Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths

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The Immortal Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion. Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII In London, in the first part of June 1929, the antique dealer Joseph Cartaphilus of Smyrna offered the Princess of Lucinge the six volumes in small quarto (1715-1720) of Pope's Iliad. The Princess acquired them; on receiving the books, she exchanged a few words with the dealer. He was, she tells us, a wasted and earthen man, with gray eyes and gray beard, of singularly vague features. He could express himself with fluency and ignorance in several languages; in a very few minutes, he went from French to English and from English to an enigmatic conjunction of Salonika Spanish and Macao Portuguese. In October, the Princess heard from a passenger of the Zeus that Cartaphilus had died at sea while returning to Smyrna, and that he had been buried on the island of Ios. In the last volume of the Iliad she found this manuscript. The original is written in English and abounds in Latinisms. The version we offer is literal. I As far as I can recall, my labors began in a garden in Thebes Hekatompylos, when Diocletian was emperor. I had served (without glory) in the recent Egyptian wars, I was tribune of a legion quartered in Berenice, facing the Red Sea: fever and magic consumed many men who had magnanimously coveted the steel. The Mauretanians were vanquished; the land previously occupied by the rebel cities was eternally dedicated to the Plutonic gods; Alexandria, once subdued, vainly implored Caesar's mercy; within a year the legions reported victory, but I scarcely managed a glimpse of Mars' countenance. This privation pained me and perhaps caused me precipitously to undertake the discovery, through fearful and diffuse deserts, of the secret City of the Immortals. My labors began, I have related, in a garden in Thebes. All that night I was unable to sleep, for something was struggling within my heart. I arose shortly before dawn; my slaves were sleeping, the moon 102
was of the same color as the infinite sand. An exhausted and bloody horseman came from the east. A few steps from me, he tumbled from his mount. In a faint, insatiable voice he asked me in Latin the name of the river bathing the city's walls. I answered that it was the Egypt, fed by the rains. "Another is the river I seek," he replied sadly, "the secret river which cleanses men of death." Dark blood surged from his breast. He told me that his homeland was a mountain on the other side of the Ganges and that on this mountain it was said that if one traveled to the west, where the world ends, he would reach the river whose waters grant immortality. He added that on its far bank the City of the Immortals rises, rich in bastions and amphitheaters and temples. Before dawn he died, but I had determined to discover the city and its river. Interrogated by the executioner, some Mauretanian prisoners confirmed the traveler's tale; someone recalled the Elysian plain, at the end of the earth, where men's lives are perdurable; someone else, the peaks where the Pactolus rises, whose inhabitants live for a century. In Rome, I conversed with philosophers who felt that to extend man's life is to extend his agony and multiply his deaths. I do not know if I ever believed in the City of the Immortals: I think that then the task of finding it was sufficient. Flavius, proconsul of Getulia, gave me two hundred soldiers for the undertaking. I also recruited mercenaries, who said they knew the roads and were the first to desert. Later events have deformed inextricably the memory of the first days of our journey. We departed from Arsinoe and entered the burning desert. We crossed the land of the troglodytes, who devour serpents and are ignorant of verbal commerce; that of the garamants, who keep their women in common and feed on lions; that of the augyls, who worship only Tartarus. We exhausted other deserts where the sand is black, where the traveler must usurp the hours of night, for the fervor of day is intolerable. From afar, I glimpsed the mountain which gave its name to the Ocean: on its sides grows the spurge plant, which counteracts poisons; on its peak live the satyrs, a nation of fell and savage men, given to lewdness. That these barbarous regions, where the earth is mother of monsters, could shelter in their interior a famous city seemed inconceivable to all of us. We continued our march, for it would have been dishonor to turn back. A few foolhardy men slept with their faces exposed to the moon; they burned with fever; in the corrupted water of the cisterns others drank madness and death. Then the desertions began; very shortly thereafter, mutinies. To repress them, I did not hesitate to exercise severity. I proceeded justly, 103
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Labyrinths Selected Stories & Other
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Contents Fictions Preface Introduct
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Preface Jorge Luis Borges is a grea
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as this: "Idea for a frightening st
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Tlön, is a Berekeleyan and Kierkeg
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writings belie the agitated conditi
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of construction. Indeed, in Borges'
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confrontation of literature and lif
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one of the most extraordinary expre
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and Literature was brief. Only one
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allusions to preceding and succeedi
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words, they do not conceive that th
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attributing the divine category of
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made possible the interrogation and
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I am still troubled by a stroke of
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The Garden of Forking Paths On page
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Captain Madden, His hands and his v
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continued. From the rear of the hou
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to the night when she must repeat i
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times, in a growing, dizzying net o
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symbols. In broad daylight a drawin
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discretion, did not answer directly
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abominably insinuates that the Comp
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Leibniz's recommendation "Ne craign
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interesting. To be, in the twentiet
Page 51 and 52: contemporary of La trahison des cle
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Page 55 and 56: confused with that of dawn, and und
Page 57 and 58: others) he instilled into him a com
Page 59 and 60: ecstasy reveals to them a circular
Page 61 and 62: is given to express, in all languag
Page 63 and 64: indicates A's position; to locate b
Page 65 and 66: Funes the Memorious I remember him
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Page 73 and 74: which in another incarnation were h
Page 75 and 76: arrogance. In this way, for good or
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Page 79 and 80: hesitations, he resolves to keep hi
Page 81 and 82: Lönnrot abstained from smiling. Su
Page 83 and 84: voice, they in high-pitched, false
Page 85 and 86: associate of Scharlach; Lönnrot co
Page 87 and 88: me to the faith of Jesus; he repeat
Page 89 and 90: For Mandie Molina Vedia Translated
Page 91 and 92: many habits, the problematic exerci
Page 93 and 94: Maimonides had written that the wor
Page 95 and 96: would have directed, with singular
Page 97 and 98: enounced honor, morality, peace and
Page 99 and 100: Midrashim, who abhor the impious wh
Page 101: good usage prefers that mothers sho
Page 105 and 106: unknown sand, I let the moon and th
Page 107 and 108: hung downwards. Other stairways, cl
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Page 111 and 112: lacking compensation in something e
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Page 115 and 116: Procrustean arguments, with theriac
Page 117 and 118: heresy spread. Originating in Egypt
Page 119 and 120: Do you want to touch what hands hav
Page 121 and 122: Story of the Warrior and the Captiv
Page 123 and 124: -- half out of wonder, half out of
Page 125 and 126: egun to suspect them, perhaps; she
Page 127 and 128: she did think once, and in that mom
Page 129 and 130: ecause substantially it was true. T
Page 131 and 132: some day my redeemer would come. Si
Page 133 and 134: difficult for me than for others, s
Page 135 and 136: By the end of 1942, Jerusalem had l
Page 137 and 138: Averroe's Search S'imaginant que la
Page 139 and 140: Andalusian country villas. Farach w
Page 141 and 142: Abulcasim, confused, now went from
Page 143 and 144: calligraphy he added these lines to
Page 145 and 146: color of her hair and the shape of
Page 147 and 148: dreamed that I was the coins guarde
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Page 151 and 152: think) of the passage in the Asrar
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desired many things with an unscrup
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the shadowless hour [midday], a tra
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A god, I reflected, ought to utter
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this problem, but rather to its ver
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there is a famous passage in which
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story was published, my friends tol
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the North American sociologist, on
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feel that the facts I have related
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Xenophanes of Colophon, wearied of
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the belief in a slow and fatal dege
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is also surprising to learn, at the
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of an exemplary poet created by tha
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* Nonrecognition of the sacred anim
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The following pages in some way bel
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unity and the declaration of that u
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d) if a, b and c are valid, z is va
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A verse from St. Paul (I Corinthian
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is that nothing can be contingent i
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ook is a dialogue, a form of relati
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verisimilar and perhaps true; in or
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actually perceived by me, or do not
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eginning is as inconceivable as its
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plurality, he who annihilates all m
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think that I had returned upstream
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important one to be, to wit, that a
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collection of perceptions" which, s
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chariot wheel in rolling rolls only
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Men have lost a face, an irrecovera
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Tired of his Spanish land, an old s
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the effect makes him presuppose a p
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could exhaust all the guises of rea
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1925 Appearance of his second book
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Poemas, 1922-1943 (Losada, 1943) *
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Certain of the selections in the fo
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Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths

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