Collected Stories
Page 21
A few minor autobiographical elements have found their way into “The Meeting.” Álvaro Melián Lafinur was a childhood idol of mine and really was my cousin. He wore a dagger and a cloak and used to play the guitar, singing the Uruguayan ballads of Elias Regules which I mention, Álvaro was a quite bad poet and, as to be expected, an academician. It is in this latter role that I introduced him into “The Aleph.”
Pedro Salvadores
I think the tale of Pedro Salvadores is summed up fully enough in its last paragraph. I might therefore take this opportunity to say something about the way it was written. At first, I played with the idea of attempting historical research, but I soon realized that for aesthetic purposes oral tradition is truer than mere facts. (The early version of Chevy Chase seems clumsier than the later.) I perhaps first heard this story from my grandfather when I was five or six. I set it down, in part, as my mother recalled it. I recently learned that the nineteenth-century novelist Eduardo Gutiérrez had already recorded the story—I think in a book called El puñal del tirano—and that the man’s real name was José María Salvadores. As to Unitarians and Federals, these words should not be taken at face value. The Unitarians, as Sarmiento and Echeverría well knew, represented civilization, while the Federals stood for the barbarism of caudillo clans. Honorably, my own forebears on both sides were Unitarians.
Our own time has furnished us with many destinies like that of Pedro Salvadores; Anne Frank’s is perhaps the best known of them.
Rosendo’s Tale
This story is, obviously, a sequel and an antidote to “Streetcorner Man.” The earlier story was mistakenly read as realistic; the present one is a deliberate surmise as to how events might actually have happened on the night Francisco Real was murdered. When I wrote “Streetcorner Man,” I was—as I pointed out at the time—fully aware of its stagy unreality. As the years went by, however, and that story became embarrassingly popular, I wanted people to understand that I was not quite the fool I was being admired for.
I had been rereading my Browning and knew from The Ring and the Book that a story could be told from different points of view. Rosendo Juárez, the seeming coward of the first version, might perhaps be allowed to have his own say. So, instead of the braggart of “Streetcorner Man,” we get a Shavian character who sees through the romantic nonsense and childish vanity of dueling, and finally attains manhood and sanity. In the first telling, Francisco Real is mortally wounded in the chest; sadly and realistically enough, he was really stabbed in the back while fornicating with La Lujanera in a ditch.
In the days when the story took place, toughs and killers were aided and abetted by the authorities, since most of them were official bodyguards of leading political figures. They were also used during elections to intimidate voters, knowing very well that because of police support they could act with impunity. Seldom outlaws, they were simply strong-arm men. I recall an anecdote told me by a priest in Adrogué. He walked up to the polling booth during one election and was politely and firmly informed by the local Rosendo Juárez, “Father, you have already cast your vote.”
Incidentally, the reference to the young man dressed in black, who wrote Paredes’ letter for him, is to the poet Evaristo Carriego.
Bibliographical Note
The original titles and first magazine or newspaper appearances of the stories in this volume are as follows (place of publication, throughout, unless otherwise indicated, is Buenos Aires):
streetcorner man: “Hombre de la esquina rosada” (entitled “Hombres de las orillas” and signed “F. Bustos”), Crítica (September 16, 1933).
the circular ruins: “Las ruinas circulares,” Sur (December 1940).
death and the compass: “La muerte y la brújula,” Sur (May 1942).
the life of tadeo isidoro cruz (1829-1874): “Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874),” Sur (December 1944).
the aleph: “El Aleph,” Sur (September 1945).
the two kings and their two labyrinths: “Los dos reyes y los dos laberintos” (entitled “Historia de los dos reyes y de los dos laberintos” and attributed, as an excerpt from The Land of Midian Revisited (1879), to R. F. Burton), Los Anales de Buenos Aires (May 1946).
the dead man: “El muerto,” Sur (November 1946).
the other death: “La otra muerte” (entitled “La redención”), La Nación (January 9, 1949).
ibn hakkan al-bokhari, dead in his labyrinth: “Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su Laberinto,” Sur (August 1951).
the man on the threshold: “El hombre en el umbral,” La Nación (April 20, 1952).
the challenge: “El desafío,” La Nación (December 28, 1952).
the captive: “El cautivo,” La Biblioteca (January-February-March 1957).
borges and myself: “Borges y yo,” La Biblioteca (January-February-March 1957).
the maker: “El Hacedor,” La Biblioteca ([February] 1958).
the meeting: “El encuentro,” La Prensa (October 5, 1969).
pedro salvadores: “Pedro Salvadores” [in English translation], The New York Review of Books (New York: August 21, 1969).
rosendo’s tale: “Historia de Rosendo Juárez,” La Nación (November 9, 1969).
“El acercamiento a Almotásim” (the approach to al-mu’tasim) did not appear in a magazine before its publication in Historia de la eternidad (Viau y Zona, 1936); “Los inmortales” (the immortals) did not appear before it was published in Crónicas de Bustos Domecq (Losada, 1967). The first appearance of “La intrusa (the intruder) was in an edition of fifty-two copies, printed by the Buenos Aires bibliophile Gustavo Fillol Day in April 1966 for private distribution among his and the author’s friends; it also appeared, in the same month, in the sixth impression of the third edition of El Aleph (Emecé, 1966).
“Hombre de la esquina rosada” was first collected in Historia universal de la infamia (Tor, 1935). “Las ruinas circulares” was first reprinted in El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (Sur, 1942); “La muerte y la brújula” in Ficciones (Sur, 1944); “Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874),” “El Aleph,” “El muerto,” and “La otra muerte” in the first edition of El Aleph (Losada, 1949); “Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su laberinto,” “Los dos reyes y los dos laberintos,” and “El hombre en el umbral” in the second edition of El Aleph (Losada, 1952). “El desafío” (entitled “El culto del coraje”) was first collected in the second edition of Evaristo Carriego (Emecé, 1955), where it appeared in a somewhat different form as part of the chapter “Historia del tango.” “El cautivo,” “Borges y yo,” and “El hacedor” were collected in El hacedor (Emecé, 1960); “Pedro Salvadores” in Elogio de la sombra (Emecé, 1969); “El encuentro” and “Historia de Rosendo Juárez” in El informe de Brodie (Emecé, 1970).
The
Garden
Of the
Branching Paths
The Garden Of
The Branching Paths
____
Jorge Luis Borges
Also by Jorge Luis Borges
STORIES
Universal History of Infamy (Histora universal de la infamia)
ESSAYS
Inquisitions (Inquisiciones)
History of Eternity (Historia de la eternidad)
POETRY
Fever of Buenos Aires (Fervor de Buenos Aires)
Contents
____
Preface
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
The Approach
to al-Mu’tasim
Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote
The Circular Ruins
The Lottery of Babylon
A Glimpse into the
Work of Herbert Quain
The Library of Babel
The Garden of
the Branching Paths
Prologue
The eight pieces of this book do not require extraneous elucidation. The eighth piece, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” is a de
tective 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,5 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.
—J. L. B.
Buenos Aires, November 10, 1941
Tlön,
Uqbar,
Orbis Tertius
1.
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.6 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.
2.
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.