Found in Translation

by Frank Wynne

  “That old refrain, that old refrain!” said the dentist, wearily.

  “I simply want to demonstrate, my dear Vinyals, that if a man as strong and as knowledgeable as Professor Turull can get it wrong, it is because sentimentality and erroneous habits flow in our blood. Traditions of magic and the supernatural wield such an influence in this world that it is an uphill struggle not to lose one’s grip on reality. Individuals who strive to base their lives firmly in reality and eliminate fantastic explanations – which are legion – of why humanity suffers so are dubbed cynical charlatans and denied what people call their daily bread. Our ideas are completely paradoxical on this front. Some people’s waywardness enables them to defend contemporary notions of morality only a few days after the end of a war that has led twelve million men to the slaughter, in the flower of their youth, for no point whatsoever. We are possessed by the narcissism of idiots. We discredit an astronomer who is a few seconds out in his calculations of the movements of a quite ordinary star and don’t show the slightest contempt for the people who plan a war and cut down men’s lives as if they were reaping a field of corn. My dear Vinyals, nobody can say I don’t combat the influence of magic and fantasy. I do what I can – which is very little – but you find that tedious.”

  On that note we reached the end of the park. We heard Big Ben striking four o’clock. The white esplanade of Admiralty Arch in Whitehall stretched before us. We could see the Horse Guards, in their red and white uniforms, against a background of muted chamois-colored stone. On both sides, and in the distance, the characteristic pearl-gray outline of this part of London: the domes, roofs, and large buildings of State. There is nothing grandiose about their jagged profile, but everything is severe and imposing. Dusk was descending. Behind us patches of purple and faded pink in the pristine air of the park stood out against a bluish backdrop. The atmosphere was a subtle blue, and the fine mist cloaked everything in haze. We stood and gaped for a moment, in awe.

  “What is that building, Sr Pla?” asked Vinyals the dentist.

  “The building with the large radio aerial hoops hanging over its roof is, I believe, the Admiralty.”

  “And the other building to its right?”

  “That palace with the austere, classical lines is the Foreign Office. El Ministeri de Negocis Estrangers, if you’d prefer it in low Latin. I see you like the sound of that and even find it slightly exciting. It has the same effect on me, dear Vinyals. The two buildings we see on either side of that murky esplanade are perhaps the two most important in the world. It is one place in the world where people quite naturally doff their hats when they walk past. I don’t know if you understand what …”

  “I understand you perfectly … so what do you want to do now?”

  “At this time of day the level of noise and bustle in London is deafening, and I must confess I feel rather tired. If you like, we can return to the park and slowly make our way home. You can’t imagine how I love to walk through this charming mist and watch reality fade and melt away. Everything is so fragile and the air is like a feather pillow. It is uniquely delightful …”

  We retraced our steps following the fence around the banks of the lake. Waterfowl were still swimming like shadows over the hazy water. A duck occasionally flew up, its wings beating the weary, twilight air. There were scant passersby. Beyond the trees in the park, car headlights projected a diffuse, gleaming light on the Mall. You could hear the hubbub of the huge, amorphous, distant city. The buzz of big cities has always made me feel deeply depressed. The noise makes me think how futile everything is. I find it oppressive and feel lost there like a speck of mud in the ocean. We suddenly saw a white shadow looming strangely on the other side of the fence. We approached, intrigued, and saw it was a penguin and a bigger specimen than the earlier one. That monster of a bird seemed rooted to the spot and was endlessly opening and closing its long mouth. I thought it was holding a gray, extremely flattened object in its beak. I recalled the battered sparrow from two hours ago. No doubt about it. It was a similar item.

  “My dear Vinyals,” I said to my companion after contemplating that unpleasant spectacle for a moment. “My dear friend, it is not a mirage: another sparrow has bit the dust. Those monstrous birds aren’t stuffed and they never stop …”

  The penguin was conscientiously going about its business. It slowly opened and closed its mouth and the bones in its beak crunched when they came together like pebbles colliding. You could see its bloodshot, demon eyes in the dark. When the sparrow had turned into soft pulp, the penguin lifted its long neck, twisted, and swallowed. Then, once it was inside its body, the penguin started flapping its short wings as if dancing a sevillana. Finally, with its neck hobbling on its slight shoulders, it disappeared into the mist, eyes half-closed, exhausted beak thrust forward, walking at a solemn gait. The dentist was sad. It was almost dark, but the mist charged the air with a luminous spongy texture. I took his arm and we walked on.

  “My dear Vinyals,” I said after we’d walked in silence for a while, “the penguins and sparrows in St. James’s Park have ruined our afternoon. We have witnessed the victory of penguins and the wretched defeat of sparrows. The spectacle, I must confess, was not without interest. Not a feather or toenail of the bird was spared. The poor creature’s big brothers and sisters must be feeling fragile. Sparrows are such animated little animals! They spend their lives in full view of the public, inspiring tenderness in lovers and loving non-stop themselves. We can’t see how they love one another, but naturalists seem well informed on the subject and report on it in their books. This recent victim was probably a late-riser who wanted to make the most of the final flicker of daylight to enjoy one last fling. The penguin gobbled it down, teeth flashing – to use a zoologically exaggerated image – and that was that. I think the moment has come for us both to repeat what Adela Boniquet and Professor Turull exclaimed in similar circumstances: ‘God has justly punished …!’”

  “That refrain again, dear Pla? You never tire, never give up …”

  “Vinyals, I’m glad to hear you protest. I put things as best as I can. When I talk about serious matters, I tend to become rather entangled and convoluted. You’ve just seen me. I won’t give up, however. Only a minority of intelligent people has grasped that God does not punish sparrows …”

  THE LIBRARY OF BABEL

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley

  Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (1899–1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language literature. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. Before Borges became one of the famous writers in the world, he had to begin his career by writing advertisements for yogurt. His longest work of fiction is a fourteen-page story, “The Congress”. Mick Jagger’s 1970 movie Performance is inspired by the works of Borges; his name is quoted several times throughout the movie. Irked by the fact he was never awarded the Nobel Prize, some observers speculate that Borges did not receive the award because of his conservative political views, or, more specifically, because he had accepted an honour from Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

  By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters…

  Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. 2, Sec. II, Mem. IV

  The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below—one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon’s six sides; the height of the bookshelves, floor to ceiling, is hardly greater than the height of a normal librarian. One of the hexagon’s
free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another gallery, identical to the first—identical in fact to all. To the left and right of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for sleeping, upright; the other, for satisfying one’s physical necessities. Through this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance. In the vestibule there is a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. Men often infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite—if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication? I prefer to dream that burnished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite….Light is provided by certain spherical fruits that bear the name “bulbs.” There are two of these bulbs in each hexagon, set crosswise. The light they give is insufficient, and unceasing.

  Like all the men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs. Now that my eyes can hardly make out what I myself have written, I am preparing to die, a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born. When I am dead, compassionate hands will throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite. I declare that the Library is endless. Idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are the necessary shape of absolute space, or at least of our perception of space. They argue that a triangular or pentagonal chamber is inconceivable. (Mystics claim that their ecstasies reveal to them a circular chamber containing an enormous circular book with a continuous spine that goes completely around the walls. But their testimony is suspect, their words obscure. That cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice for the moment that I repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable.

  Each wall of each hexagon is furnished with five bookshelves; each bookshelf holds thirty-two books identical in format; each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters. There are also letters on the front cover of each book; those letters neither indicate nor prefigure what the pages inside will say. I am aware that that lack of correspondence once struck men as mysterious. Before summarizing the solution of the mystery (whose discovery, in spite of its tragic consequences, is perhaps the most important event in all history), I wish to recall a few axioms.

  First: The Library has existed ab aeternitate. That truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, no rational mind can doubt. Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the work of chance or of malevolent demiurges; the universe, with its elegant appointments—its bookshelves, its enigmatic books, its indefatigable staircases for the traveler, and its water closets for the seated librarian—can only be the handiwork of a god. In order to grasp the distance that separates the human and the divine, one has only to compare these crude trembling symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book with the organic letters inside—neat, delicate, deep black, and inimitably symmetrical.

  Second: There are twenty-five orthographic symbols.1 That discovery enabled mankind, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and thereby satisfactorily solve the riddle that no conjecture had been able to divine—the formless and chaotic nature of virtually all books. One book, which my father once saw in a hexagon in circuit 15–94, consisted of the letters M C V perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (much consulted in this zone) is a mere labyrinth of letters whose penultimate page contains the phrase O Time thy pyramids. This much is known: For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency. (I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the “vain and superstitious habit” of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of the palm of one’s hand….They will acknowledge that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but contend that that adoption was fortuitous, coincidental, and that books in themselves have no meaning. That argument, as we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.)

  For many years it was believed that those impenetrable books were in ancient or far-distant languages. It is true that the most ancient peoples, the first librarians, employed a language quite different from the one we speak today; it is true that a few miles to the right, our language devolves into dialect and that ninety floors above, it becomes incomprehensible. All of that, I repeat, is true—but four hundred ten pages of unvarying M C V’s cannot belong to any language, however dialectal or primitive it may be. Some have suggested that each letter influences the next, and that the value of M C V on page 71, line 3, is not the value of the same series on another line of another page, but that vague thesis has not met with any great acceptance. Others have mentioned the possibility of codes; that conjecture has been universally accepted, though not in the sense in which its originators formulated it.

  Some five hundred years ago, the chief of one of the upper hexagons2 came across a book as jumbled as all the others, but containing almost two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a traveling decipherer, who told him that the lines were written in Portuguese; others said it was Yiddish. Within the century experts had determined what the language actually was: a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guaraní, with inflections from classical Arabic. The content was also determined: the rudiments of combinatory analysis, illustrated with examples of endlessly repeating variations. Those examples allowed a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This philosopher observed that all books, however different from one another they might be, consist of identical elements: the space, the period, the comma, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also posited a fact which all travelers have since confirmed: In all the Library, there are no two identical books. From those incontrovertible premises, the librarian deduced that the Library is “total”—perfect, complete, and whole—and that its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite)—that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language. All—the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.

  When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist—somewhere in some hexagon. The universe was justified; the universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited width and breadth of humankind’s hope. At that period there was much talk of The Vindications—books of apologiæ and prophecies that would vindicate for all time the actions of every person in the universe and that held wondrous arcana for men’s futures. Thousands of greedy individuals abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed downstairs, upstairs, spurred by the vain desire to find their Vindication. These pilgrims squabbled in the narrow corridors, muttered dark imprecations, strangled one another on the divine staircases, threw deceiving volumes down ventilation shafts, were themselves hurled to their deaths by men of distant regions. Others went insane….The Vindications do exist (I have seen two of them, which refer to persons in the future, persons perhaps not imaginary), but those who went in quest of them failed to recall that the chance of a man’s finding his own Vindication, or some perfidious version of his own, can be calculat
ed to be zero.

  At that same period there was also hope that the fundamental mysteries of mankind—the origin of the Library and of time—might be revealed. In all likelihood those profound mysteries can indeed be explained in words; if the language of the philosophers is not sufficient, then the multiform Library must surely have produced the extraordinary language that is required, together with the words and grammar of that language. For four centuries, men have been scouring the hexagons….There are official searchers, the “inquisitors.” I have seen them about their tasks: they arrive exhausted at some hexagon, they talk about a staircase that nearly killed them—some steps were missing—they speak with the librarian about galleries and staircases, and, once in a while, they take up the nearest book and leaf through it, searching for disgraceful or dishonorable words. Clearly, no one expects to discover anything.