Borges FAQ

There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.

Frequently Asked Questions

The following questions are some of the more common things visitors ask about the Garden of Forking Paths. If you’d like to know more about Shipwreck Library, feel free to visit the “Quarterdeck” page.

Relaunch FAQ

So you are back! What happened?
Long story short… In 1995 I founded the Libyrinth by launching the Brazen Head, a site for James Joyce, quickly followed by the Garden of Forking Paths, devoted to Borges and created with cooperation from the Borges Center in Aarhus. These endeavors brought me the attention of New York investors associated with the Joyce Centre and the Great Books Foundation. They believed that modern literature needed a place like the Libyrinth, and offered to transform my hobby into a career. Investors were brought on, and Bibliotech, Inc. was born. A Philadelphia focus group decided the name “Libyrinth” was too confusing, so “The Modern Word” was born, launched with a fancy new look. (There was also some anxiety that newcomers might think the name denoted a Christian studies site!)

For many years, the Modern Word was a for-profit concern with a board of directors and investors who put nearly a half million dollars into the site. After the dot-com crash of the late 1990s, most of these investors reasonably pulled out, and Bibliotech was forced to lay off everyone making a salary. As the site’s founder and chief content-provider, I was always in it for love of literature, so I continued to operate the Modern Word during my own free time. Of course, I had help from numerous writers, professors, and literary enthusiasts! I was also fortunate enough to have a gracious host for the site, a small tech company whose directors had an appreciation for modern literature and never charged me a cent.

A few years ago, malicious hackers attacked that company’s servers, and the Modern Word was wiped out. As soon as the company restored their assets, the hackers struck a second time. In the meantime, the company had changed hands, and after analyzing my abundant site traffic and realizing that my code was woefully antiquated, they requested a substantial fee to restore, repair, and re-host the Modern Word. As I didn’t have a few thousand dollars laying around, I declined. As time passed, I moved on to other things, trying my best to ignore the concerned and kindly flood of emails.

In 2017, I launched Shipwreck Library as place to host my writing for role-playing games. In the summer of 2019, I finally decided to get the Modern Word up and running again. I am pleased to say that I have the support of several old-timers, and hope to have all the old sites online eventually—Borges, Joyce, Beckett, Kafka, Pynchon, Eco, García Márquez, etc.

What’s different?
Well, a few years have passed, so there’s bound to be some changes. For one, my former hosts were right—the site code was terribly out of date. Because my knowledge of HTML is stuck in the year 2004, I decided to simply use Word Press. I also made the decision to stop living a “double life,” with my literature sites maintained at a safe distance from my gaming sites. I no longer care if Joycean professors discover my obsession with Native American monsters, or if my Vampire players stumble across my guide to Gravity’s Rainbow. Shipwreck Library now holds all of my projects, for better or for worse.

The “new” Libyrinth is leaner and less chaotic than the old. Back when I started, the Internet was a significantly smaller place. Although each author site contained original writing such as biographies, reviews, and guides; it also served as a clearinghouse for everything related to that particular author—academic papers, book reviews, list-serves, reading groups, and so on. If there was a dissertation somewhere about Borges, I had to include it. Any Web site relating to Borges, no matter how trivial, was dutifully annotated. Someone review a Borges-related book? It needed to be linked! Heck, the old sites even had Amazon.com “Bookstore” pages, where I repeated by hand the data already on Amazon.com, including updating the constantly fluctuating prices. Madness, I tell you!

With the advent of sites like Google and JSTOR, there’s no reason to replicate what a search engine can do; and the advent of personal blogs makes tracking every stray thought related to an author an impossible chore. I hated doing that kind of bookkeeping back in the early 2000s, and now it’s thankfully superfluous.

How extensive are the revisions?
They are very extensive—I have placed nothing online in its original form. For one thing, the Modern Word used a very quirky HTML style, one that tried to replicate the printed page and featured dozens of invisible elements such as hidden tables and transparent GIFs. So all that had to be purged! But more importantly, I’ve (hopefully) grown as a writer, so all my old material has been subjected to rigorous revision. (I confess, I’m a bit embarrassed by some of my baroque excesses, factual errors, and typos!) And finally, I’m making the material current, adding new information and images. So the Garden of Forking Paths is not simply an archive, it’s a genuine relaunch, and will be maintained moving forward.

Borges FAQ

What is the name of the Borges piece that goes: “On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids…” Etc.
A lot of people ask for the source of this passage, which was famously used in the preface to Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, as well as a few other works. It is an excerpt from the essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” which originally appeared in La Nación, 8 February 1942, and has been collected in both Other Inquisitions and Selected Non-Fictions. 

What is the name of the Borges satire that describes a map that eventually becomes the size of the entire Empire, and is then abandoned?
Another popular request, this short fiction is called “On Exactitude in Science.” (Or sometimes “On Rigor in Science.”) It appears in several books, including A Universal History of Infamy, Extraordinary Tales by Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, Dreamtigers, and Collected Fictions.

Did Borges write “Moments,” that poem that starts: “If I could live my life again / I’d try to make more mistakes, / I wouldn’t try to be so perfect…”
This is a Spanish poem called “Instantes.” Despite what numerous commemorative programs and framed needlepoints might say, the poem was not written by Jorge Luis Borges, and is anonymous. (Sorry, Bono!) Unfortunately, it has been incorrectly attributed to Borges for decades. Wikipedia even devotes a page to detailing the misattribution.

Site FAQ

Who runs this site?
My name is Allen B. Ruch, although my online nickname is “Quail.”

Do you speak Spanish?
Sí, hablo un poco de español. Despite the fact I’ve been to Spain five times, I’m still far from fluent, and I generally read Borges in English translation. I am just capable enough with Spanish to muddle my way through his untranslated poems with Google Translate and an English/Spanish dictionary.

Do you accept submissions?
Absolutely! The Garden of Forking Paths is meant to be a community effort, and I gladly accept quality submissions such as reviews, papers, essays, or Borgesian projects. Just drop me a line and we can discuss your idea.

Do you answer all your email?
I try to answer most of the letters that people send me; but it usually takes me a few days. Don’t let this discourage you from dropping me a note; I place a tremendous value on feedback of any sort, especially corrections, suggestions, and shameless flattery. If it is very important and/or time sensitive, such as a request for permission to use my materials for an upcoming project, or an offer to take Tori Amos out on a date next Saturday night, please write IMPORTANT in capital letters in the subject line. I will try to get to it immediately.

Can you offer me help on a school project or a research paper?
I often get asked to provide facts, ideas, topics, and other assistance on a research paper, and occasionally someone asks if I can email them some additional material on Borges. As much as I would like to, I simply do not have the time to offer individualized help on research papers. All the information I have I eventually place online at an appropriate location, and I try to feature various books of criticism and links to other sites that may be of assistance to students. 

Can you send me extra criticism or information about Borges or his work?
No. Quite simply, if you don’t see it on the site, I don’t have it readily available. I put everything I can online; sometimes it may take a while, but it’ll get there. I swear I’m not holding out! I’m not privy to the lost sequel to “El Aleph,” or pictures of Borges having lunch with Italo Calvino.

Boy, you sound grumpy. Do you ever answer any questions?
Sure! As a matter of fact, I enjoy some of the more offbeat questions. I just don’t answer the kind of questions that can be easily be answered by a trip to Wikipedia. (Like when people ask me, “Was Borges ever married?” or something like that.) Again, I am not trying to be rude, I just need to conserve my time.

The links on your pages sure do have long, funny names! Are those quotes from Borges’ works?
Yes. One of the joys of creating this site is finding quotes that set off the different subsections. I try to select quotes with a certain degree of appropriateness or irony; but occasionally I just choose one because I like the sound of it.

Do you do all the graphics yourself?
Yes. I know just enough about Photoshop to be dangerous, and I enjoy tinkering with images and filters, providing I have plenty of coffee and music. Laugh if you will, but I listened to a lot of Astor Piazzolla and three different versions of Evita when I was designing this Borges site!

Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 5 November 2019
Main Borges Page: The Garden of Forking Paths
Contact: quail(at)shipwrecklibrary(dot)com