by Jorge Luis Borges
An encyclopaedia entry on Borges that behaves like one of his stories, bound with thirteen engraved plates that work: a frontispiece that changes hands, two identical pages to tell apart, a garden that forks, a lottery that decides what this copy contains, a library with every book in it, a point that holds every page of this site, and a coin you will not forget.
tags: borges, labyrinth, babel, aleph, zahir, library, encyclopaedia, buenos-aires, tlon, menard, funes, forking-paths, plates
BORGES, Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis (Buenos Aires, 24 August 1899 – Geneva, 14 June 1986), Argentine writer of short fictions, essays and poems, and for eighteen years director of the National Library of his country, a post he took up in the year he could no longer read.1 He gave the coincidence to God, whose irony, he wrote in the Poema de los dones (1960), had given him "a la vez los libros y la noche": the books and the night, at once. He wrote no novel. Nearly all the work by which he is known was written in about five years and fits in two short books.2 Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949). See the bibliography at the end of this entry, which should be consulted with care.
See also Babel, Library of; Funes, Ireneo; Labyrinths; Menard, Pierre; Oracles; Uqbar.
List of Plates
- Pl. I. Frontispiece: Borges, and Ifacing p. 918
- Pl. II. Two Pages of the Quixote, Set as a Puzzlefacing p. 918
- Pl. III. The Garden of Tsʿui Pên, in Planfacing p. 919
- Pl. IV. A Drawing of the Company, with Its Consequencesfacing p. 919
- Pl. V. Two Copies of Vol. XLVI, Collated on a Light-Boxfacing p. 919
- Pl. VI. One Wall of a Hexagon of the Library, with a Volume Withdrawnfacing p. 920
- Pl. VII. The Cellar in the Calle Garay, with the Observer in Positionfacing p. 920
- Pl. VIII. A Coin of Twenty Centavos, Obverse and Reversefacing p. 920
- Pl. IX. A Game of Pairs, as Played by Ireneo Funesfacing p. 920
- Pl. X. Plan of the City, with Three Crimes and the Solutionfacing p. 921
- Pl. XI. Tigers, from Life and from a Dreamfacing p. 921
- Pl. XII. Plan of the House of Asterionfacing p. 921
- Pl. XIII. A Book of Sand, Open at a Page that Will Not Recurfacing p. 922
- Pl. XIV. The City of the Immortalsfacing p. 922(Wanting in all copies.)
Directions to the Binder. The plates are to be bound where the text calls for them; in some copies the binder has followed the text, in others the plates.
Fig. 1. Borges
† Transferred before this plate was engraved.
Fig. 2. Y yo
Six left.
Attributes transferred: 0 of 6
Register of Attributes
- Infinite, games with time and the: an attribute (see Borges, J. L.)
- Outskirts, the mythology of the: an attribute (see Borges, J. L.)
The register is kept in this browser.
Frontispiece: Borges, and I
Fig. 1. Borges, laurelled and medalled; under him the two attributes (†) that were his before this plate was engraved, the mythology of the outskirts and the games with time and the infinite. Fig. 2. I, from the same profile reversed, plain; under him his six tastes: a, hourglasses; b, maps; c, eighteenth-century typography; d, etymologies; e, the taste of coffee; f, the prose of Stevenson. The attributes of Fig. 2 may be moved to Fig. 1 but not back. Neither sat for the portrait.
Give Borges the tastes of Fig. 2, by dragging or pressing them.
J. L. Borges delin.yo sculp.
§1 · Life
He was schooled in Geneva during the First World War, spent his youth in a short-lived Spanish avant-garde, and came home to Buenos Aires in 1921. In 1937, at thirty-eight, he took his first regular job, as first assistant in a municipal library in a poor district. The work was so light that his colleagues asked him to catalogue fewer books, so as not to embarrass them; he spent the rest of each day reading in the basement. On Christmas Eve of 1938, running up a dark stairwell, he struck his head on the edge of an open casement window. The wound became infected.
He recovered, but feared the fever had damaged his mind. To test it he tried something he had never attempted, a story, reasoning that if it failed he could tell himself he had never been able to write one. The story was "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," printed in the review Sur in May 1939. In the next five years he wrote almost all the fictions on which his name rests.
version 2 of 2; Tsʿui Pên would have kept both
In 1946 the new government of Perón removed him from the library and named him inspector of poultry and rabbits in the public markets; he resigned, and lectured for a living. After Perón's fall in 1955 he was made director of the National Library, by which time his sight was gone. In 1961 he shared the first Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett and became, at sixty-two, famous outside the Spanish-speaking world. He died in Geneva, the city of his schooling, in 1986, and is buried in the Cimetière des Rois.
§2 · Method
His fictions borrow the forms of things that are not fiction: the book review, the obituary, the encyclopaedia article, the footnote, the bibliographical note. His motifs may be divided into (a) those that recur in every story, such as mirrors, tigers, knives, libraries and maps; (b) those that contain themselves, such as the Library of Babel, the Aleph, and this classification; (c) those that have been reflected; (d) forgeries acknowledged in the same breath; (e) the unutterable, such as the name of God or the totality of one moment; (f) innumerable ones; (g) those that fall under (h); (h) those included in this classification; (i) those that, from a distance, resemble flies.3 The division imitates the Chinese encyclopaedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which Borges attributed to a Dr Franz Kuhn in "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (1942). Like its model, it is complete.
§3 · Menard
Pierre Menard, a minor French symbolist of Nîmes, set himself to write Don Quixote: not to copy it, but to produce, as a man of the twentieth century, pages that would coincide word for word with those of Cervantes. He finished two chapters and a fragment of a third and burned his drafts, and the narrator of the story, comparing the two texts, finds Menard's almost infinitely richer.
Find the differences. There are said to be several.
Capitulo IX.
Donde se concluye y da fin a la estupenda batalla que el gallardo vizcaíno y el valiente manchego tuvieron.
, , , , , , .
Capitulo IX.
Donde se concluye y da fin a la estupenda batalla que el gallardo vizcaíno y el valiente manchego tuvieron.
, , , , , , .
Differences found: 0. Differences in the text: 0. Differences remaining: all of them.
the sentence, entire
- Cervantes, 1605
- A commonplace in praise of history, of the kind any reader of Cicero could turn out.
- Menard, about 1934
- History not as what happened but as the mother of truth. From a contemporary of William James, astonishing.
Two Pages of the Quixote, Set as a Puzzle
Fig. 1. Cervantes, Madrid, 1605. Fig. 2. Menard, Nîmes, about 1934, or whoever it has since been attributed to. Fig. 3. The differences, circled, on acetate. The answers are printed upside down at the foot of the plate, and are also identical. The head-piece is a woodcut and shows the windmills, which are in chapter viii; the printer had one block.
In English, for the reader without Spanish: …truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of deeds, witness of the past, example and counsel to the present, warning to the future.
Ring any word, in either copy.
M. de Cervantes delin.; P. Menard delin. (the same)Sculp. by neither.
§4 · The garden of forking paths
In the story of that name (1941), a Chinese spy in England in 1916 calls on a sinologist, Stephen Albert, who has solved the riddle of the spy's own ancestor, Tsʿui Pên: that his incoherent novel and his lost labyrinth were one object. It is a novel in which, whenever a man faces alternatives, he chooses all of them, and each creates its own future, which forks again. The method is used once in this entry, at the end of §1, and again in Plate III.
Arrow keys walk the garden: left and right along a row, up to go on (turning left, and forking the lantern if it has not forked), down to go back towards the pavilion. Enter forks a lantern.
Futures: 2. In one he dies in 1939.
The trunk
Christmas Eve, 1938: he strikes his head on a casement window. Every lantern beyond it is a future; tap one to read it from here.
The Garden of Tsʿui Pên, in Plan
Fig. 1. The pavilion of Stephen Albert. Fig. 2. A fork. Fig. 3. Both of its paths. Fig. 4. The garden after the reader has chosen everything, which is the only correct way to read it. A. The way given to Yu Tsun at the station. Walks shown dotted are laid out in other copies. In rubric, the reader’s branch as §1 left it, and the newest fork. Not to scale; to every scale.
Tap a lantern to fork it, or press Choose, which never chooses.
Tsʿui Pên delin.S. Albert sculp.
In "The Lottery in Babylon" (1941) chance is administered by a Company that may not exist; among its lesser duties, it decides whether this copy of the entry contains §4a, and Plate V lays two copies on a light-box to show which kind this is.
Participation is free and compulsory.
No. 0
Fig. 0. This copy has not yet been drawn.
Fig. 1 is not yet drawn.
A Drawing of the Company, with Its Consequences
Draw a lot. The Company draws the rest.
The Company delin.The Company denies it.
Drag the film, or focus it and use the arrow keys to move it (Shift moves ten at a time) and Q and E to turn it. Within ten units and three degrees of the marks it clicks into register. The buttons below do the same.
Two Copies of Vol. XLVI, Collated on a Light-Box
Fig. 1. Copy A, pp. 913-917, on the glass. Fig. 2. Copy B, pp. 913-921, on film. Fig. 3. The difference, which is a country; its rivers are named after its mountains, and its mountains after its rivers.
Both spines are lettered Tor-Ups, which is wrong for an entry headed Borges and, strictly, for Uqbar, which files after Ups.
Which copy this is has not yet been settled.
Bring the marks into register; whatever the copies share will cancel.
Del. from a copy in the possession of A. Bioy Casares.Sculp. in some copies.
§5 · The Library
"The Library of Babel" (1941) describes a universe of hexagonal galleries, four walls of shelves to each, five shelves to a wall, thirty-two books to a shelf, every book of four hundred and ten pages written in twenty-five symbols. No two books are the same and the Library holds them all, so that it contains, somewhere, the true catalogue of the Library, thousands of false ones, the proof that the true catalogue is false, and this entry.
Hexagon 6c64lhayo1… Wall 1
The address abridged; in full it runs to 1,178,495 characters.
The other sixteen volumes of each shelf are on the far side of the page.The other twenty volumes of each shelf are on the far side of the page.The other twenty-four volumes of each shelf are on the far side of the page.
Arrow keys move along and between the shelves. Enter withdraws a volume, and Enter again puts it back.
Volumes consulted: none. On some shelf of some hexagon stands the faithful catalogue of the Library, among a great many false ones.
One Wall of a Hexagon of the Library, with a Volume Withdrawn
Fig. 1. Shelves, five to a wall, four walls of shelves to a hexagon. Fig. 2. Volumes, thirty-two to a shelf, all of one format and all of 410 pages, so the binder has made them the same width; the lettering on a spine says nothing about what is inside. Fig. 3. A volume, open at a page it shares with no other. Fig. 4. The mirror in the vestibule, from which some infer that the Library is finite. Fig. 5. A bookmark, at the volume containing this entry; the volume containing this caption is on another wall. Fig. 6. A volume of M C V, repeated from the first line to the last, somewhere on this wall; the engraver has not marked which. Fig. 7. A lamp, of the spherical kind; there are two to a hexagon, and they are never put out.
Not figured: the single volume of ordinary size whose leaves are infinitely many and infinitely thin, which, a footnote to the story reports, Letizia Álvarez de Toledo held would do the work of the whole Library (compare Pl. XIII). A reading room is kept at ~/babel.
Pull a volume from the shelf, or look a sentence up in the drawer.
A librarian delin. (anonymous)Chance sculp.
§6 · The Aleph
In "The Aleph" (1945), a pompous poet named Carlos Argentino Daneri shows the narrator, under the nineteenth step of a cellar in the Calle Garay, a small iridescent sphere about an inch across in which every point of the universe can be seen, from every angle, at once. The narrator sees in it everything, including the letters that the dead Beatriz Viterbo, whom he loved, wrote to Daneri. The story's difficulty, the narrator says, is that what he saw was simultaneous and what he writes is successive. This entry contains such a point. It is here:
The trapdoor is open and the stair is lit. The Aleph is on the nineteenth step.
The Cellar in the Calle Garay, with the Observer in Position
Lie down, and keep still for four seconds.
C. A. Daneri delin., in verseSculp. in a single instant.
Its opposite, in the same book, is the Zahir (1949): a coin of twenty centavos which, once seen, leaves room for nothing else.
A Coin of Twenty Centavos, Obverse and Reverse
Fig. 1. Reverse: the value, in a wreath. Fig. 2. Obverse, dated 1929, with the letters N T and the figure 2 cut into it with a knife (the text does not say on which face; the engraver has put the cuts where they would be seen). Fig. 3. The same coin, from memory: not yet required.
Received in change for an orange brandy, at dawn, after a wake, at the bar on the corner of Chile and Tacuarí. In Arabic the word means visible, or notorious; it is one of the ninety-nine names of God. Earlier Zahirs, after Barlach (Breslau, 1899): a tiger in Gujarat; an astrolabe, which Nadir Shah had thrown into the sea; a small compass in the prisons of the Mahdi; a vein in one of the marble pillars of the mosque at Córdoba; the bottom of a well in Tetuán. The Aleph shows everything in one point; this shows one point in everything.
The engraver, who has seen it, apologises for what it will do to the rest of this entry. N.B. Reloading the page is an approximation of forgetting.
Take your change.
Del. from memory, which is the difficulty.Sculp. with a knife, by an unknown hand.
§7 · Funes
Ireneo Funes of Fray Bentos, thrown by a half-tamed horse at nineteen, found that he could no longer forget anything: every leaf of every tree, each time he had seen it, every shape of every cloud. He could not generalise, and so, the narrator suggests, could not think; he died of a congestion of the lungs in 1889, aged twenty-one.
Funes will keep the score. He has memorised the sixteen backs, which to him are sixteen different backs.
You: 0 pairs.
Funes: 0 pairs. He remembers all sixteen cards perfectly; that is the difficulty.
Cards turned: 0. Pairs proposed: 0; refused by Funes: 0. Deals: 1.
A Game of Pairs, as Played by Ireneo Funes
Fig. 1. A dog, seen at 3:14 from the side. Fig. 2. The same dog, seen at 3:15 from the front, which is not the same dog. Figs. 3 to 16. Other things seen that afternoon, each of them twice. Fig. 17. The table. Funes won no games and lost none; he remembers all of them.
Funes, of Fray Bentos, plays lying on his cot in a dark room; the cards are shown here by daylight. Figs. 15 and 16 bear the names he gave those numbers, in a numeration of his own in which every number had one.
Turn up two cards that match.
I. Funes delin., from memoryCould not be generalised into an engraving.
Funes would remember this visit. (The memory is kept by a script; this copy of the page has none.)
§8 · Other fictions
Death and the Compass (1942). The detective Erik Lönnrot reads three murders in an unnamed city, committed on the third of three successive months at the corners of an equilateral triangle, as three of the four letters of the secret Name of God, and goes alone to the place where the fourth must fall; the pattern had been laid for him by the man he was pursuing, Red Scharlach, who is waiting there. Before he is shot, Lönnrot proposes for their next encounter a better labyrinth, made of a single straight line.
Three crosses, three months, the third of each.
Plan of the City, with Three Crimes and the Solution
Fig. 1. The first crime, to the north: the Hôtel du Nord, on the night of 3 December. Fig. 2. The second, to the west, before a paint shop hung with rhombs, 3 January. Fig. 3. The third, to the east, in the Rue de Toulon, 3 February. Fig. 4. The fourth, to the south, which the detective deduced and attended. Fig. 5. A labyrinth of one straight line, offered for next time; it has no turnings and no end.
The clue is in the dates. Each crime fell on the third of the month, after dark; the Hebrew day is reckoned from sunset, so by that count each fell on the fourth. The Name has four letters. Three points make a triangle only for those who stop counting.
Rule a line from one crime to another, and on to the third.
E. Lönnrot delin.R. Scharlach sculp., in advance.
Dreamtigers (1960). As a child Borges would stand longest at the tigers' cage in the zoo at Palermo, and as a man, in dreams he knew to be dreams, he set himself to dream a tiger. The tiger always arrived wrong: stuffed, or flimsy, or misshapen, or of an impossible size, or gone too soon, or more like a dog or a bird.
Fig. 1. From life: Palermo.
Fig. 3. As intended. Wanting.
Fig. 2. From a dream, after a drawing by the reader.
Fig. 2 is empty. Nothing has yet been dreamt in this copy.
Tigers, from Life and from a Dream
Fig. 1. From life, at the zoo in Palermo, where the author lingered as a child. Fig. 2. From a dream, after a drawing by the reader, who deputises for the dreamer. Fig. 3. The tiger as intended; wanting.
The dreamt tiger is not to scale, or not to species. The engraver has supplied the stripes, which are always correct.
Draw a tiger in the oval, from memory. It wakes when you stop.
J. L. Borges delin., asleepThe engraver sculp. the stripes only.
The House of Asterion (1947). The Minotaur of the Cretan legend describes his house, whose doors are never locked and whose every part is repeated fourteen times, a number he takes to mean infinite, and passes the time with a game in which another Asterion comes to visit. Every nine years nine men enter, whom he sets free in the only way he knows, and he waits for the one who will set him free; in a last paragraph Theseus tells Ariadne that the Minotaur hardly resisted.
Arrow keys walk Asterion one room at a time, and the other Asterion copies every step, west for east. Rooms are counted across from the west and down from the north. A door in the outer wall comes back in on the opposite side of the house.
Doors used: none
Asterion is at home. The other Asterion is expected.
Asterion (you, in red) in room 1, 6; the other in room 11, 6.
Plan of the House of Asterion
Fig. 1. Asterion. Fig. 2. The other Asterion, who visits. Fig. 3. A cistern, one of fourteen, that is to say of infinitely many. Fig. 4. A visitor with a sword, expected; not shown until he comes. Fig. 5. A thread, which Asterion’s account does not mention.
Doors of the same letter are one door: every place is another place. Scale: one room, or every room; each part of the house is every other part. Another labyrinth is bound at Pl. III, and another is kept at ~/labyrinth.
Walk until you meet the other Asterion.
Daedalus delin.The occupant approves.
§9 · Apocrypha
The following fictions are not by Borges. They were written for this entry in his manner, under the custom he established of attributing his own inventions to others; here the custom is reversed.
The two libraries. A scholar in Smyrna possessed two libraries. The first contained every book he had read; the second, every book he had not. He spent his life moving volumes from the second library to the first. On his deathbed he understood, with the calm characteristic of those who have read enough, that the two libraries were the same library and that the work of moving had been an elaborate way of pretending otherwise.
On rereading. A scholar discovered that he had read the same book twice. The first reading was in his thirty-second year and had pleased him; the second was in his sixty-fourth and had bored him. He concluded that the book had aged badly. He had not yet considered that the book might be the same book and that he was the one who had aged.
On the limits of knowledge. Hakim of Merv, a heresiarch of the eighth century, taught that there are nine universes and that we inhabit the eighth. The discovery did not interest him; what interested him was that the inhabitants of the seventh universe, who could perceive ours, must despise us in the way we despise the inhabitants of the ninth. He drank from a cup of green clay and was silent for thirty years.
§10 · Works
Fervor de Buenos Aires, poems. Buenos Aires: privately printed, 1923. · Historia universal de la infamia. Buenos Aires: Tor, 1935. · Historia de la eternidad. Buenos Aires: Viau y Zona, 1936. · Ali, Mir Bahadur, The Approach to Al-Muʿtasim. London: Gollancz, 1934. · Runeberg, Nils, Kristus och Judas. 1904. · Quain, Herbert, April March. 1936. · El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan. Buenos Aires: Sur, 1941. · Tsʿui Pên, The Garden of Forking Paths, manuscript. Yunnan. · Ficciones. Buenos Aires: Sur, 1944. · A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön, vol. XI, Hlaer to Jangr. · El Aleph. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1949. · Otras inquisiciones. Buenos Aires: Sur, 1952. · El hacedor. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1960. · The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, vol. XLVI. New York, 1917. · This Craft of Verse, the Norton lectures of 1967–68. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 2000.4 Some of the works above exist only in the works above. Readers are asked not to inquire which.
The left and right arrow keys turn the page, and so does a tap on either page.
Pages seen: 2. Pages seen twice: 0.
A Book of Sand, Open at a Page that Will Not Recur
Fig. 1. Page 40,514. Fig. 2. Page 999, which faces it: the pair in the story, the only opening of the book on record, and so the only one that has ever recurred. Fig. 3. The first page (wanting in all copies). Fig. 4. An anchor, in pen, by an unskilled hand. Look at it; it will not recur.
The drawings fall some two thousand pages apart and none recurs. Their owner listed them in an alphabetical notebook, which soon filled; the list for this copy runs: an anchor.
Turn the page. You will not see it again; neither will anyone.
A Bible-seller from the Orkneys, sold.The reader, unwisely, bought.