Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations

by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N. T. di Giovanni)

  The tribesmen are proscribed from lifting their gaze to the stars, a privilege accorded only to the witch doctors. Each witch doctor has a disciple, whom he instructs from childhood in secret lore and who succeeds him upon his death. In this wise they are always four, a number of magical properties, since it is the highest to which the Yahoo mind attains. They profess, in their own fashion, the doctrines of heaven and hell. Both places are subterranean. Hell, which is dry and filled with light, harbours the sick, the aged, the ill-treated, the Ape-men, the Arabs, and the leopards; heaven, which is depicted as marshy and beclouded, is the dwelling-place of the king and queen, the witch doctors, and those who have been happy, merciless, and blood-thirsty on earth. They worship as well a god whose name is “Dung,” and whom possibly they have conceived in the image and semblance of the king; he is a blind, mutilated, stunted being, and enjoys limitless powers. Dung is wont to take the form of an ant or a serpent.

  After the foregoing remarks, it should cause no one to wonder that during my long stay among them I did not contrive to convert a single Yahoo. The words “Our father,” owing to the fact that they have no notion of fatherhood, left them puzzled. They cannot, it seems, accept a cause so remote and so unlikely, and are therefore uncomprehending that an act carried but several months before may bear relation to the birth of a child. Moreover, all the women engage in carnal commerce, and not all are mothers.

  The Yahoo language is complex, having affinities with no others of which I have any knowledge. We cannot speak even of parts of speech, for there are no parts. Each monosyllabic word corresponds to a general idea whose specific meaning depends on the context or upon accompanying grimaces. The word “nrz,” for example, suggests dispersion or spots, and may stand for the starry sky, a leopard, a flock of birds, smallpox, something bespattered, the act of scattering, or the flight that follows defeat in warfare. “Hrl,” on the other hand, means something compact or dense. It may stand for the tribe, a tree trunk, a stone, a heap of stones, the act of heaping stones, the gathering of the four witch doctors, carnal conjunction, or a forest. Pronounced in another manner or accompanied by other grimaces, each word may hold an opposite meaning. Let us not be unduly amazed; in our own tongue, the verb “to cleave” means both to divide asunder and to adhere. Of course, among the Yahoos, there are no sentences, nor even short phrases.

  The intellectual power to draw abstractions which such a language assumes has led me to believe that the Yahoos, for all their backwardness, are not a primitive but a degenerate nation. This conjecture is borne out by the inscriptions I discovered on the heights of the plateau and whose characters, which are not unlike the runes carved by our forefathers, are no longer within the tribe’s capacity to decipher. It is as though the tribe had forgotten written language and found itself reduced now only to the spoken word.

  The diversions of these people are the fights which they stage between trained cats, and capital executions. Someone is accused of an attempt against the queen’s chastity, or of having eaten in the sight of another; without either the testimony of witnesses or a confession, the king finds a verdict of guilty. The condemned man suffers tortures that I shall do my best to forget, and then is stoned to death. The queen is privileged to cast the first stone and, what is usually superfluous, the last. The throng applauds her skill and the beauty of her parts, and, all in a frenzy, acclaims her, pelting her with roses and fetid things. The queen, without uttering a sound, smiles.

  Another of the tribe’s customs is the discovery of poets. Six or seven words, generally enigmatic, may come to a man’s mind. He cannot contain himself and shouts them out, standing in the center of a circle formed by the witch doctors and the common people, who are stretched out on the ground. If the poem does not stir them, nothing comes to pass, but if the poet’s words strike them they all draw away from him, without a sound, under the command of a holy dread. Feeling then that the spirit has touched him, nobody, not even his own mother, will either speak to him or cast a glance at him. Now he is a man no longer but a god, and anyone has license to kill him. The poet, if he has his wits about him, seeks refuge in the sand dunes of the North.

  I have already described how I came to the land of the Yahoos. It will be recalled that they encircled me, that I discharged my firearm into the air, and that they took the discharge for a kind of magical thunderclap. In order to foster that error, I strove thereafter to go about without my weapon. One spring morning, at the break of day, we were suddenly overrun by the Ape-men; I started down from the highlands, gun in hand, and killed two of these animals. The rest fled in amazement. Shot, it is known, is invisible. For the first time in my life I heard myself cheered. It was then, I believe, that the queen received me. The memory of the Yahoos, as I have mentioned, being undependable, that very afternoon I made good an escape. My subsequent adventures in the jungle are of little account. In due course, I came upon a village of black men who knew how to plough, to sow, and to pray, and with whom I made myself understood in Portuguese. A Romish missionary, Father Fernandes, offered me the hospitality of his hut, and cared for me until I was able to continue on my hard journey. At first I found it revolting to see him open his mouth without the slightest dissimulation and put into it pieces of food. I still covered my mouth with my hand, or averted my eyes; a few days later, however, I had readjusted myself. I recall with distinct pleasure our debates in topics theological, but I had no success in turning him to the true faith of Jesus.

  I set down this account now in Glasgow. I have told of my visit among the Yahoos, but have not dwelt upon the essential horror of the experience, which never ceases entirely to be with me, and which visits me yet in dreams. In the street, upon occasion, I feel that they still surround me. Only too well do I know the Yahoos to be barbarous nation, perhaps the most barbarous to be found upon the face of the earth, but it would be unjust to overlook certain traits which redeem them. They have institutions of their own; they enjoy a king; they employ a language based upon abstract concepts; they believe, like the Hebrews and the Greeks, in the divine nature of poetry; and they surmise that the soul survives the death of the body. They also uphold the truth of punishments and rewards. After their fashion, they stand for civilization much as we ourselves do, in spite of our many transgressions. I do not repent having fought in their ranks against the Ape-men. Not only is it our duty to save their souls, but it is my fervent prayer that the Government of Her Majesty will not ignore what this report makes bold to suggest.

  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 me
rely 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.