the letters MCV perversely repeated from the
;rst line to the last. Another, very much consulted in this zone, is a mere labyrinth of letters, but on the next-to-the-last page, one may
read, O Time your pyramids. As is well known:
for one reasonable line or one straightforward
note there are leagues of insensate cacophony,
of verbal farragoes and incoherencies. (I know
of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the
vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense
in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one’s
hands…;ey admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-;ve natural symbols,
but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean
nothing. ;is opinion—we shall see—is not
altogether false.)
For a long time it was believed that these
impenetrable books belonged to past or remote
languages. It is true that the most ancient men,
the ;rst librarians, made use of a language quite
di;erent from the one we speak today; it is true
that some miles to the right the language is dialectical and that ninety stories up it is incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true; but 410
pages of unvarying MCVs do not correspond
to any language, however dialectical or rudimentary it might be. Some librarians insinuated that each letter could in;uence the next
and that the value of MCV on the third line of
page seventy-one was not the same as that of
the same series in another position on another
page, but this vague thesis did not prosper. Still
other men thought in terms of cryptographs;
this conjecture has come to be universally accepted, though not in the sense in which it was
formulated by its inventors.
Five hundred years ago, the chief of an up-
per hexagon came upon a book as confusing
as all the rest but which contained nearly two
pages of homogenous lines. He showed his ;nd
to an ambulant decipherer, who told him the
lines were written in Portuguese. Others told
him they were in Yiddish. In less than a centu-
ry, the nature of the language was ;nally estab-
lished: it was a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of
Guaraní, with classical Arabic in;ections. ;e
contents were also deciphered: notions of com-
binational analysis, illustrated by examples of
variations with unlimited repetition. ;ese ex-
amples made it possible for a librarian of genius
to discover the fundamental law of the Library.
;is thinker observed that all the books, how-
ever diverse, are made up of uniform elements:
the period, the comma, the space, the twenty-
two letters of the alphabet. He also adduced a
circumstance con;rmed by all travelers: ;ere
are not, in the whole vast Library, two identical
books. From all these incontrovertible premises
he deduced that the Library is total and that
its shelves contain all the possible combina-
tions of the twenty-odd orthographic symbols
(whose number, though vast, is not in;nite);
that is, everything which can be expressed, in
all languages. Everything is there: the minute
history of the future, the autobiographies of the
archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library,
thousands and thousands of false catalogs, a
demonstration of the fallacy of these catalogs,
a demonstration of the fallacy of the true cata-
log, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the com-
mentary on this gospel, the commentary on
the commentary of this gospel, the veridical
account of your death, a version of each book in
all languages, the interpolations of every book
in all books.
From “;e Library of Babel.” Living abroad during
World War I, Borges returned in 1921 to his native
Argentina, where two years later he published his ;rst
book of poems, Fervor of Buenos Aires. He worked
at a city library for nine years beginning in 1938
while also writing the short stories later collected in
Ficciones. Su;ering from deteriorating eyesight,
Borges later recollected the irony that “by 1955, when
the revolutionary government appointed me director of
the National Library, I was no longer able to read.”
