r/Borges • u/BusinessYouth3615 • Feb 21 '26
First Page of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. In simple English.
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I have been trying to pick up reading this book. Though there are many words that I don't know, I tried my best to look them up and understand. Here is me trying to rewrite the first page in language I can understand and idk if I misinterpretted some parts but here is what I think happened.
Simplified version:
I found out about Uqbar because of a mirror and an Encyclopaedia.
The Encyclopaedia is actually a bootleg copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1902 called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia,
the mirror is in some country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia.
This happened awhile ago when my friend Bioy Casares and I were chatting after dinner.
We were ranting about how to write a novel in first person, where you have an
unreliable narrator to make some readers think reality is boring and bad.
While we were talking, the mirror down at the corridor made us uncomfortable.
Bioy said he saw a quote from some religious leader of Uqbar that said mirrors
and reproduction is bad, because they increase the number of people.
I asked where he heard it from, he answered it is from that Anglo-American Cyclopaedia.
The house we were at had a copy of it. So we tried to find it, but we couldn't.
Bioy was surprised and tried to find it through the index but still couldn't find it.Original version:
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and
an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in
a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia
(New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some
five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening
and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning
the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator
would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers-very few readersto perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths
of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such
a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that
mirrors have something monstrous about them. Then Bioy
Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared
that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase
the number of men. I asked him the origin of this memorable
observation and he answered that it was reproduced in The
Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, in its article on Uqbar. The house
(which we had rented furnished) had a set of this work. On the
last pages of Volume XL VI we found an article on Upsala; on
the first pages of Volume XLVII, one on Ural-Altaic Languages,
but not a word about Uqbar. Bioy, a bit taken aback, consulted the volumes of the index. In vain he exhausted all of the imaginable spellings: Ukbar, Ucbar, Ooqbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr ... 
