Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - the Giovanni Translations (And Others)

by Jorge Luis Borges

  Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk ...

  But why Don Quixote? our reader will ask. For a Spaniard such a choice would have been understandable; not, however, for a Symbolist poet from Nîmes, an ardent follower of Poe, who begat Baudelaire, who begat Valéry, who begat Edmond Teste. The letter quoted above sheds light on the point. 'Don Quixote', explains Menard, 'interests me deeply but does not seem to me — how can I put it? — inevitable. While I find it hard to imagine a world without Edgar Allan Poe's interjection,

  Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!

  or without the “Bateau ivre” or the “Ancient Mariner”, I am quite able to imagine it without Don Quixote. (Of course, I am talking about my own ability and not about the historical resonance of these works.) Don Quixote is an incidental book; Don Quixote is not necessary. I can therefore plan the writing of it — I can write it — without the risk of tautology. I read it from cover to cover when I was about twelve or thirteen. Since then, I have carefully reread certain chapters — those that for the moment I shall not try my hand at. I have also delved into Cervantes's one-act farces, his comedies, Galatea, the exemplary novels, the all-too laboured Travails of Persiles and Segismunda, and the Voyage to Parnassus. My overall recollection of Don Quixote, simplified by forgetfulness and lack of interest, is much like the hazy outline of a book one has before writing it. Given this outline (which can hardly be denied me), it goes without saying that my problem is somewhat more difficult than the one Cervantes faced. My obliging forerunner, far from eschewing the collaboration of chance, went about writing his immortal work in something of a devil-may-care spirit, carried along by the inertial force of language and invention. I have taken upon myself the mysterious duty of reconstructing his spontaneous novel word for word. My solitary game is governed by two contradictory rules. The first allows me to try out variations of a formal or psychological nature; the second makes me sacrifice these variations to the “original” text while finding solid reasons for doing so. To these assumed obstacles we must add another — an inbuilt one. To compose Don Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was reasonable, necessary, and perhaps even predestined; at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, it is well-nigh impossible. Three centuries, packed with complex events, have not passed without effect. One of these events was Don Quixote itself.'

  In spite of this trio of obstacles, Menard's fragmentary Don Quixote is subtler than that of Cervantes. Cervantes sets up a crude contrast between the fantasy of the chivalric tale and the tawdry reality of the rural Spain he knew, whereas Menard chooses as his reality the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega. What picturesque touches would this not have suggested to a Maurice Barrès or a Dr Rodríguez Larreta! Menard, with complete unselfconsciousness, avoids the least hint of exoticism. We find in his work no gypsydom, no conquistadores, no mystics, no Philip II, no burnings at the stake. He does away with local colour. This disdain hints at a new treatment of the historical novel. This disdain is an outright condemnation of Salammbô.

  If we examine isolated chapters we are equally astonished. Let us, for example, look into chapter thirty-eight of part one, 'in which don Quixote gives a strange discourse on arms and letters.' We all know that don Quixote (like Quevedo in an analogous later passage from his Hora de todos) finds for arms over letters. Cervantes was an old soldier; his finding is understandable. But that the don Quixote of Pierre Menard, a contemporary of La trahison des clercs and of Bertrand Russell, should relapse into such fuzzy sophistry! Madame Bachelier sees this as the author subordinating himself in an admirable and characteristic way to the mentality of his hero; others, showing not the slightest perceptiveness, see only a transcription of Don Quixote; the Baroness of Bacourt sees the influence of Nietzsche. To this third view (which I consider beyond dispute) I wonder if I dare add a fourth, which accords quite well with Pierre Menard's all but divine modesty — his self-effacing or ironic habit of propagating ideas that were the exact reverse of those he himself held. (Let us once more remember his diatribe against Paul Valéry in Jacques Reboul's short-lived super-realist pages.) Cervantes's text and Menard's are identical as to their words, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will claim, but the ambiguity is itself a richness.)

  It is a revelation to compare Menard's Don Quixote with Cervantes's. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

  ... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of great deeds, witness to the past, example and admonition to the present, warning to the future.

  Written in the seventeenth century, written by the 'lay genius' Cervantes, this catalogue is no more than a rhetorical eulogy to history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

  ... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of great deeds, witness to the past, example and admonition to the present, warning to the future.

  History, the 'mother' of truth; the idea is breathtaking. Menard, the contemporary of William James, does not define history as an enquiry into reality but as its source. To him historic truth is not what actually took place, it is what we think took place. The last two phrases — 'example and admonition to the present, warning to the future' — are shamelessly pragmatic.

  As vivid is the contrast in styles. Menard's, deliberately archaic — he was a foreigner, after all — is prone to certain affectations. Not so the style of his forerunner, who uses the everyday Spanish of his time with ease.

  There is no intellectual exercise which in the end is not pointless. A philosophical tenet is at the outset a true description of the world; with the passage of time it becomes no more than a chapter — perhaps only a paragraph or a name — in the history of philosophy. In literature this eventual withering away is even plainer. Don Quixote, Menard once told me, was first and foremost an entertaining book; now it has become a pretext for patriotic toasts, grammatical arrogance, and obscene deluxe editions. Fame is a form of incomprehension — perhaps the worst.

  There is nothing new in such nihilistic conclusions; what is unusual is the resolve that Pierre Menard derived from them. Determined to rise above the emptiness that awaits all man's endeavours, he embarked upon a task that was extremely complex and, even before it began, futile. He devoted his utmost care and attention to reproducing, in a language not his own, a book that already existed. He wrote draft after draft, revising assiduously and tearing up thousands of manuscript pages.*** He never let anyone see them and took pains to ensure they did not survive him. I have tried without success to reconstruct them.

  It seems to me that the 'final' Don Quixote can be looked on as a kind of palimpsest in which traces — faint but still decipherable — of our friend's 'earlier' writing must surely shine through. Unfortunately, only a second Pierre Menard, working his way back over the pages of the first one, would be capable of digging up and restoring to life those lost Troys.

  'To think, to analyse, to invent,' Menard also wrote to me, 'far from being exceptional acts are the way the intelligence breathes. To glorify one particular instance of this action, to store as treasure the ancient thoughts of others, to recollect in amazed disbelief what the doctor universalis thought is to admit to our own indolence and crudeness. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will.'

  Through a new technique, using deliberate anachronisms and false attributions, Menard (perhaps without trying to) has enriched the static, fledgling art of reading. Infinite in its possibilities, this technique prompts us to reread the Odyssey as if it came after the Aeneid and Madame Henri Bachelier's book The Centaur's Garden as if it were written by Madame Henri Bachelier. The technique fills the mildest of books with adventure. To attribute The Imitation of Christ to Louis Ferdinand Céline or to James Joyce — would this not be a satisfactory renewal of its subtle spiritual lessons?

  Nîmes, 1939

  * Madame Henri Bachelier also lists a literal translation of Quevedo's
literal translation of St Francis of Sales's Introduction à la vie dévote. No trace of this work is to be found in Pierre Menard's library. The ascription must have arisen from something our friend said in jest, which the lady misunderstood.

  ** I had a secondary purpose as well — to sketch a portrait of Pierre Menard. But dare I compete with the gilded pages that I am told the Baroness of Bacourt is preparing, or with Carolus Hourcade's delicate, precise pencil?

  *** I remember his notebooks with their square-ruled pages, the heavy black deletions, the personal system of symbols he used for marginal emendations, and his minute handwriting. He liked to stroll through the outskirts of Nîmes at sunset, often taking along a notebook with which he would make a cheerful bonfire.

  The Lottery In Babylon

  Like all men in Babylon, I have been a proconsul; like all, a slave. I have known absolute power, public disgrace, and imprisonment. Behold, my right forefinger is missing. Behold, beneath this rent in my cloak my flesh bears a red tattoo. It is a beth, the second letter of our alphabet. On nights when the moon is full, this symbol grants me sway over men whose sign is a gimel but, at the same time, it makes me subject to those marked with an aleph. They, on moonless nights, owe obedience to men branded with the gimel. In the twilight of dawn, before a black altar deep in a vault, I have slit the throats of sacred bulls. For the space of a lunar year, I was declared invisible. When I cried out, no one answered; when I stole bread, I was not beheaded. I have suffered that which the Greeks did not — uncertainty. In a bronze chamber, confronting the strangler's silent cord, hope did not abandon me; in the river of pleasure, neither did panic. Heraclides of Pontus relates in wonder that Pythagoras remembered having been Pyrrhus and before that Euphorbus and before that some other mortal. In order to remember similar experiences, I have no need to fall back either on death or deception.

  I owe this almost hideous alternation in my fortunes to a practice that other republics do not follow or that in them works in an imperfect, secret way. I speak of our lottery. Although I have not delved into its history, I find our sages cannot agree on it. Of the lottery's mighty purpose, I know what a man unversed in astrology knows of the moon. I come from a bewildering country, where daily life revolves round the lottery. Until now, I have given this institution no more thought than I have the behaviour of the inscrutable gods or of my own heart. Here, far from Babylon and its cherished customs, I think back in amazement on the lottery and on the blasphemous speculations about it whispered by men lurking in shadows.

  My father used to say that long ago — was it centuries? years? — the Babylonian lottery was little more than a street game. He said (I do not know how true it is) that barbers sold for a few copper coins oblong bits of bone or parchment, marked with symbols. A draw was made in broad daylight, and, without further complication, winners received a handful of silver coins. It was, as you see, a simple arrangement.

  Of course, these so-called lotteries failed. Their moral force was nil. They did not take into account all of man's capacities but only his hope. Faced with public apathy, the shopkeepers who set up these venal lotteries began to lose money. One of their number, introducing a reform, added a few forfeits to the winning lots. Accordingly, anyone who bought a numbered ticket faced a twofold contingency — that of winning a sum of money or of paying a fine. These fines were often considerable. Naturally, the slight risk — out of every thirty winning numbers one was unlucky — aroused the public's interest. The Babylonians threw themselves into the game. Anyone who did not buy a ticket was looked on as a coward and a faintheart. In time, this well-deserved contempt grew. Those who did not play were despised, but so were the losers, who had to pay the fine. The Company (as it then began to be called) had to protect the winners, who could not collect their prizes until almost all the fines were in the lottery's coffers. Claims would be made against the losers, and a judge would order them to pay the fine, together with court costs, or spend a few days in jail. To cheat the Company, the losers all chose jail. Out of this defiance by a few the Company's absolute power, its ecclesiastical and metaphysical basis, was born.

  Soon after, financial reports gave up listing the fines and took to publishing only the number of days in custody a particular ticket imposed. The omission, which passed almost unnoticed at the time, proved to be of prime importance. It was the first appearance in the lottery of a non-pecuniary element. Success was immediate. On the insistence of the gamblers, the Company found it had to issue more unlucky numbers.

  Everyone knows that the people of Babylon set great store by logic and symmetry. It was deemed inconsistent that lucky numbers should be reckoned in coinage and unlucky numbers in days and nights of imprisonment. Certain moralists pointed out that money does not always lead to happiness and that other forms of reward might be simpler.

  A further concern swept the humbler neighbourhoods. Members of the college of priests, laying more bets than ever, were able to relish the thrills of impending terror or hope. Not so the poor, who knew, with inevitable and understandable envy, that they were barred from the much-touted delights of the lottery's fluctuations. The right and proper wish that rich and poor participate equally in the game sparked off an indignant protest, whose memory the years have not dimmed. A stubborn few failed to understand (or pretended to fail to understand) that a new order — an inescapable historical advance — was in the making. A slave stole a red ticket, which, when drawn, entitled him to have his tongue burned. This was the same penalty the law imposed for the theft of a lottery ticket. Some Babylonians argued that the man deserved the executioner's branding iron because he was a thief; others, more generous, because it was the luck of the draw.

  There were riots, there was regrettable bloodshed, but in the end the will of Babylon's common people prevailed against that of the rich. The citizenry achieved its aims in full. First, it got the Company to take over the reins of power. (This unifying act was essential in view of the breadth and complexity of the operation's new scope.) Second, the citizenry managed to get the lottery made secret, gratis, and available to all. The sale of tickets for money was abolished. Now initiated into the mysteries of Bel, every free men was automatically entered in the sacred draws, which were held in the labyrinths of the god on each sixtieth night and which, until the next round, decided a man's fate. The possibilities were countless. A lucky draw could lead to promotion to the council of sages, to the arrest of a public or a personal enemy, or to a tryst in the hushed dark of a room with a woman who intrigues us but whom we never expected to see again; an unlucky draw, to mutilation, various types of disgrace, or death. Sometimes a single event — the murder of C in some low haunt, the mysterious deification of B — was the happy outcome of thirty or forty draws. Getting the combinations right was tricky, but it should be remembered that Company agents were (and are) shrewd and all-powerful. In many instances, the knowledge that certain lucky draws were simply a matter of chance would have lessened their attraction. To get round this difficulty, agents of the Company resorted to the power of suggestion and sorcery. Their maneuverings, their wiles, were secret. To find out everyone's intimate hopes and fears, they used spies and astrologers. Certain stone lions, a sacred privy called Qaphqa, cracks in a crumbling aqueduct — all these, according to popular belief, 'were pathways to the Company'. Both malicious and well-meaning people began informing on each other. Their reports, which were of varying reliability, were collected and filed away.

  Unbelievably, the mutterings went on. The Company, with its usual prudence, did not reply directly. Instead, it chose to scrawl in the trash heap of a mask factory a brief explanation, which is now part of holy writ. This tenet affirmed that the lottery is an introduction of chance into the order of the world and that to accept error does not contradict but rather confirms chance. The doctrine further held that the lions and the sacred receptacle, although not unauthorized by the Company (which reserved the right to consult them), operated without official sanction.


  This declaration allayed the fears of the public. It also gave rise to other consequences, perhaps not foreseen by its author. The statement profoundly changed the nature and conduct of the Company. I have little time left; we have been told that our ship is about to set sail, but I will try to explain things.

  Strange as it may seem, no one so far had come up with a general theory of probability. Babylonians are little concerned with odds. They respect the dictates of chance, to which they hand over their lives, their hopes, and their wild panic, but it never occurs to my countrymen to look into the labyrinthine laws of chance or the revolving spheres that reveal them. Nevertheless, the semi-official statement I have referred to prompted much discussion of a juridico-mathematical cast. Out of some of this discussion came the following premise: If the lottery is a heightening of chance, a periodic infusion of chaos into the cosmos, would it not be better if chance intervened in all stages of the draw and not just one? Is it not absurd that if chance dictates someone's death the details of this death — whether in obscurity or in the public eye, whether spanning an hour or a century — should not also be tied to chance? In the end, these quite reasonable reservations prompted a substantial reform, whose complexities (weighted by the practice of hundreds of years) only a handful of specialists understand. These complexities I shall try to sum up, albeit in a hypothetical way.