Collected Fictions

by Jorge Luis Borges

  MAHOMED'S DOUBLE

  * Attribution: Emanuel Swedenborg, The True Christian Religion, containing the Universal Theology of the New Church, foretold by the Lordm Daniel VII, 13, 14, and in the Apocalypse XXI, 1, 2, translated from the Latin of ES (NewYork: American Swedenborg Printing and Publishing Society, 1886),ÎJ.829-830.

  Index of Sources

  * Source for "The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro": The source given by Borges here is the PhilipGosse book The History of Piracy; as one can clearly see, it is the same source cited for "The Widow Ching—Pirate," just below it. In my view, this attribution is the result of an initial error seized upon by Borges for another of his "plays with sources"; as he subsequently admitted freely, and as many critics have noted, much of this story comes from the Encyclopcedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, in the article titled "Tichborne Claimant." Here again, where JLB is clearly translating or calquing that source, I have followed it without slavish "transliteration" of JLB's Spanish.

  * Source for "The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan": Neither the Walter Noble Burns book nor the Frederick Watson book contains anything remotely approaching the story given by Borges here. Some details are "correct" (if that is the word), such as Billy's long and blasphemous dying, spewing Spanish curses, but little in the larger pattern of the "biography" seems to conform to "life." While Borges claimed in the "Autobiographical Essay" (written with Norman Thomas diGiovanni and published in The Aleph and Other Stories [1970]) that he was "in flagrant contradiction" of his "chosen authorities]," the truth is that he followed the authorities fairly closely for all the characters herein portrayed except that of Billy the Kid. He did, of course, "change and distort" the stories to suit his own purposes, but none is so cut from whole cloth as that of this gunfighter of the Wild West. The lesson in the "Autobiographical Essay" is perhaps that JLB's predilection for the red herring was lifelong.

  Notes to Fictions ("The Garden of Forking Paths" and "Artifices")

  * Title: First published as Ficciones(1935-1944) by Editorial Sur in1944, this book was made up of two volumes: El jardín de senderosque sebifurcan("The Garden of Forking Paths"), which had originally been published in 1941-1942, and Artificios("Artifices"), dated 1944 and never before published as a book. Each volume in the 1944 edition had its own title page and its own preface. (In that edition, and in all successive editions, The Garden of Forking Paths included the story"El acercamientoa Al-motasim" (The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim"), collected first in Historia de la eternidad("History of Eternity"), 1936, and reprinted in each successive edition of that volume until 1953; this story now appears in the Obras Completas in Historia de la eternidad, but it is included here as a "fiction" rather than an "essay") In 1956 Emecé published a volume titled Ficciones, which was identical to the 1944 Editorial Sur edition except for the inclusion in Artifices of three new stories ("The End," "The Cult of the Phoenix," and "The South") and a "Postscript" to the 1944 preface to Artifices. It is this edition of Fictions, plus "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," that is translated for this book.

  THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS

  Foreword

  * The eight stories: The eighth story, here printed as the second, "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," was included in all editions subsequent to the 1941-1942 original edition. It had originally been published (1936) in Historia de la eternidad("A History of Eternity"). Ordinals and cardinals used in the Foreword have been adjusted to reflect the presence of this story.

  * Sur: "[T]he most influential literary publication in Latin America" (Rodriguez Monegal, p. 233), it was started by Victoria Ocampo, with the aid of the Argentine novelist Eduardo Malica and the American novelist Waldo Frank. Borges was one of the journal's first contributors, certainly one of its most notable (though Sur published or discussed virtually every major poet, writer, and essayist of the New or Old World) and he acted for three decades as one of its "guardian angels." Many of JLB's fictions, some of his poetry, and many critical essays and reviews appeared for the first time in the pages of Sur.

  Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

  * Ramos Mejia: "A part of Buenos Aires in which the rich had weekend houses containing an English colony. It is now an industrial suburb" (Hughes and Fishburn).

  * Bioy Casares: Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914- ): Argentine novelist, JLB's closest friend and collaborator with JLB on numerous projects, including some signed with joint pseudonyms. In their joint productions, the two men were interested in detective stories, innovative narrative techniques (as the text here hints), and tales of a somewhat "fantastic" nature. Unfortunately rather eclipsed by Borges, especially in the English-speaking world, Bioy Casares is a major literary figure with a distinguished body of work; a description of the reciprocal influence of the two writers would require (at least) its own book-length study.

  * Volume XLVI: The Obras completas, on which this translation is based, has "Volume XXVI," which the translator takes to be a typographical error, the second X slipped in for the correct L

  * Johannes Valentinus Andrea in the writings of Thomas de Quincey: It is perhaps significant that de Quincey credits Andrea (1586-1654) with "inventing" the Rosicrucian order by writing satirical works (and one especially: Fama Fraternitatis of the meritorious Order of the Rosy Cross, addressed to the learned in general and the Governors of Europe) describing an absurd mystico-Christian secret society engaged not only in general beneficence and the improvement of mankind but also in alchemy and gold making. The public did not perceive Andrea's satirical intent, and many rushed to "join" this society, though they could never find anyone to admit them. At last, according to de Quincey, a group of "Paracelsists" decided that if nobody else would admit to being a Rosicrucian, they would take over the name and "be" the society.

  * Carlos Mastronardi: Mastronardi (1901-1976) was "a poet, essayist, and journalist [in Buenos Aires], a member of the group of writers identified with the avant-garde literary magazine Martín Fierro" (Fishburn and Hughes). Balderston (The Literary Universe of JLB: An Index... [New York: Greenwood Press], 1986) gives some of his titles: Luz de Provincia, Tierra amanecida, Conocimiento de la noche. Mastronardi was one of JLB's closest friends throughout the thirties and forties (Borgestoo was closely associated with Martín Fierro), and Rodríguez Monegal reported in his biography of JLB that Borges was still seeing Mastronardi as the biography (pubi.1978) was written; it seems safe to say, therefore, that Borges and Mastronardi were friends until Mastronardi's death.

  * Capangas: Overseers or foremen of gangs of workers, usually either slaves or indentured semislaves, in rural areas, for cutting timber, etc., though not on ranches, where the foreman is known as a capataz. This word is of Guaraníor perhaps African origin and came into Spanish, as JLB indicates, from the area of Brazil.

  * Néstor Ibarra:(b. 1908) "Born in France of an Argentine father who was the son of a French Basque émigré, M went to the University of Buenos Aires around 1925 to complete his graduate education. While [there] he discovered Borges' poems and ... tried to persuade his teachers to let him write a thesis on Borges' ultraist poetry"(Rodríguez Monegal, p. 239). Ibarra's groundbreaking and very important study of JLB, Borges et Borges, and his translations of JLB (along with those of Roger Caillois) into French in the 19505 were instrumental in the worldwide recognition of JLB's greatness. Among the other telling associations with this and other stories is the fact that Ibarra and Borges invented a new language ("with surrealist or ultraist touches"), a new French school of literature, Identism, "in which objects were always compared to themselves," and a new review, tided Papers for the Suppression of Reality (see "Pierre Menard," in this volume; this information, Rodriguez Monegal, pp. 240-241). The N. R. F. is the Nouvelle Revue Française, an extremely important French literary magazine that published virtually every important modern writer in the first three decades of this century.

  * Ezequiel Martínez Estrada: Martinez Estrada (1895-1964) was an influential Argentine writer whose work Radiografiade la pampa (X-ray of the Pam
pa) JLB reviewed very favorably in 1933 in the literary supplement (Revista Multicolor de los Sábados["Saturday Motley Review"] ) to the Buenos Aires newspaper Crítica.

  * Drieu La Rochelle: Pierre-Eugene Drieu La Rochelle (1893-1945) was for a time the editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française; he visited Argentina in 1933, recognized JLB's genius, and is reported to have said on his return to France that "Borges vaut levoyage" (Físhburn and Hughes).

  * Alfonso Reyes: Reyes (1889-1959) was a Mexican poet and essayist, ambassador to Buenos Aires (1927-1930 and again 1936—1937), and friend of JLB's (Fishburn and Hughes). Reyes is recognized as one of the great humanists of the Americas in the twentieth century, an immensely cultured man who was a master of the Spanish language and its style ("direct and succinct without being thin or prosaic" [Rodriquez Monegal]).

  * Xul Solar: Xul Solar is the nom de plume-turned-name of Alejandro Schultz (1887-1963), a lifelong friend of JLB, who compared him favorably with William Blake. Xul was a painter and something of a "creative linguist," having invented a language he called creol: a "language ... made up of Spanish enriched by neologisms and by monosyllabic English words ... used as adverbs" (Roberto Alifano, interviewer and editor, Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges, trans. Nicomedes Suárez Araúz, Willis Barnstone, and Noemi Escandell [Housatonic, Mass.: Lascaux Publishers, 1984], p. 119). In another place, JLB also notes another language invented by Xul Solar: "a philosophical language after the manner of John Wilkins" ("Autobiographical Essay," * The Aleph and Other Stories: 1933-1969 [New York: Dutton, 1970], pp. 203-260). JLB goes on to note that "Xul was his version of Schultz and Solar of Solari." Xul Solar's painting has often been compared with that of Paul Klee;"strange" and "mysterious" are adjectives often applied to it. Xul illustrated three of JLB's books: El tamaño de mi esperanza(1926), El idioma de los argentinos(1928), and Un modelo para la muerte, the collaboration between JLB and Adolfo Bioy Casares that was signed"B. SuárezLynch." In his biography of Borges, Emir Rodríguez Monegal devotes several pages to Xul's influence on JLB's writing; Borges himself also talks at length about Xul in the anthology of interviews noted above. Xul was, above all, a "character" in the Buenos Aires of the twenties and thirties and beyond.

  * Amorim: Enrique Amorim (1900-1960) was a Uruguayan novelist, related to Borges by marriage. He wrote about the pampas and the gaucho (and gaucho life); Borges thought his El Paisano Aguilar"a closer description of gaucho life than Gùiraldes' more famous Don Segundo Sombra" (Fishburn and Hughes).

  Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

  * Local color in Maurice Barresor Rodríguez Larreta: Barres (1862-1923) was a "French writer whose works include a text on bullfighting entitled Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort" (Fishburn and Hughes); one can see what the narrator is getting at in terms of romanticizing the foreign. Enrique Rodriguez Larreta (1875-1961) wrote historical novels; one, set in Avila and Toledo in the time of Philip II (hence the reference to that name in the text) and titled La gloriade Don Ramiro, used an archaic Spanish for the dialogue; clearly this suggests the archaism of Menard's Quixote. (Here I paraphrase Fishburn and Hughes.)

  A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain

  * The Siamese Twin Mystery: A novel by Ellery Queen, published in 1933. Here the literary critic-narrator is lamenting the fact that Quain's novel was overshadowed by the much more popular Queen's.

  ARTIFICES

  Funes, His Memory

  * Title: This story has generally appeared under the tide"Funes the Memorious," and it must be the brave (or foolhardy) translator who dares change such an odd and memorable title. Nor would the translator note (and attempt to justify) his choice of a translation except in unusual circumstances. Here, however, the title in the original Spanish calls for some explanation. The title is"Funes el memorioso"; die word memorioso is not an odd Spanish word; it is in fact perfectly common, if somewhat colloquial. It simply means "having a wonderful or powerful memory," what in English one might render by the expression "having a memory like an elephant." The beauty of the Spanish is that the entire long phrase is compressed into a single word, a single adjective, used in the original title as an epithet: Funes die Elephant-Memoried. (The reader can see that that translation won't do.) The word "memorisi" is perhaps die closest thing that common English yields up without inventing a new word such as "memorious," which strikes the current translator as vaguely Lewis Carroll-esque, yet "memorisi" has something vaguely show business about it, as though Funes worked vaudeville or the carnival sideshows. The French tide of this story is the lovely eighteenth-century-sounding "Funesou La Mémoire"; with a nod to JLB's great admirer John Bardi, I have chosen "Funes, His Memory."

  * The Banda Oriental: The "eastern bank" of the River Plate, die old name of Uruguay before it became a country, and a name used for many years afterward by the "old-timers" or as a sort of nickname.

  * Pedro Leandro Ipuche: The Uruguayan Ipuche was a friend of die young ultraist-period Borges (ca.1925), with whom (along with Ricardo Guiraldes, author of the important novel Don Segundo Sombra) he worked on the literary magazine Proa (Fishburn and Hughes). Proa was an influential little magazine, and Borges and friends took it seriously; they were engaged, as Rodriguez Monegal quotes the "Autobiographical Essay" as saying, in "renewing both prose and poetry."

  * Fray Bentos:"A small town on the banks of the Uruguay River, famous for its meat-canning industry. In his youth Borges was a regular visitor to his cousins' ranch near Fray Bentos"(Fishburn and Hughes). Haedo was in fact the family name of these cousins.

  * The thirty-three Uruguayan patriots: The "Thirty-three," as they were called, were a band of determined patriots under the leadership of Juan Antonio Lavalleja who crossed the River Plate from Buenos Aires to Montevideo in order to "liberate" the Banda Oriental (Uruguay) from the Spaniards. Their feat of bravery, under impossible odds, immortalized them in the mythology of the Southern Cone. For fuller detail, see the note to p. 474, for the story"Avelino Arredondo"in the volume The Book of Sand.

  Three Versions of Judas

  * Euclides daCunha: Cunha (1866-1909) was a very wellknown Brazilian writer whose most famous novel is a fictional retelling of an uprising in the state of Bahia. He was moved by the spiritualism (Fishburn and Hughes note its mystical qualities) of the rebels.

  * Antonio Conselheiro:(1828-1897). Conselheiro was "a Brazilian religious dissident who led a rebellion in Canudos, in the northern state of Bahía. The rebels were peasants ... who lived in a system of communes, working out their own salvation. They rose against the changes introduced by the new Republican government, which they regarded as the Antichrist.... Conselheiro's head was cut off and put on public display" (Fishburn and Hughes). His real name was Antonio Maciel; conselheiro means "counselor," and so his messianic, ministerial role is here emphasized.

  * Almafuerte: The pseudonym of Pedro Bonifacio Palacio (1854-1917), one of Argentina's most beloved poets. A kind of role model and hero to young writers, akin to the phenomenon of Dylan Thomas in Britain and the United States a few years ago, Almafuerte was one of JLB's most admired contemporaries.

  The End

  * "It'd been longer than seven years that I'd gone without seeing my children. I found them that day, and I wouldn't have it so's I looked to them like a man on his way to a knife fight": It is not these words that need noting, but an"intertextual event." It is about here that the Argentine reader will probably realize what this story is about: It is a retelling of the end of José Hernández' famous tale Martín Fierro. As Fierrois a knife fighter, and as a black man figures in the poem, and as there is a famous song contest, the reader will put two and two together, no doubt, even before Martin Fierro's name is mentioned a few lines farther on. This is the way Fishburn and Hughes state the situation: "The episode alluded to in 'The End' is the payada, or song contest, between Martín Fierro and el moreno["the black man"] who was the brother of the murdered negro. In the contest the gauchos discuss metaphysical themes, but towards the end el more
no reveals his identity, and his desire for revenge is made clear. In keeping with the more conciliatory tone of pt. 2 [of Hernandez' original poem] a fight is prevented between the two contestants, each going his own way. "The End" is a gloss on this episode, the fight that might have taken place." By this late in the volume, JLB's Preface to the stories, hinting at the coexistence of a "famous book" in this story, may have dimmed in the reader's memory, but for the Latin American reader, the creeping familiarity of the events, like the echoes of Shakespeare in the assassination of Kilpatrick in "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero," should come into the foreground in this section of the story, and the reader, like Ryan in that other story, make the "connection."

  The South

  * Buenos Aires: Here the province, not the city. The reference is to the northern border, near Entre Ríos and Santa Fe provinces, on the Paraná River.

  * Catriel: Cipriano Catriel (d. 1874). Catriel was an Indian chieftain who fought against the Argentines in the Indian wars. Later, however, he fought on the side of the revolutionary forces (Fishburn and Hughes).

  * His gaucho trousers: This is the chiripá, a triangular worsted shawl tied about the waist with the third point pulled up between the legs and looped into a knot to form a rudimentary pant, or a sort of diaper. It is worn over a pair of pantaloons (ordinarily white) that "stick out" underneath. Sometimes, incredible as it strikes Anglo-Saxons that the extraordinarily machista gauchos would wear such clothing (but think of the Scots' kilts), the pantaloons had lace bottoms.