The world (which some call the Library) is made up of an unknown, or perhaps unlimited, number of hexagonal galleries, each with a vast central ventilation shaft surrounded by a low railing. From any given hexagon, the higher and lower galleries can be seen stretching away interminably. The layout of every floor is identical. Twenty-five long shelves, five on each side, fill all the sides but one; the height of the shelves, which is the height of the walls, is little more than that of the average librarian. From the unshelved side, a narrow passageway leads off to another gallery, which is identical to the first and to all the others. To left and right of the passageway are a pair of tiny cupboards. One is used for sleeping upright; the other, for satisfying faecal necessities. From this passage a spiral stairway climbs up, or goes down, to the uttermost reaches. The passageway contains a mirror, which faithfully duplicates what appears before it. From this, most people infer that the Library is not infinite, for, if it were, why this illusion of duplication? I prefer to imagine that the mirror's gleaming surface depicts and promises infinity. Illumination comes from spherical fruit called lamps. There are two, opposite each other, in each hexagon. Their light is inadequate, though continuous.

Like all men in the Library, in my youth I travelled, roaming in search of a book, perhaps of a catalogue of catalogues. Now, when my eyes can barely make out what I write, I am getting ready to die a league or two from the hexagon where I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no want of pious hands to hurl me over the railing. My grave will be the bottomless air; my body will plummet for a long, long time, decaying and dissolving in the wind generated by my fall, which will be infinite. I have said that the Library is limitless. Idealists argue that hexagonal chambers are the quintessential form of absolute space or, at least, of our perception of space. A triangular or five-sided chamber, they reason, is unimaginable. (Mystics claim that their ecstasies reveal a circular chamber with a great circular book, whose continuous spine runs all the way round the walls, but the evidence of these seers is suspect and their words obscure. Such a cyclical book is God.) For now, I need only quote the classic dictum that 'The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any hexagon and whose circumference is beyond reach'.

Each wall but one of each hexagon has five shelves; each shelf holds thirty-two books of a uniform size. Each book contains four hundred and ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, eighty characters in black letter. There are also characters on the spine of each book but they give no indication or forewarning of what is inside. I know that this discrepancy was once looked on as a mystery. Before I run through the explanation (whose discovery, despite its tragic ramifications, may be the most important event in history), let me call to mind a few salient facts.

First, that the Library has always existed. Of this truth, whose direct corollary is that the world will always exist, no reasonable mind can be in doubt. Man, the imperfect librarian, may be a creation of chance or of evil lesser deities. The world, with its elegant supply of bookshelves, of baffling volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveller and privies for the seated librarian, can only be the creation of a god. To appreciate the distance between the divine and the human, all we need do is compare the crude, spidery symbols my fallible hand is scrawling on the endpapers of this book with the organic letters on the inside, which are precise, fine, deep black, and perfectly symmetrical.

Second, that the number of these symbols is twenty-five. [0] The discovery of this fact three hundred years ago led to the formulation of a general theory of the Library and to a satisfactory solution of a problem which, until then, no hypothesis had addressed namely, the formless and random nature of almost all books. One, once seen by my father in a hexagon of Circuit 1594, consisted of a relentless repetition, from beginning to end, of the letters M C V. Another, frequently consulted in this zone, is nothing more than a labyrinth of letters but its second-to-last page reads, 'O time your pyramids'. We now know that for every coherent or straightforward line there are leagues of nonsensical, clashing sounds, verbal hodgepodge, and gibberish. (I know of a wild hinterland whose librarians reject the superstitious and pointless custom of looking for meaning in books, which they equate with seeking meaning in dreams or in the haphazard lines of one's hand. They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that their use is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This notion, as we shall see, is not entirely false.)

For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books were works in dead or remote languages. It is true that earliest man, the first librarians, used a language very different from the one we speak now; it is true that some miles to our right the language spoken is a dialect and that ninety floors above us that dialect is incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true, but four hundred and ten pages of unbroken lines of M C V can be part of no language, however primitive or however much of a dialect it may be. Some people suggested that each letter might have a bearing on the one after it and that the meaning of M C V in the third line of page 71 was not the same as that of these letters in another position on another page, but this embryonic theory came to nothing. Others believed that these letter sequences were codes, a hypothesis that has been widely accepted, although not in the sense intended by its originators.

Five hundred years ago, the head of an upper hexagon [1] came across a book as confused as the rest but which had almost two pages of identical lines. He showed his find to a peripatetic cryptographer, who told him they were in Portuguese. Others said they were Yiddish. Within a hundred years, the language had been established as a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with inflections from classical Arabic. The contents, which were also decoded, proved to be theories of synthetic analysis, illustrated by endlessly repeated examples of variations. Such examples led one librarian of genius to stumble on the Library's fundamental law. This thinker noted that all the books, however different they may be, have identical elements - the space, the full stop, the comma, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also claimed something that all travellers have confirmed - that in the whole vast Library no two books are the same. From these undeniable premises he deduced that the Library is complete and that its shelves hold all possible permutations of the twenty-odd symbols (a number which, although vast, is not infinite) or, in effect, everything that can be expressed in all languages - a history of the future down to the last detail, the autobiographies of the archangels, a true catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false ones, a proof of the falseness of these catalogues, a proof of the falseness of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, a commentary on this gospel, a commentary on the commentary on this gospel, a true account of your death, translations of each book into all languages, interpolations from each book into every other book.

When it was announced that the Library was the repository of all books, the initial response was one of unrestrained joy. Men everywhere felt they were lords of a secret and still intact treasure. There was no individual or world problem for which an eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe had been justified and at a stroke had usurped the limitless dimensions of hope. At the time, there was much talk of the Vindications - books of apologia and prophecy, which justified for ever the actions of each man on earth and held wondrous mysteries concerning his future. Thousands of avid seekers abandoned their comfortable native hexagons and rushed upstairs and down, driven by a fruitless urge to find their particular Vindication. These pilgrims wrangled in the narrow passageways, uttering dark curses and seizing each other by the throat on the divine stairways; they flung the deceiving books into the bottomless pit of the shafts and were hurled to their deaths by men from distant regions. Others went mad. The Vindications exist (I have seen two that tell of people in the future, who may not be imaginary), but the seekers forgot that the likelihood of a man's finding his own apologia - or some false version of it - is next to nil.

It was also hoped at that period that the fundamental mysteries of human life - the origin of the Library and of time - would be revealed. Clearly, these deep mysteries can be explained in words, and, should the language of philosophers be inadequate, the multiform Library will doubtless have produced the undiscovered language that is required, together with its vocabulary and grammar. For four hundred years, men have been exhausting the hexagons. There are official searchers, or inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their work. They always arrive bone weary, talking about a stairway with missing steps, which was nearly the death of them. They talk to the librarian about galleries and staircases. Sometimes they pick out the nearest book and leaf through it in search of shameful words. Plainly, none of them expects to find anything.

Of course, the excessive hope was followed by extreme depression. The conviction that some shelf in some hexagon held precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible seemed almost too much to bear. A blasphemous sect suggested that the searches stop and that everyone keep scrambling and re-scrambling the letters and symbols until, through an improbable stroke of luck, the canonical books emerged. The authorities felt obliged to lay down strict rules. The sect disappeared, but in my childhood I saw old men who for long periods hid in the privies, with some metal disks in a forbidden shaker, trying feebly to ape the divine disorder.

Others, conversely, believed that the most important thing was to eliminate useless works. These men, showing credentials that were not always false, invaded the hexagons, pored over a single volume and condemned whole shelves. To their ascetic zeal for cleansing we owe the senseless loss of millions of books. The names of these perpetrators are still cursed, but those who mourn the 'treasures' destroyed in such frenzy overlook two well-known facts. One, that the Library is so vast that any loss caused by humans is necessarily minute. The other, that each copy is unique, irreplaceable, but since the Library is a totality there are always several hundred thousand imperfect copies - works that differ in no other detail than a letter or a comma. Contrary to general opinion, I take the view that the damage caused by the Purifiers' raids has been exaggerated as a result of the terror these fanatics unleashed. A madness drove them to defeat the books of the Crimson Hexagon - books of a smaller than average size, which were all-powerful, illustrated, and magical.

We also know of another superstition of that time - that of the Man of the Book. On some shelf in some hexagon, it was said, there must be a book that is the sum and substance of all the others. A certain librarian has studied it and he is akin to a god. In the language of this particular zone, traces of the worship of this long-dead official remain. Many have made pilgrimages in search of Him. For a hundred years, they vainly exhausted every possible path. How were they to discover the venerated secret hexagon that gave Him shelter? Someone suggested that they should try working backwards. To find book A, first consult book B, which will tell where A is; to find book B, first consult book C, and so on ad infinitum. I have squandered and used up my years in quests of this kind. It seems to me quite possible that on some shelf or other in the world there may be an all-embracing book. [2] I pray the unknown gods that one man - just one, even if thousands of years ago - has examined and read it. If honour and wisdom and happiness are not my lot, may they be the lot of others. May heaven exist, even if my place is in hell. Let me be reviled and obliterated, so long as for a single instant - in a single being - Your vast Library finds justification.

Unbelievers insist that in the Library nonsense is the norm, while reason (or even simple, lowly coherence) is an almost miraculous exception. I know they speak of 'the feverish Library, any one of whose haphazard volumes runs the endless risk of turning into any other and that all books affirm, deny, or cast confusion on this fact like a god in a state of delirium'. These words, which not only denounce but also exemplify chaos, are a clear proof of bad taste and hopeless ignorance. In fact, the Library includes every verbal structure and every permutation that the twenty-five symbols permit but not a single piece of sheer nonsense. It is of no purpose to point out that the best book in the many hexagons I administrate is entitled Combed Thunder, and another The Plaster Cramp, and a third Axaxaxas Mlö. These titles, although at first sight meaningless, must lend themselves to some coded or allegorical interpretation. Such an interpretation consists of words and so, by definition, is in the Library. I can make no combination of letters - even dhcmrlchtdj - which the divine library has not envisaged and that in one or another of its secret languages does not hold some fearful meaning. Any syllable full of tenderness or fear uttered in any one of those languages is the all-powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology. The present futile, long-winded epistle already exists in one of the thirty-two volumes of the five shelves in one of the numberless hexagons - as does its refutation. (An n number of possible languages use the same vocabulary; in some, the symbol for 'library' correctly denotes 'a ubiquitous, ever-lasting system of hexagonal galleries', but in others 'library' is 'bread' or 'pyramid' or anything else, and the seven words that define it have another meaning. Are you sure, you who are reading this, that you understand my language?)

The act of writing methodically distracts me from the current condition of mankind. The certainty that everything is already written negates or makes phantoms of us. I know of regions where young people prostrate themselves before books and crudely kiss their pages but do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heresies, pilgrimages that inevitably degenerate into hooliganism, have decimated the population. I believe I mentioned suicides, whose numbers rise every year. Perhaps age and fear deceive me, yet I suspect that the human race - the only race - stands on the brink of extinction but that the Library will live on - its lights burning, unvisited, infinite, perfectly still, and bristling with precious, useless, incorruptible, secret volumes.

I have just used the word 'infinite'. I did not choose this adjective out of rhetorical habit. I do not find it illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge the world to be limited put forward the notion that in remote parts the passageways and stairways and hexagons might inconceivably end. This is absurd. Those who imagine the world to be without limits forget that these are defined by the possible number of books. I make bold to suggest the following solution to the age-old question: The Library is limitless and recurrent. If an eternal traveller were to cross it in any direction, he would discover after centuries that the same volumes were repeated in the same random order. This, when it occurred, would be an order - the Order. My solitude is cheered by this elegant hope. [3]













I have in my possession a PDF copy of The Garden of Branching Paths by Jorge Luis Borges, in English, translated by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni.

The Library of Babel appears on pages 73-83 in this book.

The first few pages include these details:
- Jorge Luis Borges
- The Garden of Branching Paths
- A Translation by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni

The PDF contains text (i.e. it is not a scanned copy). I was able to copy the text into this article. I then cleaned it (e.g. by removing various spaces, newlines, and hyphens).


On pages 1-4, there is the following introduction:

The eight stories of El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, published in Buenos Aires early in 1942, are widely considered the cornerstone of Borges's fiction and of his subsequent fame as a storyteller. Yet, paradoxically, the book in which these celebrated tales first appeared was to last a bare three or so years as a separate title before it disappeared, subsumed in the now famous volume Ficciones. So strange a twist surely calls for explanation.

Elsewhere (The Lesson of the Master, 2nd ed., p. 233), I have made the claim that The Garden of Branching Paths 'must stand as the most revolutionary set of short fiction since Joyce's Dubliners, published twenty-eight years earlier', and I went on to say that Borges

came to the short story in an inconspicuous, tentative, roundabout fashion, groping his way with sketches and borrowings. In fact, he sneaked in by the back door via an amalgam of the essay, the book review, and the hoax. Among the great writers of our time, it is difficult to recall a more timorous début.

In a nutshell, Borges had little confidence in himself as a writer of fiction. His self-doubt in this matter, as I myself witnessed on many occasions, followed him all his life. These eight stories were written in the period from 1935 to 1941 and produced but a slim volume of some 126 pages. Over the next few years, while The Garden of Branching Paths slipped out of print, Borges managed to write six more stories. What to do with them? Each new story he felt might be his last. He spoke constantly of running dry. He was growing blind and he was also impatient. He never got over the fear of misplacing or losing a text before it somehow found its way into print. On several occasions he tucked a new story or stories unannounced into a re-impression of an earlier book.

All this, of course, is a mark of the amateurism of publishing in the Argentine in those years. Rarely was an edition reprinted; The Garden of Branching Paths simply died on the vine. A further mark of the provincial nature of River Plate publishing was that when Borges presented his next new stories - six of them - his editor or publisher did not tell him to go back to his desk and write six more for an entirely new book. Instead, the first eight and the second six were issued together in a collection called Ficciones. Ficciones then became the revolutionary volume to be marvelled at, the book that in time would launch Borges onto the international scene. And so, as a discrete entity, The Garden of Branching Paths passed unnoticed into oblivion, and its unique status as Borges's seminal work - a landmark in the annals of River Plate literature - became the mere opening section of Ficciones.

The collection contains 'The Circular Ruins', a perfect story flawlessly executed. The collection also contains Borges's most difficult and most intellectual fiction. Indeed, with their staggering, even phantasmagorical, concepts, 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' - widely considered his masterpiece - and 'The Library of Babel' are veritable brainteasers. In the latter, the layout of the library's hexagonal chambers obviously taxed the author too. In 1956, fifteen years after he wrote the tale, it was revised and reprinted for inclusion in his complete works. In the earlier text, Borges wrote: 'Twenty-five long shelves, five on each side, fill all the sides but one . . .'; in the latter, this became 'Twenty long shelves, five on each side, fill all the sides but two . . .' Twenty shelves or twenty-five, five of the hexagon's walls or four, I defy any architect armed with these details to draw a floor-plan of Borges' Kafkian library. I imagine the emended version was prompted by some astute yet baffled reader who took Borges aside to point out a conceptual error. In the English translation printed here, I have not modified Borges's original wording.

The first Argentine readers of The Garden of Branching Paths would have found its contents puzzling and its prose a shock. Indeed, on publication the book was notoriously overlooked for a leading prize, which went to some now utterly forgotten title. As for their style, the stories are written in a Spanish unlike any up until then. One could argue the case that in fact they were composed in English with Spanish words, for they exhibit none of Castilian's high-sounding, empty bombast and instead opt for the quiet, plain language with which Borges ultimately transformed written Spanish. The shock effect will go unnoticed by English readers, who, on the other hand, will everywhere detect the stamp of those authors Borges revered and in whom he steeped himself: Stevenson and Wells, Kipling and Chesterton, Conan Doyle and the inimitable compilers of the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Two of this book's English versions were written in direct collaboration with the author. The stories are presented here in the order in which they were written.

- N T di G

How I acquired the text of the library of babel:


1) Google "borges library of babel"

First result:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

Excerpt:

The story was originally published in Spanish in Borges' 1941 collection of stories El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths). That entire book was, in turn, included within his much-reprinted Ficciones (1944). Two English-language translations appeared approximately simultaneously in 1962, one by James E. Irby in a diverse collection of Borges's works titled Labyrinths and the other by Anthony Kerrigan as part of a collaborative translation of the entirety of Ficciones.

2) Search on archive.org for "borges ficciones"

In the results, I find this page:
archive.org/details/TheGardenOfBranchingPaths

This page contains these details:

- The Garden of Branching Paths
- by Jorge Luis Borges and Norman Thomas di Giovanni
- Jorge Luis Borges and Norman Thomas di Giovanni worked together on English editions of much of Borges' fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, all of which was signed by both authors together as a collaborative effort.
- All the published translations can be downloaded from
libraryofbabel.info/Borges/borgesdigiovannitranslations.zip
- Identifier: TheGardenOfBranchingPaths
- Identifier-ark: ark:/13960/t52g1kp4x
- Ocr ABBYY FineReader: 11.0
- Ppi: 300
- Year: 2014
- Uploaded by FrankFrankly on December 14, 2015

This page also contains a link to a PDF copy of The Garden of Branching Paths, which I downloaded.


3) [some research into the site libraryofbabel.info occurs here]


4) On this forum page, there is some information about the origin of these books:
libraryofbabel.info/forum/?topic=previously-unpublished-di-giovanni-translation

A post on this forum page:

Author: Jonathan Basile
November 23, 2015 at 4:17 pm

I've written in the past about the legal battles Borges' widow has carried out to prevent Norman Thomas Di Giovanni from publishing the translations of Borges' work that he co-authored with Borges himself.

Thanks to Dan Visel, who did the beautiful design, and the internet we've taken a small step toward rectifying that. You can now access the version of The Garden of Branching Paths translated by Di Giovanni here:
http://libraryofbabel.info/borges/thegardenofbranchingpaths.pdf

As well as his translation of The Maker:
http://libraryofbabel.info/borges/themaker.pdf


Here's a description:


An author who frequently played with the borders of his own identity, Borges loved to create works in collaboration with others. One of his longtime companions in this literary game of exquisite corpse was Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, who translated this edition of El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan. They worked together on English editions of much of Borges' fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, all of which was signed by both authors together as a collaborative effort. Borges loved translation, and brought a creative infidelity to the effort that embraced the inevitable transformations of the original and highlighted his own interests in the source text. His translations of his own work with Di Giovanni are no more faithful, and represent an important part of his literary output. Unfortunately, they were allowed to go out of print after Borges' death, most likely because Borges' widow María Kodama and Viking-Penguin could secure more royalties for themselves if they broke the 50/50 agreement Borges had established with Di Giovanni for all their shared projects. Di Giovanni has even been legally barred from making his translations available for free on his website. The present edition gathers his translations of Borges' most important collection of fiction, including versions of "The Library of Babel" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", and other translations which have never appeared in print. All their published translations can be downloaded from http://libraryofbabel.info/Borges/borgesdigiovannitranslations.zip

I downloaded the PDF copy from
libraryofbabel.info/borges/thegardenofbranchingpaths.pdf
and used to compare it to the copy I found on archive.org. Appropriately enough, a large amount of semi-readable and unreadable text was produced (xml-as-used-in-the-PDF-format and binary-data-rendered-as-unicode).

They are however the same size (Mac Finder reports they are each 885 KB). On skimming through both files, particularly The Library of Babel on pages 73-83, they appear to be the same. I suspect that only the metadata in the archive.org version has changed.


5) I have used the copy from libraryofbabel.info as my source.





Two further posts on the libraryofbabel.info forum page [link]:

Author: LittleJ
May 25, 2016 at 2:02 am

Di Giovanni says in his preface to The Garden of Branching Paths (much better title, when you think about it, than The Garden of Forking Paths!) that "Two of this book's English versions were written in direct collaboration with the author". Oddly, he doesn't say which ones. Do you happen to know?


Author: Jonathan Basile
May 26, 2016 at 8:46 pm

All the translations that appear in the earlier book The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969 were co-authored with Borges - that includes "The Circular Ruins" and "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim".

These two stories, The Circular Ruins and The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim, are included in my copy of The Garden of Branching Paths.

I deduce that Di Giovanni's translation of The Library of Babel into English was not written in direct collaboration with Borges.





Changes from the original text:

- The title was originally set in a larger font size than the default.
- The title was originally aligned left.
- I have set the title in bold.
- I have added the lines "by Jorge Luis Borges" and "translated by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni" underneath the title, aligned centre.
- The initial quote has been set in italicised text.
- The name of the quoted book, italicised in the original typesetting, is now underlined.
- The first letter of the text, "T" in "The world", was originally set in a much larger font size than the default.
- I have removed word-breaking hyphens.
- I have not preserved the original line breaks. I treat each paragraph as a single line.
- I have not preserved page divisions or page numbers.
- I have replaced the original indentation at the start of each paragraph with an empty line after each paragraph.
- I have embedded the footnotes into the text.
- In the original text, the single quotation marks were curled to indicate whether they were positioned at the start or end of a phrase/sentence/sentence_group. I have replaced them with straight quotation marks.
- I have replaced curled apostrophes with straight single quotation marks.
- I have moved punctuation out from between quotation marks if it is not relevant to the text within those quotation marks.
- When a sentence includes another sentence that is quoted to indicate speech, I haven't always included a final punctuation mark at the end of the quoted sentence.
- I have not always preserved the format of any excerpts from webpages on other sites (e.g. not preserving the original bold/italic styles, changing the list structures, not preserving hyperlinks).

Many of these changes were also made to the text of the introduction and the forum posts included earlier in these notes.

Additional changes to the text of the introducton:
- I changed "the inimitable compilers of Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica." to "the inimitable compilers of the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.".
- I have added a space before the word "I" in "Kafkian library. I imagine".