Jorge Luis Borges

Translated by James E.Irby

[1] No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the Bamboo canoe sinking into the sacred mud, but within a few days no one was unaware that the silent man came from the South and that his home was one of the infinite villages upstream, on the violent mountainside, where the Zend tongue is not contaminated with Greek and where leprosy is infrequent.The truth is that the obscure man kissed the mud, came up the bank without pushing aside (probably without feeling) the brambles which dilacerated his flesh, and dragged himself, nauseous and bloodstained, to the circular enclosure crowned by a stone tiger or horse, which once was the colour of fire and now was that of ashes.This circle was a temple, long ago devoured by fire, which the malarial jungle had profaned and whose god no longer received the homage of men.

[2] The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though it was supernatural.He wanted to dream a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality.This magical project had exhausted the entire content of his soul; if someone had asked him his own name or any trait of his previous life, he would not have been able to answer.The uninhabited and broken temple suited him, for it was a minimum of visible world; the nearness of the peasants also suited him, for they would see that his frugal necessities were supplied.The rice and fruit of their tribute were sufficient sustenance for his body, consecrated to the sole task of sleeping and dreaming.

[3] At first, his dreams were chaotic; somewhat later, they were of a dialectical nature.The stranger dreamt that he was in the centre of a circular amphitheatre which in some way was the burned temple: clouds of silent students filled the gradins; the faces of the last ones hung many centuries away and at a cosmic height, but were entirely clear and precise.The man was lecturing to them on anatomy, cosmography, magic; the countenances listened with eagerness and strove to respond with understanding, as if they divined the importance of the examination which would redeem one of them from his state of vain appearance and interpolate him into the world of reality.The man, both in dreams and awake, considered his phantoms’ replies, was not deceived by impostors, divined a growing intelligence in certain perplexities.He sought a soul which would merit participation in the universe.

[4] After nine or ten nights, he comprehended with some bitterness that he could expect nothing of those students who passively accepted his doctrines, but that he could of those who, at times, would venture a reasonable contradiction.The former, though worthy of love and affection, could not rise to the state of individuals; the latter pre-existed somewhat more.One afternoon (now his afternoons too were tributaries of sleep, now he remained awake only for a couple of hours at dawn) he dismissed the vast illusory college for ever and kept the obstinate one, with sharp features which reproduced those of the dreamer.He was not long disconcerted by his companions’ sudden elimination; his progress, after a few special lessons, astounded his teacher.Nevertheless, catastrophe ensued.The man emerged from sleep one day as if from a viscous desert, looked at the vain light of afternoon, which at first he confused with that of dawn, and understood that he had not really dreamt.All that night and all day, the intolerable lucidity of insomnia weighed upon him.He tried to explore the jungle, to exhaust himself; amidst the hemlocks, he was scarcely able to manage a few snatches of feeble sleep, fleetingly mottled with some rudimentary visions which were useless.He tried to convoke the college and had scarcely uttered a few brief words of exhortation, when it became deformed and was extinguished.In his almost perpetual sleeplessness, his old eyes burned with tears of anger.

[5] He comprehended that the effort to mould the incoherent and vertiginous matter dream are made of was the most arduous task a man could undertake, though he might penetrate all enigmas of the upper and lower orders: much more arduous than weaving a rope of sand or coining the faceless wind.He comprehended that an initial failure was inevitable.He swore he would forget the enormous hallucination which had misled him at first, and he sought another method.Before putting it into effect, he dedicated a month to replenishing the powers his delirium had wasted.He abandoned any premeditation of dreaming and, almost at once, was able to sleep for a considerable part of the day.The few times he dreamt during this period, he did not take notice of the dreams.To take up his task again, he waited until the moon’s disk was perfect.Then, in the afternoon, he purified himself in the waters of the river, worshipped the planetary gods, uttered the lawful syllables of a powerful name and slept.Almost immediately, he dreamt of a beating heart.

[6] He dreamt it as active, warm, secret, the size of closed fist, of garnet colour in the penumbra of a human body as yet without face or sex; with minute love he dreamt it, for fourteen lucid nights.Each night he perceived it with greater clarity.He did not touch it, perhaps correcting it with his eyes.He perceived it, live it, from many distances and many angles.On the fourteenth night he touched the pulmonary artery with his finger, and then the whole heart, inside and out.The examination satisfied him.Deliberately, he did not dream for a night; then he took the heart again, invoked the name of the planet and set about to envision another of the principal organs.Within a year he reached the skeleton, the eyelids.The innumerable hair was perhaps the most difficult task.He dreamt a complete man, a youth, but this youth could not rise nor did he speak nor could he open his eyes.Night after night, the man dreamt him as asleep.

[7] In the Gnostic cosmogonies, the demiurgi knead and mould a red Adam who cannot stand alone; as unskilful and crude and elementary as this Adam of dust was the Adam of dreams fabricated by the magician’s night of effort.One afternoon, the man almost destroyed his work, but then repented.(It would have been better for him had he destroyed it.) Once he had completed his supplications to the numina of the earth and the river, he threw himself down at the feet of the effigy which was perhaps a tiger and perhaps a horse, and implored its unknown succour.That twilight, he dreamt of the statue.He dreamt of it as a living, tremulous thing: it was not an atrocious mongrel of tiger and horse, but both these vehement creatures at once and also a bull, a rose, a tempest.This multiple god revealed to him that its earthly name was Fire, that in the circular temple (and in others of its kind) people had rendered it sacrifices and cult and that it would magically give life to the sleeping phantom, in such a way that all creatures except Fire itself and the dreamer would believe him to be a man of fresh and blood.The man was ordered by the divinity to instruct his creature in its rites, and send him to be other broken temple whose pyramids survived downstream, so that in this deserted edifice a voice might give glory to the god.In the dreamer’s dream, the dreamed one awoke.

[8] The magician carried out these orders.He devoted a period of time (which finally comprised two years) to revealing the arcana of the universe and of the fire cult to his dream child.Inwardly, it pained him to be separated from the boy.Under the pretext of pedagogical necessity, each day he prolonged the hours he dedicated to his dreams.He also redid the right shoulder, which was perhaps deficient.At times, he was troubled by the impression that all this had happened before...In general, his days were happy; when he closed his eyes, he would think: Now I shall be with my son.Or, less often: The child I have engendered awaits me and will not exist if I do not go to him.

[9] Gradually, he accustomed the boy to reality.Once he ordered him to place a banner on a distant peak.The following day, the banner flickered from the mountain top.He tried other analogous experiments, each more daring than the last.He understood with certain bitterness that his son was ready — and perhaps impatient — to be born.That night he kissed him for the first time and sent him to the other temple whose debris showed white downstream, through many leagues of inextricable jungle and swamp.But first (so that he would never know he was a phantom, so that he would be thought a man like others) he instilled into him a complete oblivion of his years of apprenticeship.

[10] The man’s victory and peace were dimmed by weariness.At dawn and at twilight, he would prostrate himself before the stone figure, imagining perhaps that his unreal child was practicing the same rites, in other circular ruins, downstream; at night, he would not dream, or would dream only as all men do.He perceived the sounds and forms of the universe with a certain colourlessness: his absent son was being nurtured with these diminutions of his soul.His life’s purpose was complete; the man persisted in a kind of ecstasy.After a time, which some narrators of his story prefer to compute in years and other in lustra, he was awakened one midnight by two boatmen; he could not see their faces, but they told him of a magic man in a temple of the North who could walk upon fire and not be burned.The magician suddenly remembered the words of the god.He recalled that, of all the creatures of the world, fire was the only one that knew his son was a phantom.This recollection, at first soothing, finally tormented him.He feared his son might meditate on his abnormal privilege and discover in some way that his condition was that of a mere image.Not to be a man, to be the projection of another man’s dream, what a feeling of humiliation, of vertigo! (they have permitted to exist) in mere confusion or pleasure; it was natural that the magician should fear for the future of that son, created in thought, limb by limb and feature by feature, in a thousand and one secret nights.

[11] The end of his meditations was sudden, though it was foretold in certain signs.First (after a long drought) a faraway cloud on a hill, light and rapid as a bird; then, towards the south, the sky which had the rose colour of the leopard’s mouth; then the smoke which corroded the metallic nights; finally, the panicky flight of the animals.For what was happening had happened many centuries ago.The ruins of the fire god’s sanctuary were destroyed by fire.In a birdless dawn the magician saw the concentric blaze close round the walls.For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the river, but then he knew that death was coming to crown his old age and absolve him of his labours.He walked into the shreds of flame.But they did not bite into his flesh, they caressed him and engulfed him without heat or combustion.With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.

[1956]

Notes

1.Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986): He was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires.His work embraces the “character of unreality in all literature”.His most famous books, Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949), are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, animals, fictional writers, philosophy, religion and God.His works have contributed to philosophical literature and also to the fantastic genre, a genre that reacted against the realism / naturalism of the 19th century.Scholars have also suggested that Borges’s progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination.His international fame was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by the “Latin American Boom” and the success of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Writer and essayist J.M.Coetzee said of him: “He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.”

2.Zend: It refers to late middle Persian language commentaries on the individual books of the Avesta (波斯古教) within Zoroastrianism.They date from the 3rd to 10th centuries and were not intended for use as theological texts by themselves but for religious instruction of the non-Avestan-speaking public.

3.Gnosticism（相信神秘直觉的早期基督教派，诺斯替教派）: It is a modern scholarly term for a set of religious beliefs and spiritual practices found among some early Christian and non-Christian groups called “Gnostic” (“learned”) by Irenaeus and other early Christian leaders.

After You Read

Knowledge Focus

1.Discuss the following questions with your partner.

1) Where does the magician come from? What kind of function does his mysterious identity serve in conveying the theme of the story?

2) What kind of impression does the description of the settings of the “circular ruins”give to you?

3) Try to describe the setting of the story in simple language without distorting the atmosphere.

4) Try to describe the image of the magician in simple language without distorting the atmosphere.

5) What is the magician’s task? What are the significances of the task?

6) Would you summarize the process of the task?

7) What do the magician and his task symbolize?

8) What do the interactions between the magician and the villagers symbolize?

9) What are the symbolic meanings of the fire in the stories?

10) Does the ending of the story impress you? What impresses you most?

2.Learn literary devices with your partner.

Metanarrative is an abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge.In simple words, a metanarrative is a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other “little stories” within conceptual models that make the stories into a whole.

To some extent, The Circular Ruins is not only a story about story, but, ascending to the highest level of the medication related to stories, a story about fictional narrative as a whole.Discuss with your partner about the story with your understanding about metanarrative.

3.Discuss the following topic with your partner.

In the ending of the story, the magician finally realized that he too was a fictional figure.How does it relate to modern people’s living condition and experience, both exteriorly and interiorly?

Language Focus

1.Explain the following expressions and try to make up sentences based on them.

2.Study the following verbs and use a proper one to replace the underlined part in each sentence.

1) The leader gathered all the villagers to discuss the matter of taking in the group of strangers.

2) When the survivor got onto the shore from the rescuing ship, there were tears in his eyes.

3) The teacher’s ideas about reformation shot through the youngsters.

4) It is shameless to tear apart the contract you have signed without any passable explanation.

5) Calling the stranger husband by mistake embarrassed her a lot.

6) You shouldn’t disrespect the name of God no matter you believe in it or not.

7) The violent personalities of the criminal were formed bit by bit from his childhood.

8) Only the wedding ceremony in a church can be made holy.

9) The mother was telling her child a fairytale running her fingers softly through his hairs.

10) The design of this popular video game has used up all my imagination and energy.

3.Identify the errors and correct them.

4.Read the following sentences and summarize the grammatical function of the italicized parts.

1) Although he escaped the officers by a fluke, he could be severely punished.

2) As a kind-hearted man, he can never betray his friends for his own interests.

3) We can see from the vagrant’s eyes that he must have suffered something we can’t imagine.

4) He needn’t have bought such expensive shoes for his girlfriend, as she has already accepted his apology.

5) I hate the fact that I have to stay up late to work.

6) The shy boy dares not speak to the girl he has a crush on.

7) It should be noted that not all the qualified contestants can get the opportunity.

8) May your family always be healthy!

9) Language learners must stick to hard practice in order to lay a solid foundation of their language skills.

10) It is 10 am, you shouldn’t still be sleeping.

5.Fill in each blank with a modal and the correct form of the given word.

1) I ________ (ask) you, because I must be wrong.

2) There ________ (be) a beautiful little house of European style on the corner of the street.

3) According to his permission, you ________ (watch) TV all night if you like.

4) Peter ________ (come) with us tonight, but he isn’t very sure yet.

5) Even if he has time, he ________ (go) shopping in town on Sunday.

6) He ________ (not finish) his essay by this time.

7) There ________ (be) any difficulty about passing the road test since you have practiced a lot in the driving school.

8) You can’t imagine that a well-behaved gentleman ________ (be) so rude to a lady.

9) Mr.Bush is on time for everything.How ________ (it be) that he was late for the opening ceremony?

10) The only thing that really matters to the children is how soon they ________(return) to their school.

Comprehensive Work

1.Group work: Recreation.

Try to use the narrative structure of the story in Text A to recreate a short story about 800 ～ 1000 words.The plot can be developed into any directions you like within the structure.For your references, some possible settings of the story can be:

1) A painter painted into a painting

2) A composer composed into a narrative symphony

3) A photographer taken into a photo

4) ...

Share the story with you classmates.

2.Pair work: Detail Description.

Postmodernism: Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories are often considered as predicting postmodernism and conceiving the ideal of the ultimate parody.In Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Brian McHale details the shift from modernism to postmodernism, arguing that the former is characterized by an epistemological dominant, and that postmodern works have developed out of modernism and are primarily concerned with questions of ontology.

Work with the partner to answer the following questions:

1) What is your understanding about the concept of post-modernism?

2) What are the postmodernist temperaments of Borges’s short stories?

3.Comparison.

Compare The Circular Ruins by Borges with The Fifty-string Lyre (《锦瑟》) by contemporary Chinese author Ge Fei (格非) to explore the similarities and different cultural implications in their stories.

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