‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley

“. . . not for nothing am I the great-grandson of that Ts’ui Pen who was the governor of Yunan province and who renounced all temporal power in order to write a novel containing more characters than the Hung Lu Meng and construct a labyrinth in which all men would lose their way . . .”

I know I’m not the first to choose Borges in A Personal Anthology and I doubt I’ll be the last. I thought about not including him for fear of duplicating what others have said, but the fact is that his work has excited and influenced me more than any other writer. ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ is a story that begins like a John Buchan spy tale but becomes a dizzying but equally thrilling contemplation of time and infinite pathways. Reading him for the first time in my late teens I was struck by the way he opened up whole new possibilities for writing beyond the social realism that I was used to reading at that time. The fact that I then spent most of my twenties trying and failing to emulate his style is of course not his fault.

First published 1941; collected in Collected Fictions, Allen Lane 1999

‘The A Bao A Qu’ by Jorge Luis Borges

“On the stairway of the Tower of Victory there has lived since the beginning of time a being sensitive to the many shades of the human soul and known as the A Bao A Qu. It lies dormant, for the most part on the first step, until at the approach of a person some secret life is touched off in it, and deep within the creature an inner light begins to glow.”

Some days we’re the A Bao A Qu desperate for help to self-actualise.

Some days we’re the dreadful traveller stopping the A Bao A Qu from self-actualising.

Spoiler: I’ve never known a tentacle plot-twist like it.

First published in The New Yorker, October 4th, 1969. Collected in Manual de zoología fantástica, Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1957, and translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni into English in The Book of Imaginary Beings, Dutton, 1969

‘The Book of Sand’ by Jorge Louis Borges

What if you found a mysterious book that contained infinite wisdom? What would you hope to find in the pages? I like to think that this is a simple treatise on the power of books, but it’s more than that. The story is about a man who acquires a book such as the one I’ve described. He becomes obsessed with it and spends all of his time with it. Until handling the book becomes too much to grasp.

First published in Spanish 1975 as part of a short story collection of the same name. The English translation first appeared in The New Yorker in 1976 and can be found here, and the entire collection was published in 1977.

‘The Gospel According to Mark’ by Jorge Luis Borges

As with many of his stories Borges begins as if this is something taken from the archives – “These events took place at La Colorada ranch, in the southern part of the township of Junín, during the last days of March, 1928” – though of course we know it’s pure fiction. The first page sketches the background and personality of Espinosa, a young man of “with nothing more noteworthy about him than an almost unlimited kindness and a capacity for public speaking that had earned him several prizes at the English school in Ramos Mejía.” Espinosa ends up trapped by floods on a friend’s farm, his only companions being the farm foreman Gutres and Gutres’s son and daughter. Good-natured and condescending, the young visitor decides to take it upon himself to educate the Gutres by reading to them from the Bible, with disastrous results. The ending is truly stunning. A breathtakingly ironic story about class, belief and unintended consequences.

First published in English, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author, in The New Yorker, October 1971, and collected in Doctor Brodie’s Report, Dutton, 1972, and Collected Fictions, Viking, 1998/Penguin, 2000, where it is translated by Andrew Hurley. Read it online at the New Yorker here; or hear it read by Paul Theroux here

‘The Library of Babel’ by Jorge Luis Borges

‘The Library of Babel’ may not be Borges’ most riveting story from a narrative perspective, but I find it most compelling conceptually. I spent hours exploring every corner of my college library stacks, so the thought of a library that contains every combination of letters in the human language is just too thrilling. There’s something exciting and reassuring about the idea that the perfect words are out there; you just have to claim them as yours. (Bonus: a curious soul programmed a virtual version of the library. Check it out here… the potential for writing prompts is endless.)

First published in Spanish as ‘La biblioteca de Babel’ in El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan, Sur, 1941. First published in English in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962, and Fictions, Grove Press, 1962

‘Averroës’s Search’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley

Averroës spends the day struggling to translate Aristotle into Arabic, before going to a dinner with tiresome, poetry-spouting intellectuals. One guest, a traveller from an antic land, confuses the others with his reportage: there are foreigners who, instead of telling a story in a civilized manner, do a bewildering activity of many people pretending (like little kids) to be the different characters who feature in that story. They’re actors, in China, but the whole concept of what they’re doing is inconceivable to the scholars in Córdoba.

That’s what this main story is about: the incommunicability of ideas, over time, through languages, and into different cultures. But, suggests the narrator, “History will record few things lovelier and more moving than this Arab physician’s devotion to the thoughts of a man separated from him by a gulf of fourteen centuries.”

This understanding of another is what the narrator, too, is attempting, as he explains when he pops up, Beatrix Potter-like, at the end. But as in all of Borges, there are mirrors and stage-sets, perspective changes and reverse shots everywhere: he feels that “my story was a symbol of the man I had been as I was writing it, and that in order to write that story I had had to be that man, and that in order to be that man I had had to write that story.”

Originally published in Spanish as ‘La busca de Averroes’ in Sur, 1947. First collected in El Aleph, Editorial Losada, 1949. First published in English trs by Norman Thomas de Giovanni in The Aleph and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1971. This edition, Penguin, 2000

‘Funes the Memorious’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by James E. Irby

Borges I read not long after Nabokov. Having grown up with a secondhand bookseller for a dad, Borges made sense to me right away. There had always been something magical about all the evenings spent driving in the dark to garages in Huddersfield or damp terraced rooms on the outskirts of Halifax, watching as dad picked through endless boxes and sports bags heaped with books. Borges got into these moments and, again from a seemingly impossible distance, transfigured them. Borges, perhaps more than any modern writer, takes on directly the infinite as the promise of literature, its curse being always to break that promise. Borges’ talent is that he manages to make these stories read not like intellectual exercises but as the leftover case files of literature’s unsolved crimes. In this story we learn of Ireneo Funes who is given a perfect memory after a riding accident. Being able to perceive not only the individuality of every leaf on a tree, but each of his perceptions of each leaf, destroys his ability to talk, his ability to live. As I learned from philosophy a little later, it is a story that will absorb and spit back as much Hegel as it will Nietzsche, will wrestle with the paradox of sense certainty as ferociously as it will the reductive epistemological violence of conceptuality. It will also, like the Babylonian libraries and books of sand, remake into the patterns of the infinite the memory of an excited child on a rainy night watching his dad drive from the back of a Volvo.

First published as ‘Funes el memorioso’ in La Nación, June 1942 and collected in the 1944 anthology Ficciones. The first English translation appeared in Avon Modern Writing No. 2, 1954. Collected in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1964/Penguin, 1970 and in Fictions and Collected Fictions, Viking, 1998/Penguin, 2000, where it is translated by Andrew Hurley as ‘Funes, His Memory’

‘House of Asterion’ by Jorge Luis Borges

In the preface to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Borges’s Labyrinths, André Maurois writes: “His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound—he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas—but it is vast.”

My favorite story in the collection is ‘The House of Asterion’, which gives Minotaur a background story that is compassionate and sympathetic. He is lonely and isolated and wants to be put out of his solitary misery. Borges is influenced by Ovid’s Theseus and Ariadne story, but gives us the Minotaur’s point of view. He tells us that every nine years a group of men enter his home but fall and die on their own. One of them prophesies Asterion’s escape:

“Since then my loneliness does not pain me, because I know my redeemer lives and he will finally rise about the dust. If my ear could capture all the sounds of the world, I should hear his steps. I hope he will take me to a place with fewer galleries and fewer doors. What will my redeemer be like? I ask myself. Will he be a bull or a man? Will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me?

The morning sun reverberated from the bronze sword. There was no long even a vestige of blood.

‘Would you believe it, Ariadne?’ said Theseus. ‘The Minotaur scarcely defended himself.”

First published in Spanish as ‘La casa de Asterión’ in Los Anales de Buenos Aires, 1947 and collected in El Aleph, Editorial Losada, 1949. First translated by James Irby and Donald Yates and collected in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962

‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Donald A. Yates

With my case now in the hands of the private investigator, I felt more at ease. A burden had been shifted: I would now wait, either for the apologetic call from the legitimate yet disorganised departmental secretary, or for an update on the matter from the investigator. (Could it be, I had asked the investigator, that my appointment within the department is some elaborate fraud? He would not be able to say, he had replied, until he had made some preliminary inquiries.)

The temperature had dropped slightly, enough for me to walk through the city that afternoon. I again walked along the docks, then back into the labyrinth of the old town.

The owner of a small bottega had just opened up. I ordered a vermouth and a sandwich, and sat on the terrace under a parasol. A tall gentleman stopped to ask me for a light. He had a coarse moustache—of both white and thick black hairs—and, despite the heat, he wore a light overcoat that reached his calves.

The gentleman lit his cigarette and offered me one, which I accepted. He introduced himself by his surname, Proto. Was I visiting the city? he asked. I told him the story of the job offer and the now silent departmental secretary, the same story I had told the hotel proprietor, Mr Rosenwasser, the kitchen hand, and the investigator. The gentleman nodded. I remarked on the heat of the afternoons and the charm of the old town, of the side streets and alleyways that crossed the small canals, splitting and rejoining each other at unpredictable intervals.

‘Once one has lived in the city as long as I have,’ Proto replied, ‘he might come to see that the real labyrinth in which we live is not geographical, but rather temporal. I find myself talking with you less due to the chances that both our walks would take us to this exact same point—this spot beneath this parasol—but far more—given your so far brief stay in this city, and especially your tendency, that you have mentioned, to pass this time of day in the hotel lobby—a coincidence of the incalculable pasts and futures we might live. The great Ts’ui Pên believed in an infinite series of times—a network of paths we might live, times that run in parallel, which fork, break off, and diverge or converge on themselves. In one, I come to you asking for a light; in another, I have long quit tobacco, and walk straight past you. In one, my overcoat is brown; in another, it is grey; there are some in which I wear a handkerchief in my breast pocket, others with an extra button fixed to my lapel. In one of these times, we are already friends; in another, I am your enemy.

‘And in the majority of these times, we may not even exist; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us.’

‘And the department? My new job? Will I find these in the future that I am currently propelled towards?’ I jested.

‘There is another time where I walk past this bottega, searching for a light, yet we never meet: you are already in your office, already at work in the department you have been appointed to.’

First published in Spanish in the eponymous collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, Editorial Sur, 1941; translated and collected in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962 and Fictions, Calder and Boyes, 1965, both still in print. Also available in the Collected Fictions, Viking 1998 and as a Penguin Modern, 1998

‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges

I was wowed by the whole of Labyrinths, but it has been a while since I read it. I remember fragments, the tone of the whole, the style of writing–there’s an inevitable impact when you first come across someone doing things in a way so unlike that which you’re used to, and yet finding it still works. What didn’t stick so much was the shape of the individual pieces. Except for this one. Like ‘The Landlady’, understanding only comes towards the end, but once you get there, everything else that has happened falls perfectly into place. The reluctance of the perpetrator of a seemingly meaningless crime because they find the victim so personable, so admirable, and yet their fateful paths are proscribed and entwined, and cannot, whatever happens, be altered.

A perfect short story is often on rails. What comes next is inevitable, and unavoidable, and sometimes all the more horrifying for it. The best twist endings are not twists at all–once you arrive at them.

First published in Spanish in the eponymous collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, Editorial Sur, 1941; translated and collected in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962 and Fictions, Calder and Boyes, 1965, both still in print. Also available in the Collected Fictions, Viking 1998 and as a Penguin Modern, 1998

‘Death and the Compass’ by Jorge Luis Borges

I’m not sure how I first came across Borges, although it may have been the striking cover of the King Penguin edition of this book that drew me in. However, as soon as I started reading, I felt that if ever there was a collection that had been constructed with me in mind as the reader, this was it.

Borges is essentially two very different writers. First of all, he is a philosopher. Every story absolutely fizzes with original and unusual theories and ideas – more so even than any science fiction writer, with the possible exception of Stanislaw Lem, who we’ll come along to in a minute. On the other hand, he is a wonderfully lyrical writer, full of poetry and magical imagery. But the extraordinary thing is that the two aspects are somehow completely intertwined, so that only Borges the poet could present the ideas of Borges the theorist.

I could have picked almost any one out of this set, but I’ve gone for ‘Death and the Compass’, a detective story that goes off at something of a tangent. The central conceit was borrowed by Peter Greenaway in the somewhat Borgesian film The Draughtsman’s Contract, and also by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose, where he even went so far as naming one of his characters Jorge de Burgos. (For what it’s worth, I tried to pull the same trick off myself in my first Mathematical Mystery The Truth About Archie and Pye, but sadly no-one noticed, even though the first murder victim was called George Burgess. Well, there you go.)

First published in Sur in May 1942 and collected in Labyrinths, various editions

‘The Aleph’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley

As for many, my first encounter with Borges – in my case with the incredible collection Labyrinths – changed everything. He cracks open the very idea of what a story might be and reading for him for the first time is a dizzying experience of extraordinary possibility. But the truth is that some of Borges’s best stories are not really ‘stories’ as such. There is little narrative; they are instead philosophical exercises, paradoxical vignettes, speculations, puzzles, prose poems. But of course, all those things are ‘stories’ too, or at least they are now that Borges has shown us so.

‘The Aleph’ contains one of Borges’s most dazzling metaphysical inventions. It is a curious tale of lost love and the narrator’s (Borges, himself) uneasy relationship with the poet Carlos Argentino. It is not until the story is almost done that we have the first mention of the Aleph itself; which Borges calls “the ineffable center of my tale.” The passage in which he finally gazes upon it, “a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness”, and sees everything that has passed, everywhere and in all times, is justly renowned, and is not unlike the experience of encountering Borges’s work for the first time; after, nothing can be the same again.

First published in the Argentine journal Sur in 1945. First published in English in The Aleph and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1971. Currently available in The Aleph, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000 and Collected Fictions, Viking, 1998

‘The Library of Babel’, by Jorge Luis Borges

I do also have to have Borges in here. His stories are undoubtedly some of the most important pieces of literature of the twentieth century. I could have chosen any of them – I’m not sure there is any other writer of whom I can say that I have read as much as I can find, and never yet encountered a dud. They are jewels, little reflective, magical worlds that shatter as you read them. I could choose any, so I’ve gone for the one that is emblematic of the whole project – the labyrinthine Library of Babel. It is a game, a philosophical exploration, and a surprisingly straight bit of science fiction fantasy.

‘The Library of Babel’ by Jorge Luis Borges

So, Borges. I would be remiss not to include ‘The Library of Babel’, as it has become a symbol for my whole life in letters and affinity for baroque multiverses. Borges melts the blue popsicle where your brain should be. I’m not going to spoil the story by telling you anything other than you will come to an affection for hexagons that exceeds all moderation. You can also visit a version of the library online, such is the miracle of our age. It was originally published in Spanish in 1941, and then in English in 1962, in the Labyrinths anthology which you can still read in its entirely from New Directions.