My Translation of "El Libro de Arena" by Jorge Luis Borges

The Book of Sand

by Jorge Luis Borges

...thy rope of sands...

GEORGE HERBERT (1593-1623)

     The line consists of an infinite number of points; the plane, of an infinite number of lines; the volume, of an infinite number of planes; the hypervolume, of an infinite number of volumes... No, this more geometrico is clearly not the best way to begin this narrative.  To affirm this story is true is now a convention of every fantastic tale; mine, however, is true.
     I live alone, on a fourth floor off of Belgrano Street.  Some months ago in the afternoon, I heard a sound on the door.  I opened and a stranger came in.  He was a tall man with fading features.  At least my myopia saw him this way.  His whole aspect was of dignified poverty.  He wore gray and had a gray suitcase in hand.  I immediately felt he was a stranger.  At first I thought he was old; then I realized that his scarce blonde hair, in the manner of Scandinavians, had deceived me.  In the course of our conversation, which would not last an hour, I learned he came from the Orkneys.
     I pointed him to a chair.  The man took a while to speak.  He exhaled melancholy, as I do now.
     "I sell Bibles," he told me.
     Not without pedantry, I answered:
     "In this house there are some English Bibles, including the first, the one by John Wycliffe.  I also have one by Cipriano de Valera, one by Luther, which is in literary terms the worst, and one copy of the Latin Vulgate.  As you can see, I don't exactly need Bibles."
     He answered after some silence.
     "I don't just sell Bibles.  I can show you a sacred book that will perhaps interest you.  I obtained it on the outskirts of Bikaner."
     He opened the suitcase and left the book on the table.  It was a clothbound volume in octavo.  It had undoubtedly passed through many hands.  I examined it; its unfamiliar weight surprised me.  On the cover it read Holy Writ and on the bottom Bombay.
     "It's from the nineteenth century," I observed.
     "I don't know.  I have never known," was the response.
     I opened it blindly.  The characters looked strange to me.  The pages, which looked worn and of poor typography, were printed in double columns in the manner of the Bible.  The text was tight and ordered in versicles.  On the top corner of the pages there were Arabic-like scripts.  It caught my attention that the even pages had, for example, the number 40.514 and the following odd page, 999.  I turned the book; the back was numbered with eight scripts.  It had a small illustration, much in the way that dictionaries do: an anchor drawn with a pen as if by the sloppy hand of a child.
     It was then that the stranger told me:
     "Take a good look at it.  You will never see it again."
     There was a threat in the affirmation, but not in the voice.
     I marked the place and closed the volume.  I opened it immediately.  I searched in vain for the figure of the anchor, page after page.  To hide my puzzlement, I said:
     "This is some version of the Scripture in some Hindustani language, isn't that so?"
     "No," he replied.
     Then he lowered his voice as if to confirm a secret:
     "I obtained it in a town on the plain in exchange for some rupees and the Bible.  Its owner didn't know how to read.  He suspected that in the Book of Books he perceived an amulet.  He was of the lowest caste; people couldn't step on his shadow without contamination.  He told me his book was called the Book of Sand because neither the book nor sand have a beginning or end."
     He asked me to find the first page.
     I placed my left hand on the cover and with my thumb opened very near the index.  It was all useless: various pages always interposed themselves between the cover and my hand.  It was as if they grew from the book.
     "Now look for the last page."
     I failed at that too; I barely stuttered in a voice that wasn't mine:
     "This can't be."
     Still in a low voice, the Bible salesman told me:
     "It can't be, but it is.  The number of pages in this book is exactly infinite.  None is the first; none is the last.  I don't know why they're numbered in that arbitrary way.  Perhaps to give the idea that the terms in an infinite series admit any number."
     Then, as if he thought in a loud voice:
     "If space is infinite, we are at any point in space.  If time is infinite, we are at any point in time."
     His deliberations irritated me.  I asked him:
     "You are religious, undoubtedly?"
     "Yes, I'm a Presbyterian.  My conscience is clear.  I'm sure of not having deceived  the native when I gave him the Word of God in exchange for his diabolical book."
     I assured him that nothing was to be reproached, and I asked him if he was just passing by these lands.  He answered that he thought of returning to his fatherland within a few days.  It was then I discovered he was Scottish and from the Orkney islands.  I told him I personally loved Scotland for the love of Stevenson and Hume.
     "And Robbie Burns," he corrected.
     While we talked I continued exploring the infinite book.  With false indifference I asked him:
     "Are you considering offering this curious specimen to the British Museum?"
     "No. I offer it to you," he answered; and he set a large sum.
     I told him, in all truth, that the sum was inaccessible to me, and I continued thinking.  After a few minutes I had weaved my plan.
     "I propose an exchange," I said.  "You obtained this volume for some rupees and the Sacred Scriptures; I'll offer you the whole of my retirement fund, which I have just received, and the Wycliffe Bible in gothic letter.  I inherited it from my parents."
     "A blackletter Wycliffe!" he murmured.
     I went to my dormitory and brought him the money and the book.  He turned the pages and studied the cover with the fervor of a bibliophile.
     "Done deal," he said.
     I was surprised he didn't retract.  Only after did I understand that he had entered my home with the purpose of selling me the book.  He didn't count the bills; he just put them away.
     We talked of India, of the Orkneys, and of the Norwegian jarls that ruled them.  It was night when the man left.  I have not seen him since, nor do I know his name.
     I thought of hiding the Book of Sand in the space left by the Wycliffe, but I finally opted to hide it behind some shoddy volumes of the Thousand and One Nights.
     I lay on my bed and did not sleep.  At three or four in the morning I turned on the light.  I looked for the impossible book and flipped the pages.  On one of them I saw a mask reproduced.  One of the pages, I don't know which one, had a numeral elevated to the ninth power.
     I showed no one my treasure.  To the luck of possession was added the fear that it would be stolen, and then the paranoia that it was not truly infinite.  Those two suspicions aggravated my old misanthropy.  I had few friends left; I stopped seeing them.  A prisoner of the Book, I hardly went out.  I examined the worn cover and binding with a magnifying glass and rejected the possibility of deception.  I proved that the small illustrations were separated by two-thousand pages each.  I annotated these alphabetically in a notebook, which filled up in no time.  They never repeated.  At night, during the scarce intervals permitted me by insomnia, I dreamed of the book.
     Summer waned, and I understood that the book was monstrous.  It did not help me to consider that I was no less monstrous, I who perceived it with eyes and touched it with ten fingers with nails on them.  I felt it was an object of nightmare, an obscene thing that disgraced and corrupted reality.
     I thought of lighting it on fire, but feared that the flame would also be infinite and suffocate the planet in smoke.
     I remembered reading that the best place to hide a leaf is in the forest.  Before retiring I had worked at the National Library, which housed nine-thousand books; I knew that on the right hand of the entrance a staircase curved down into the basement where the periodicals and maps were kept.  I took advantage of the employees' inattention and abandoned the Book of Sand in one of the humid shelves.  I tried not to note the height or distance from the door.  I feel a bit of relief, but I don't even want to pass by Agüero Street.

The Book of Sand as Hypertext

If the more geometrico explanation didn't work for the narrator of "El Libro de Arena," I nonetheless sense that he hinted at the nature of the Book of Sand and then completely forgot about it for the rest of the narrative.  If "the line consists of an infinite number of points; the plane, of an infinite number of lines; the volume, of an infinite number of planes; the hypervolume, of an infinite number of volumes"—and notice that we move from the one dimensional (line) to the two dimensional (plane) to the three dimensional (volume) and finally to the four dimensional (hypervolume)—then, in what dimension does the Book of Sand reside?

It resides in the hyper dimension and it is therefore a hypertext.

I could have used the word hypervolume instead of hypertext, since Jorge Luis Borges actually uses the word "hypervolume" in the section I just quoted and since he uses the word "volume" to describe the Book of Sand in his afterword to the collection of short stories, El Libro de Arena.  He says, "Two unlucky and inconceivable objects are the subject of the last two stories. 'The Disk' is the Euclidean circle, which has but one face; 'The Book of Sand,' a volume of innumerable pages" (emphasis mine).

I could have used hypervolume, with "volume" used as a pun for books and three-dimensional objects, yet I chose to use the word hypertext.  The word text, if you remember, means literally "to weave" or "a thing woven" (as in the word textile) at the same time that it means "a book or written code."  And there are two instances in which weaving is alluded to in the short story.  The first instance is the epigram, which reads

"...thy rope of sands...

George Herbert (1593-1623),"

and by the way, a rope is merely a weaving of several strands of twine.  The second instance is the mention that the Book of Sand is "a volume in octavo, bound in cloth," and "cloth" is a weaving of cotton material.

I also use hypertext to retain the idea that the Book of Sand is a holy text, just like the Bible is a book whose verses are usually referred to as texts.  Holy texts are always above us and represent that which is "over, above, beyond, exceedingly, ... overmuch, above measure," which is the meaning of the preposition and adverb hyper.  It is this aboveness that makes the narrator feel like a beast: "It helped nothing to consider that I was no less monstrous [than the book], I who looked on it with eyes and touched it with ten fingers with nails."

And of course, I want hypertext to echo with our contemporary idea of hypertext as digital text displayed on computers, text that is not printed with ink on a page, a very material substance, but text written with HTML language codes and existing in airy nothingness.  The ether is the heaven and realm of the new digital world we have invented, and the sacred secular text, or hypertext, of this digital dimension is "the Book of Books"—the Book of Sand.

The Book of Sand in the Geometrical Manner

The opening of "El Libro de Arena" seems like a false start on the part of the narrator:

"The line consists of an infinite number of points; the plane of an infinite number of lines; the volume of an infinite number of planes; the hypervolume of an infinite number of volumes...No, this more geometrico is decidedly not the best way to begin my tale.  To affirm this [story] is true is now a convention of all fantastic tales; mine, however, is true."

Not knowing whether to begin with a geometrical explanation that may or may not help the reader understand the infinite nature of the Book of Sand, the narrator opts for a narrative convention instead—the convention of affirming the truth of a fictive tale.

I think the narrator's choice of narrative convention over mathematical explanation is interesting.  Jorge Luis Borges had read his Baruch Spinoza and was familiar with Ethica More Geometrico Demonstrata (or more simply knows as Ethics), Spinoza's most famous work in which he explains the universe and existence "in the manner of geometry" (more geometrico) by offering propositions, definitions, scholia, and corollaries.  (Need I say that Baruch Spinoza had borrowed the geometric method from Rene Descartes, the father of rationalism?)  In this way, Spinoza sought to write a philosophy that necessarily follows from axioms to propositions to inevitable conclusions, very much in the imitation of proofs in mathematics.

But more importantly, Spinoza sought to write and deduce an ethical system from his geometrical philosophizing.  After discovering the principle that everything that exists can be called God or Nature, Spinoza goes on to formulate several propositions and he argues that "intellectual love," understanding things as they are, not weeping or laughing at them, brings happiness, which is its own virtue.  This is his ethical position.

Now, I only bring up Spinoza to ask the following question: If the narrator abandoned the more geometrico in favor of a narrative convention, did the narrator also abandon questions of ethics?  Or has he merely repositioned ethics in the realm of fiction?  Has the narrator missed an opportunity for intellectual love, to understand the universe and its objects, the Book of Sand in particular, as they are?  Did the narrator demonize the Book of Sand by abandoning it?  And could the narrator have partaken of the infinity of the Book of Sand by dedicating himself wholly to it?  I have no answers to this at the moment, but I may seek answers in a separate blog.

This is all I can give for now.

What is the Book of Sand?

"What is the Book of Sand?" seems like a straightforward question.  I have several answers to this inquiry and none of them are mutually exclusive.  The Book of Sand is

• the Bible's doppelgänger;
• one of several borgesian artifacts that corrupt reality—the others are the blue tigers, the disk, the zahir, the city of the immortals, the aleph, and of course the labyrinth;
• an encyclopedia;
• a mathematically infinite object; and
• a hypertext.

In my previous blog I made a few comparisons between the Bible and the Book of Sand.  I will make a separate point here.  The Bible is thought to have been written by men inspired by the Holy Ghost, and thus there is only one true author of the Scriptures, God.  The peculiarity of the Book of Sand is that it is authorless.

In the story, there is mention of a title, binding, place of publication, and other specifications for the Book of Sand, but there is no mention of an author.  We can suppose that because the book seems to be an encyclopedia of sorts, with entries like "anchor" and "mask," its has many authors, and because it has infinite entries, it has infinite authors.

My following statement may be illogical but I will venture it anyway:

If a book is written by everyone, then it is written by no one.

No one wrote the Book of Sand.  I am reminded of Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author," in which he argues against the romantic notion of the author as genius and the author as sole authority over the text.  He argues that when a person writes, their personhood disappears because writing consists of "several indiscernible voices...to which we cannot assign a specific origin." It is as though the writer is merely a "shaman or speaker, whose 'performance' may be admired (that is, his mastery of the narrative code), but not his 'genius'"; that is, the words pass through the writer, they are not produced by the writer.

And if there is no author, the meaning of the text is unsettled, ambiguous, fluid, changing, and unstable.  The text is not the utterance of one voice, "the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture."  The Book of Sand, then, becomes meaningless gibberish, the sounds of an infinite babel of voices.

In this sense the Book of Sand is the Bible's doppelgänger, the dark mirror image of Scripture.  The Bible has one authoritative Author speaking law to humanity; the Book of Sand has no authors speaking no special message to no one.  And because it has no special message that reifies reality, the Book of Sand, as the narrator states, "defile[s] and corrupt[s] reality."

The Book of Sand has no authors speaking no special message to no one.  Instead, it is all hypertext.

But I will leave that for later.

That is all I can give for now.  (receding into silence)

"El Libro de Arena" and Book Collecting

If we ignore the infinite aspect of the Book of Sand, Borges' short story "El Libro de Arena" is about two bibliophiles and book collecting.

In “El Libro de Arena” a blind and aged narrator, who is probably Borges, meets a Bible salesman who connives him into buying the Book of Sand, a very material and physical tome of a book that is nonetheless infinite.  Being a book collector and bibliophile, the narrator describes the aspects and dimensions of the infinite book: it is a clothbound volume in octavo printed in double columns (like the Bible), and it is unusually heavy and worn through much handling.  Also like the Bible, it is composed in versicles and carries the imprint of Holy Writ.  He notes that Bombay, India is the place of publication, which is Borges' nod to the Orient that produced The Thousand and One Nights.  And finally, the narrator, attempting to create a catalogue of the illustrations, notes that the illustrations are “spaced at two-thousand page intervals,” two of which we know about, an anchor and a mask.

The Bible salesman, who I guess is not really a Bible salesman, trades his Book of Sand for the narrator's "blackletter Wyclif" and "with a bibliophile's zeal he turned the pages and studied the binding," examining his new acquisition.  John Wycliffe translated the Bible from the Latin into English in the year 1382, which is before the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440.  A Bible with blackletter font (which is also known as Old English font or Gothic Script) means that this copy of the Bible was copied by hand, is one of the first Bibles in the English language, and is therefore an extremely rare and valuable item for book collectors and museums.

Any story about property includes a narrative about the method of acquisition, and so the Bible salesman tells us that he obtained the Book of Sand from a native in the outskirts of Bikaner, India for some rupees and a Bible.  This information about the previous owners and history of the books transmission is important for any book collector because as Walter Benjamin, a true bibliophile, tells us in "Unpacking My Library": "The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership—for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object."

Benjamin's "talk about book collecting" is about "the relationship of a book collector to his possessions" and he focuses on the act of collecting books rather than on the book collection itself.  According to Benjamin, a bibliophile through the act of acquisition "renew[s] the old world" and becomes a guardian of a piece of history.  For Benjamin, the private collector is a dying breed being replaced by museum and other public collectors, and he mourns the loss of the private collector who alone maintained "the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects"—ownership.

Indeed, the narrator of "El Libro de Arena" tells us of his object fetishism: "I showed no one my treasure. To the joy of possession was added the fear that it would be stolen from me, and to that, the suspicion that it might not be truly infinite."  Here ownership results in wildly varying emotional states—jealousy, joy, fear, paranoia, suspicion—all exacerbated by the peculiarity and singularity of the object, an infinite book.  The excessive attachment to the object results in an interchangeability between owner and owned, or as Benjamin phrases it, "Not that the [objects] come alive in [the owner]; it is he who lives in them."  The terrifying and disturbing essence of the Book of Sand merges with each and every owner, each of whom in the end seek to dispossess themselves of the accursed book.

Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli.  Let me offer a purposeful mistranslation: Owners and books share a destiny.  If we apply this formula to "El Libro de Arena," the short story becomes a tale of owners dispossessing themselves of a cursed object that "defiled and corrupted reality."  And in terms of plot, then, "El Libro de Arena" is a history of the acquisition and voluntary loss of a singular and peculiar book, the Book of Sand.  Of course, there is more going on in "El Libro de Arena" than bibliophilia turned bibliophobia, but I will deal with that next time.

This is all I can give for now.  (receding into silence)

Borgesian Bibliophilia

Forgive me for writing a serious blog.  It's my nature to find seriousness in everything, even in poop jokes.  And so i decided to write a literary blog, a place where i can quietly, silently, and under the radar of the Audience (because as we know, no one reads blogs: "Nowadays books are written by the public and read by no one,' said Wilde) post my trivial thoughts on my readings.

And who knows, perhaps this will help me write my grad thesis.

Maybe.

I chose a subject broad enough to cover more than just the writings of Jorge Luis Borges—Borges who has blindly kept company with a neophyte this whole year—but to still retain him at the center of my meditations.

Borgesian bibliophilia refers not only to my maddening obsession with the books Borges published (and didn't publish), it also refers to the books Borges himself loved: the intimidatingly long list of books he read in Spanish, English, German, Latin, and Old English, ranging from authors such as Julio Cortazar, GK Chesterton, William Faulkner, Paul Valéry, Lady Murasaki, Ray Bradbury, and Søren Kierkegaard.

Borgesian bibliophilia also alludes to the material, physical object called a book, an object that seared its image into the mind of Borges from so much reading and from being around the tomely presence of books at the National Library of the Argentine Republic, where he was director from 1955 through 1973.

He even dreamt and continually hallucinated books in stories like "The Library of Babel" and "The Book of Sand," and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."  But he also dreamed the book as something else—as something virtual, something existing in hyperspace and in our reality.  Who knows...maybe he was the first to envision the digital, electronic book.

But enough of this.  I will leave these thoughts for another post.  Whatever I have intimated or said by the way will be explained in detail later.

This is all I can give for now.