Foreword

The eight pieces that make up this book require no further explanation. The last of them, 'The Garden of Branching Paths', is a detective story; its readers will participate in the commission of and in all the events leading up to a crime whose motive they will know but will not understand, it seems to me, until the final paragraph. The other stories are fanciful inventions. One, 'The Lottery in Babylon', is not wholly innocent of symbolism. Nor am I the first author of the tale 'The Library of Babel'; anyone curious as to its history and prehistory may consult certain pages of the magazine Sur, Number 59, which record names as diverse as Leucippus and Lasswitz, Lewis Carroll and Aristotle. In 'The Circular Ruins' everything is unreal; also unreal is the destiny that the hero of 'Pierre Menard, the Author of Don Quixote' imposes on himself. The catalogue of works which I ascribe to him is not particularly amusing but neither is it arbitrary; it is a chart of his intellectual history.

The writing of vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea which could be perfectly expressed orally in a few minutes - is an exhausting and impoverishing piece of extravagance. Far better to pretend that such books already exist and to provide them with a summary or commentary. This is what Carlyle did in Sartor Resartus and Butler in The Fair Haven, works that have the imperfection of also being books and no less tautological than any others. More rational, more inept, more idle, I have chosen to write reviews of imaginary books. These are 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', 'A Glimpse into the Work of Herbert Quain', and 'The Approach to al-Mu'tasim'. The last of these was written in 1935; a short while ago I read The Sacred Fount (1901), whose general outline is perhaps similar. The narrator of James's subtle novel explores the influence of A and B on C; in 'The Approach to al-Mu'tasim' the remote existence of Z, whom B does not know, is foreshadowed or surmised by B.

Jorge Luis Borges

Buenos Aires, 10 November 1941