Jorge Luis Borges

The library of Babel

soochie

“The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of man. The certitude that everything has been written negates us, it turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter.”

“Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god.”

Bianca Layog

Emily Morgan

I read this as part of my course on Aesthetics when we were exploring the relationship between literature and philosophy, and the capacity for fiction to convey philosophical concepts. The seven pages of this short story are about  "the Universe (which others call the Library)".  The Library is a collection of galleries, infinite in size, which contains an indefinite but not quite infinite number of books whose contents are all derived from varying arrangements of the same 25 symbols. It's essentially a more poetic version of the theory that an infinite amount of monkeys with typewriters will eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare.  "One book, which my father once saw in a hexagon in circuit 15-94, consisted of the letters M C V perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (much consulted in this zone) is a mere labyrinth of letters whose penultimate page contains the phrase 'O Time thy pyramids'."  All in all, a whimsically specific and metaphysically entertaining piece of philosophy.

 "In the vast Library there are no two identical books...its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books."

Die Bibliothek von Babel

Elaine

Really interesting and thought provoking short stories. I really enjoyed reading this.

𝓬𝓱𝓮𝓻𝓲𝓮

Anna with an A

Louisa

Ryan Greene

Barış Yarsel

Sofia Santos

Eine repräsentative Auswahl kürzerer und sprachlich nicht zu schwieriger Erzählungen aus dem Gesamtwerk des grossen Argentiniers: La intrusa, Las ruinas circulares, La biblioteca de Babel, El sur, El milagro secreto, El libro de arena, El otro, La casa de Asterión, Deutsches Requiem, Los dos reyes y los dos laberintos, Hombre de la esquina rosada, La trama, Diálogo sobre un diálogo, El cautivo. Als Auftakt enthält die Anthologie Borges Hommage an die deutsche Sprache: Al idioma alemán.

cuentos selectos y un poema

La biblioteca de Babel

Derek

Matylda M

Jay Harris

Ari Hertz

Matthew Zabel

Kevin Bertolero

Larisa

Henry Fey

nda and

Este libro recoge los veintinueve prologos que Jorge Luis Borges escribio para la coleccion La Biblioteca de Babel, publicada inicialmente en italiano y mas tarde en espanol. Seleccionados por Borges, los libros que la integran exhiben sus vastas y sorprendentes lecturas. En los prologos, analiza los cuentos de escritores tan diversos como Pedro Antonio Alarcon, Voltaire, Leopoldo Lugones, Leon Bloy, Giovanni Papini y P'u Sung-Ling, junto a otros como Nathaniel Hawthorne, G. K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson, Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe y H. G. Wells, que se cuentan entre sus autores preferidos.

prólogos

La Biblioteca de Babel

Maria Amaro

The library of Babel

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