Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations

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

  Things are duplicated on Tlön; also, as people forget them, objects tend to fade and lose detail. A classic example is that of the doorstep that lasted as long as a certain beggar huddled there but was lost from sight upon his death. On occasion, a few birds or a horse have saved the ruins of an amphitheatre.

  Salto Oriental, 1940

  *

  Postscript, 1947 — I have copied the above article just as it appeared in the Anthology of Imaginative Literature (1940), leaving out but a handful of metaphors and a kind of mock summary that now seems frivolous. So many things have taken place since then; I shall list them briefly.

  In March, 1941, a handwritten letter from Gunnar Erfjord was found in a book by Hinton that had belonged to Herbert Ashe. The envelope was postmarked Ouro Preto; the letter illuminated the whole mystery of Tlön. Its contents supported Martínez Estrada's theory. The remarkable story began one night in Lucerne or London back at the beginning of the seventeenth century. A secret benevolent society (among whose members were Dalgarno and, later, George Berkeley) was formed with the object of inventing a country. The vaguely outlined initial programme featured 'hermetic studies', philanthropy, and the cabala. Andreä's strange book dates from this early period. After some years of secret meetings and an overhasty amalgamation of ideas, they saw that one generation was not enough to delineate a new country. They resolved that each of the masters who made up the society should choose a disciple to carry on his work. This hereditary arrangement became the custom.

  After a hiatus of two centuries, the persecuted brotherhood was reborn in America. In about 1824, in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the members spoke to the millionaire ascetic Ezra Buckley. Disdainfully, Buckley heard the man out, then laughed at the modest scope of the project. In America it was absurd to invent a country, he said, and he suggested they invent a whole planet. To this gigantic idea he added another, the child of his nihilism‡ — that of keeping the enormous undertaking secret. At that time, the Encyclopædia Britannica was in print in all its twenty volumes; Buckley proposed a similar encyclopaedia of the imaginary planet. He would bequeath the society his gold-bearing mountain ranges, his navigable rivers, his plains trodden by the steer and the buffalo, his slaves, his brothels, and his dollars — all on one condition: that 'The work will make no pact with the impostor Jesus Christ.' Buckley did not believe in God, but he wanted to prove to the non-existent God that mortal men were capable of conceiving a world. Buckley was poisoned in Baton Rouge, in 1828; in 1914, the society sent its collaborators, who numbered three hundred, the final volume of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. The publication was private; its forty volumes (the vastest work ever undertaken by men) would be the basis of another edition, more detailed and compiled not in English but in one or other of Tlön's languages. This emended description of an imaginary world was provisionally called Orbis Tertius, and one of its modest lesser gods was Herbert Ashe, whether as an agent of Gunnar Erfjord or as a member of the society I do not know. That he received a copy of Volume XI of the work would seem to suggest the latter.

  But what of the other volumes? From about 1942, events followed each other thick and fast. I remember one of the first of these with singular clarity, and I believe I felt something of its premonitory nature. The incident took place in a flat in Laprida Street, over the way from a high bright balcony that faced the setting sun. The Princess de Faucigny Lucinge's silver dinner service had arrived from Poitiers. Out of the vast depths of a chest adorned with seals from all over the globe came a stream of fine ware — silver from Utrecht and Paris chased with heraldic fauna, a samovar. Among these items — with the barely perceptible flutter of a sleeping bird — a compass quivered mysteriously. The princess did not recognize it. The blue needle yearned for magnetic north; the metal case was concave; the letters on the compass rose came from one of the alphabets of Tlön.

  This was the first intrusion of the imaginary world into the real world. A chance occurrence that still troubles me led to my also being a witness to the second. It took place some months later, in the Cuchilla Negra, in a country saloon belonging to a Brazilian. Enrique Amorim and I were on our way back from Sant'Anna. The river Tacuarembó had risen, forcing us to risk — and to survive — the place's primitive hospitality. In a big room cluttered with barrels and leather hides, the saloon-keeper supplied us with a couple of creaking cots. We lay down, but the drunkenness of an unseen neighbour, who veered back and forth from incomprehensible insults to snatches of milonga — or, at least, to snatches of one particular milonga — did not allow us to sleep until dawn. As may be imagined, we attributed his persistent shouting to the proprietor's fiery rum. At daybreak, the man lay dead in the corridor. The roughness of his voice had fooled us — he was a youth. In his drunken state, a handful of coins had come loose from his wide leather belt, as had a cone of gleaming metal the size of a dice. A boy tried without success to pick up the cone. A man barely managed it. I held the object in the palm of my hand for a minute or so. I remember that it was intolerably heavy and that after I laid it aside its weightiness stayed with me. I also remember the perfect circle it left imprinted in my flesh. The evidence of a very small object that was at the same time very heavy left me with a disagreeable feeling of revulsion and fear. One of the locals suggested that we throw it into the fast-moving river; Amorim bought the cone for a few pesos. Nobody knew anything about the dead man except that 'he was from the Brazilian border'. In certain religions of Tlön, small and extremely heavy cones made of a metal that is not of this planet represent the godhead.

  This concludes the personal part of my story. The rest exists in the memory — when not in the hopes and fears — of all my readers. I shall simply record the following events in a few words and let mankind's collective memory enrich or amplify them. In about 1944, a researcher working for The American, a Nashville newspaper, found buried in a Memphis library the forty volumes of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Even today it is a matter of dispute as to whether the discovery was accidental or whether the directors of the still nebulous Orbis Tertius arranged it. The latter is likely. Some of the less credible bits of Volume XI (for example, the proliferation of hrönir) have been eliminated or played down in the Memphis copies. It may reasonably be supposed that the suppressed material was part of a plan to introduce a world that was not overly incompatible with the real world. The distribution of objects from Tlön to different countries contributed to the plan.‡‡ In the event, the international press kept the 'find' in the public eye. Handbooks, anthologies, digests, facsimiles, authorized and pirated reprintings of the Greatest Work of Man flooded and continue to flood the world. Almost at once, the real world gave way in more than one area. The truth is that it was longing to give way. Ten years ago, any symmetrical scheme with an appearance of order — dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism — was enough to hold mankind in thrall. Why not submit to Tlön, to the immense, meticulous evidence of an ordered planet? It is useless to reply that the real world too is ordered. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws — that is, non-human laws — that we shall never comprehend. Tlön may be a labyrinth, but a labyrinth contrived by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

  Contact and familiarity with Tlön have brought about the deterioration of our world. Mesmerized by that planet's discipline, we forget — and go on forgetting — that theirs is the discipline of chess players, not of angels. Tlön's putative 'primitive language' has now found its way into our schools; the teaching of its harmonious history, so full of stirring episodes, has obliterated the history that presided over my childhood; in our memories a fictitious past has now replaced our past, of which we know nothing for certain — not even that it is false. Numismatics, pharmacology, and archaeology have all been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics too await their avatars. A far-flung dynasty of isolated individuals has changed the face of the earth. Their task goes on. If our forecasts are not mistaken, a hundred years from now someone will
discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.

  Then English, French, and mere Spanish will disappear from this planet. Our world will be Tlön. All this means nothing to me; here in the quiet of the Hotel Adrogué I spend my days polishing a tentative translation in Quevedo's style — which I do not propose to publish — of Sir Thomas Browne's Urne-Buriall.

  * Haslam has also published A General History of Labyrinths.

  ** Bertrand Russell (The Analysis of Mind, 1921, p. 159) hypothesizes that the world was created a few minutes ago, together with a population that 'remembers' an unreal past..

  † A century, in terms of the duodecimal system, is equivalent to a period of a hundred and forty-four years.

  †† At present, one of Tlön's churches takes the platonic view that a given pain, a given greenish shade of yellow, a given temperature, a given sound, are the only reality. All men, in the dizzying moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who recite a line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.

  ‡ Buckley was a freethinker, a fatalist, and a defender of slavery.

  ‡‡ There remains, of course, the problem of the materia of certain objects.

  Pierre Menard, the Author of Don Quixote

  To Silvina Ocampo

  The visible body of work left by the novelist Pierre Menard is easily and briefly listed. Inexcusable, therefore, are the omissions and additions perpetrated by Madame Henri Bachelier in a misleading checklist which a certain newspaper that makes no secret of its Protestant leanings has had the insensitivity to thrust upon its unfortunate readers — few and Calvinist though these be, when not Freemason or circumcised. Menard's true friends looked on this checklist with alarm and even a certain sadness. Only yesterday, in a manner of speaking, did we gather among the mournful cypresses at his final resting place, and already Error creeps in to blur his Memory. Unquestionably, some small rectification is in order.

  It is all too easy, I realize, to challenge my meagre credentials. Nevertheless, I trust that I shall not be disallowed from citing the names of two eminent patrons. The Baroness of Bacourt (at whose unforgettable vendredis it was my privilege to come to know the late-lamented poet) has been kind enough to grant approval to the pages that follow. The Countess of Bagnoreggio, one of the most refined minds of the Principality of Monaco (now of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, following her recent marriage to the international philanthropist Simon Kautzsch, a man much vilified, alas, by the victims of his disinterested activities), has sacrificed 'to truth and to the death' (her own words) the aristocratic reserve that so distinguishes her, and in an open letter published in the review Luxe she too grants me her approbation. These patents, I believe, should suffice.

  I have said that Menard's visible work is readily listed. After careful examination of his private papers, I find that they contain the following items:

  a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (the second time with variants) in the review La Conque (March and October, 1899).

  b) A study of the feasibility of constructing a poetic vocabulary of concepts that are neither synonyms for nor circumlocutions of those that shape our everyday speech 'but ideal objects created by consensus and intended essentially for poetic needs' (Nîmes, 1901).

  c) A study of 'certain connections or affinities' in the thinking of Descartes, Leibniz, and John Wilkins (Nîmes, 1903).

  d) A study of Leibniz's Characteristica Universalis (Nîmes, 1904).

  e) A technical article on the possibility of enriching the game of chess by removing one of the rook's pawns. Menard sets forth his case, elaborates, argues, and in the end rejects his own innovation.

  f) A study of Ramon Lull's Ars Magna Generalis (Nîmes, 1906).

  g) A translation, with a foreword and notes, of The Book of the Free Invention and Art of the Game of Chess by Ruy López de Segura (Paris, 1907).

  h) The draft pages of a monograph on George Boole's symbolic logic.

  i) An examination of the basic metrical laws of French prose, illustrated with examples from Saint-Simon (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, October, 1909).

  j) A reply to Luc Durtain (who had denied the existence of such laws), illustrated with examples from Luc Durtain (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, December, 1909).

  k) A manuscript translation of Quevedo's Aguja de navegar cultos, entitled La boussole des précieux.

  l) A foreword to the catalogue of an exhibition of lithographs by Carolus Hourcade (Nîmes, 1914).

  m) Problems with a Problem (Paris, 1917), a book discussing in chronological order the solutions to the well-known paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. To date, two editions of this book have appeared; the second bears in an epigraph Leibniz's advice, 'Have not the slightest fear, Mr Tortoise', and amends the chapters on Russell and Descartes.

  n) A dogged analysis of Toulet's 'syntactic usage' (Nouvelle revue française, March, 1921). Menard, I recall, held that censure and praise are sentimental activities which have little or nothing to do with criticism.

  o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry's 'Cimitière marin' (N.R.F., January, 1928).

  p) An invective against Paul Valéry in Jacques Reboul's Pages Towards the Suppression of Reality. (This denunciation, if I may digress, is the exact reverse of his true opinion of Valéry. Valéry knew this, and the old friendship between the two men was not imperiled.)

  q) A 'definition' of the Countess of Bagnoreggio, included in the 'triumphant tome' — the words of another contributor, Gabriele D'Annunzio — published annually by this lady for the purpose of correcting the inevitable falsehoods of the gutter press and of presenting 'to the world and to Italy' a true portrait of her person, so often exposed (by reason of her beauty and conduct) to over-hasty misinterpretation.

  r) An admirable crown of sonnets for the Baroness of Bacourt (1934).

  s) A handwritten list of verses whose effect derives from their punctuation.*

  The above, then, is a summary in chronological order (omitting only a few woolly occasional sonnets inscribed in Madame Henri Bachelier's hospitable, or greedy, album) of Menard's visible work. I shall now move on to his other work — the underground, the infinitely heroic, the singular, and (oh, the scope of the man!) the unfinished. This oeuvre, possibly the most significant of our time, consists of chapters nine and thirty-eight of the first part of Don Quixote and of a fragment of chapter twenty-two. I am aware that my claim will seem an absurdity, but to vindicate this 'absurdity' is the principle object of the present essay.**

  Two texts of differing value inspired Menard's undertaking. One was that philological fragment (number 2005 in the Dresden edition) in which Novalis outlines the notion of total identification with a particular author. The other was one of those derivative books that place Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet in the Cannebière, or don Quixote on Wall Street. Like any man of good taste, Menard loathed such pointless masquerades, since all they were fit for, he said, was to amuse the man in the street with anachronisms or, worse still, to bewitch us with the infantile idea that every historical period is the same or is different. What seemed to Menard more interesting — albeit superficial and inconsistent in execution — was Daudet's famous attempt to combine in one character, Tartarin, both the Ingenious Knight and his squire. Anyone who suggests that Menard dedicated his life to writing a modern-day Don Quixote defiles Menard's living memory.

  Pierre Menard was not out to write another Don Quixote — which would have been easy — but Don Quixote itself. Needless to add, he never envisaged a mindless transcription of the original; it was not his intention to copy it. His ambition, an admirable one, was to produce a handful of pages that matched word for word and line for line those of Miguel de Cervantes.

  'Only my aim is astonishing,' he wrote to me from Bayonne on the thirtieth of September, 1934. 'The final term, the conclusion, of a theological or metaphysical proof — about, say, the objective world, God, causation, platonic forms — is just as foregone and familiar as my we
ll-known novel. The one difference is that the philosopher gives us in pretty volumes the intermediary stages of his work, while I have chosen to destroy mine.' In fact, not a single draft page remains to bear witness to Menard's many years of toil.

  The first method he devised was relatively simple. To learn Spanish well, to return to the Catholic faith, to fight the Moor and Turk, to forget European history from 1602 to 1918, to be Miguel de Cervantes. This was the course Pierre Menard embarked upon (I know he gained a fair command of seventeenth-century Spanish), but he rejected the method as too easy. Too impossible, rather! the reader will say. Granted, but the scheme was impossible from the start, and of all the impossible ways of achieving his aim this was the least interesting. To be in the twentieth century a popular novelist of the seventeenth century seemed to him a belittlement. To be, however possible, Cervantes and to come to Don Quixote seemed less exacting — therefore less interesting — than to stay Pierre Menard and come to Don Quixote through the experience of Pierre Menard. (This conviction, let me add, made him leave out the autobiographical prologue to the second part of Don Quixote. To have retained this prologue would have been to create another character — Cervantes — and would also have meant presenting Don Quixote through this character and not through Menard. Naturally, Menard denied himself this easy way out.) 'In essence, my scheme is not difficult,' I read in another part of his letter. 'To carry it through all I need is to be immortal.' Should I confess that I often find myself thinking that he finished the book and that I read Don Quixote — all of Don Quixote — as if it had been Menard's brainchild? A few nights ago, leafing through chapter twenty-six, which he never tried his hand at, I recognized our friend's style and voice in this fine phrase: 'the nymphs of the streams, the damp and doleful Echo....' This effective coupling of a moral and a physical adjective brought back to me a line of Shakespeare's that Menard and I talked about one evening: