heresiarch but did cite his tenet, setting it out in words almost identical to Bioy's, although perhaps less literary. Bioy had remembered the quotation as, 'Copulation and mirrors are abominable.' The text of the encyclopædia ran, 'To one of these Gnostics, the visible world was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they reproduce and multiply the planet.' I said that I should by all means like to see the article. A day or two later Bioy brought it round. This surprised me, for the detailed gazetteer to Ritter's
Erdkunde
was utterly innocent of the name Uqbar.

Bioy's
book was indeed Volume XLVI of
The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia
. On its spine and half-title page the index key, Tor-Ups, was the same as on our copy, but instead of 917 pages his volume had 921. The four additional pages contained the entry on Uqbar — not shown (as the reader will have noted) by the alphabetic indication. We then verified that there was no other difference between the two volumes. Both, as I believe I have said, were reprints of the tenth edition of the
Encyclopædia Britannica
. Bioy had acquired his copy at some auction sale or other.

We
read the article with considerable care. The passage Bioy remembered was perhaps the only extraordinary one. The rest seemed quite plausible, and, fitting in with the general tone of the work, was — as might be expected — a bit boring. Re-reading the entry, we found beneath its painstaking style an intrinsic vagueness. Of the fourteen place names that appeared in the geographical section, we recognized only three — Khorasan, Armenia, and Erzurum — all worked into the text in a suspect way. Of the historical names, only one was familiar — the impostor Smerdis the Magus — and he was cited rather more as a metaphor. The article purported to set out the boundaries of Uqbar, but the hazy points of reference were the region's own rivers, craters, and mountain ranges. We read, for instance, that the Tsai Khaldun lowlands and the delta of the Axa mark the southern border and that wild horses breed on islands in the delta. All this came at the beginning of page 918. In the historical section, on page 920, we found out that as a result of religious persecution during the thirteenth century orthodox believers sought refuge on the islands, where their obelisks still stand and where their stone mirrors are not infrequently unearthed. The section on language and literature was short. One feature stood out: Uqbar's literature was of a fantastic nature, while its epic poetry and its myths never dealt with the real world but only with two imaginary regions, Mlejnas and Tlön. The bibliography listed four titles, which so far Bioy and I have been unable to trace, although the third — Silas Haslam's
History of the Land Called Uqbar
(1874)
—
appears in a Bernard Quaritch catalogue.
*
The first,
Lesbare und lesenswerthe Bemerkungen über das Land Ukkbar in Klein-Asien
, dated 1641, was written by Johann Valentin Andreä. This fact is worth pointing out, for a year or two later I came across his name again in the unexpected pages of De Quincey (
Writings
, Volume XIII) and found that Andreä was a German theologian who, in the early seventeenth century, described an imaginary community of Rosicrucians, which others later founded in imitation of the one foreshadowed by him.

That
night Bioy and I paid a visit to the National Library. In vain we exhausted atlases, catalogues, yearbooks of geographical societies, accounts by travelers and historians. No one had ever been to Uqbar, nor did the name appear in the general index of Bioy's encyclopaedia. The next day, Carlos Mastronardi, to whom I had spoken of the matter, noticed in a bookshop at the corner of Corrientes and Talcahuano the black-and-gold spines of
The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia
. He went in and asked to see Volume XLVI. Naturally, he did not find in it the slightest mention of Uqbar.

II

A dim and dwindling memory of Herbert Ashe, an engineer on the Southern Railways, lingers amid the overpowering jasmine and in the illusory depths of the mirrors in the Hotel Adrogué. In his lifetime, Ashe — like so many Englishmen — seemed not altogether real; in death, he is not even the ghost he was then. A tall, phlegmatic man, whose tired, square-cut beard had once been red, he was, I believe, a childless widower. Every few years he went back to England to visit — judging from the snapshots he showed us — a sundial and some oak trees. With him, my father had cemented (the verb is extreme) one of those English friendships that begin by eschewing confidences and very soon dispense with conversation. The two men used to engage in an exchange of books and magazines and, with scarcely a word, would duel at chess.

I
remember Ashe in the hotel corridor, holding a book on mathematics and from time to time gazing at the irretrievable colours of the sky. One evening, we discussed the duodecimal system, in which the number twelve is equivalent to ten. Ashe said that he was just then transposing duodecimal into sexagesimal tables, in which sixty is equivalent to ten. He added that while in Rio Grande do Sul he had been commissioned to do this work by a Norwegian. My father and I had known Ashe for eight years, but he had never before mentioned having been in that place. We talked about cattle breeding and ranch foremen, about the Brazilian root of the word 'gaucho', which certain elderly Uruguayans still pronounce
gaúcho
, and he said nothing further — thank God — about duodecimal functions.

In
September, 1937 (we were not then at the hotel), Herbert Ashe died of a ruptured aneurysm. A few days earlier, he had received a sealed, registered package from Brazil. It was a book in royal octavo. Ashe left it in the bar, where, months later, I found it. Leafing through the volume, I felt a strange lightheadedness that I shall not enlarge on, for this is not the story of my feelings but of Uqbar, Tlön, and Orbis Tertius. On a particular Islamic night called the Night of Nights, the secret gates of heaven are thrown open and the water in jugs tastes much sweeter. Had these gates opened just then, I would not have felt what I felt that evening. The book, which was written in English, contained 1,001 pages. On its yellow leather spine I read the following strange words, which also appeared on the half-title page:
A First Encyclopædia of Tlön. Volume XI. Hlaer to Jangr
. No date or place of publication was given. On the opening page and on a sheet of tissue paper that guarded one of the coloured plates, a printed blue oval bore the words
Orbis Tertius
. Two years before, in a volume of a certain pirated encyclopaedia, I had come across a cursory description of a bogus country; now chance was offering me something more precious and more demanding. What I held in my hands was an enormous, systematically presented fragment of the complete history of an unknown planet, embracing its architecture and its playing cards, its terrifying mythologies and the sound of its languages, its emperors and its seas, its minerals, birds, and fishes, its algebra and fire, its theological and metaphysical controversies — all coherently set out, without any apparent dogmatic viewpoint or hint of parody.

In
the Volume XI just mentioned are references to both prior and subsequent volumes. Néstor Ibarra, in a now classic article in the
Nouvelle Revue Française
, denies that such accompanying tomes exist; Ezequiel Martínez Estrada and Drieu La Rochelle have — perhaps successfully — refuted Ibarra's doubts. The fact is that until today the most diligent searches have proved fruitless. To no avail, we have ransacked the libraries of both Americas and of Europe. Alfonso Reyes, weary of this laborious and petty sleuthing, suggests that all of us should together undertake to reconstruct
ex ungue leonem
the several missing bulky volumes. He calculates, not entirely in jest, that one generation of Tlön specialists should be enough. This figure out of a hat takes us back to the basic problem of who the people were who invented Tlön. The plural is unavoidable, for the idea of a single inventor — an eternal Leibniz labouring away in darkness and humility — has been unanimously rejected. One speculation is that this 'brave new world' is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, and geometricians — all led by an obscure genius. There are plenty of men outstanding in these various disciplines but none who is capable of such sublime invention, much less of subordinating his creativity to a minutely detailed plan. The plan is so vast that each writer's contribution would have been infinitesimal. At first, it was thought that Tlön was nothing but a chaos, an irresponsible excess of the imagination; it is now known that Tlön is a harmonious universe and that the secret laws governing it were in fact framed, albeit in a makeshift way. I need only point out that the logic displayed in Volume XI is so lucid and perfect that the tome's apparent contradictions are the very crux of the proof that other volumes exist. Popular magazines, with pardonable extravagance, have spread the news of Tlön's zoology and geography. In my opinion, however, the planet's transparent tigers and towers of blood are perhaps not worthy of the perpetual attention of all mankind. May I be permitted a few moments to explain Tlön's view of the world.

Hume
noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments neither allowed for the least rebuttal nor produced the slightest conviction. Applied to our earth, such a finding is completely true; in the case of Tlön, it is completely false. The nations of that planet are congenitally idealist. Its language and those things derived from language — religion, literature, metaphysics — are predicated on idealism. To the inhabitants of Tlön, the world is not an assemblage of objects in space but a diverse series of separate acts. The world is sequential, rooted in time rather than space. In Tlön's putative
Ursprache
, from which its 'modern' languages and dialects stem, there are no nouns but only impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes or prefixes that function as adverbs. For example, there is nothing equivalent to our word 'moon', but there is a verb that for us would be 'to moonrise' or 'to moon'. 'The moon rose over the river' would be 'Hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö' or, literally, 'Upward behind the lasting-flow it moonrose'. (Xul Solar translates this more succinctly as 'Upward, behind the onstreaming, it mooned.')

The
above applies to the languages of Tlön's southern hemisphere. In northern hemisphere languages, about whose
Ursprache
Volume XI gives little information, the basic unit is not the verb but the monosyllabic adjective. Nouns are formed by an accumulation of adjectives. One does not say 'moon' but rather 'air-bright on round-dark' or 'pale-gold of-the-sky' or other combinations. In this particular example, the mass of adjectives denotes an actual object; the fact is pure chance. The literature of this hemisphere — as with the real world of Meinong — abounds in ideal objects, joined together or separated at will, according to poetic necessity. Sometimes, mere simultaneity dictates what these objects are. They can be made up of two terms, one visual and the other aural — the colour of the sunrise and the distant cry of a bird. Others are made up of several terms — the sun and the water against a swimmer's breast; the flickering pink blur you see when your eyes are closed; the feeling of letting yourself drift down a river or into sleep. These second-degree objects can be combined with others, a process which — with the aid of certain contractions — becomes virtually endless. There are famous poems that consist of one enormous word. Such a word is a 'poetic object' created by the author. Paradoxically, the fact that nobody believes nouns to be real objects makes their number countless. The languages of Tlön's northern hemisphere boast all the nouns of Indo-European languages and many others as well.