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Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

It's worth mentioning that Borges is a great author for STEM types. Apart from being a towering critic of literature, he wrote short stories. He treated these as a poetry problem -- compressing the most story into the least number of words. They are spare, lean, but powerful.

The Lottery in Babylon and The Library of Babel, in particular, are combinatorial horror stories. They take simple concepts and slowly unfold them. The sense of escalating dread at the possibilities of infinity and the uncertainties of infinitude reminds me of HP Lovecraft, yet it's all matter of fact without the purple prose.

I also greatly enjoyed Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, where Borges similarly shows the power of mere ideas to reshape the entire world; even ideas which are later shown to be utterly false.

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Also recommended Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" about a writer who rewrites Don Quixote word-for-word, though of course imbuing with a radically new meaning given the different historical context:

"It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

'...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.'

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the 'lay genius' Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

'...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.'

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor —are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time."

Yes! An excellent meditation piece for language designers thinking about syntax and semantics. Similarly Kafka and his Predecessors for working out who should be acclaimed an inventive genius.

In fact, let's just give up and say that every one of his short stories is a delight.

I was reading this exact passage aloud this very afternoon. It's Borges at his funniest! He's a stand out among the greats, surpassing Joyce, Marquez, Saramago and Solzhenitsyn.

There's a pervasive magic to his writing. The prose equals the subject. It reminds me of the best of Dostoevsky or Bulgakov's trial before Pilate.

> It's Borges at his funniest

Exactly. My feeling in the first pages of Fictions was : is it some kind of joke ?

For those who read the House of Leaves, it's good to know that Danielewski took a lot of inspiration from Borges (among other things). If I recall correctly The Garden of Forking Paths is very similar in its purpose and construction.

"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is perhaps my favourite short story. Borges is so powerful that he shines through the translation barrier like it didn't exist.

While he is best known for his short stories, his non-fiction - essays, book and film reviews - are, if anything, even better.

Mathematically inclined Borges nerds will enjoy William Goldbloom Bloch's The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel [0]. It's a pop-math book, but much better written than most, and intriguing enough in uncovering mathematical connections to the Library that I recommend it even to readers already familiar with all the math it discusses.

(Curiously, as far as I remember, Bloch doesn't ask whether there's a comprehensive meta-catalogue of those catalogues in the Library that do not mention themselves.)

0. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0195334574

And the further question of whether those meta-catalogues are accurate, or how many of them are deceptive, or how many of them mention themselves under a million different titles, or ...

I wonder if Borges knew about Russell's Paradox. It seems unlikely that he wouldn't.

I don't know; Bloch does try to note what Borges knew about the math, and he sometimes speculates (for example in the chapter in which he models librarians as Turing machines).

... By the way, having now read the submitted article, let me point out a selection that exemplifies what I love about Borges's writing:

There is a Hindu school of philosophy that says that we are not the actors in our lives, but rather the spectators, and this is illustrated using the metaphor of a dancer. These days, maybe it would be better to say an actor. A spectator sees a dancer or an actor, or, if you prefer, reads a novel, and ends up identifying with one of the characters who is there in front of him. This is what those Hindu thinkers before the fifth century said. And the same thing happens with us. I, for example, was born the same day as Jorge Luis Borges, exactly the same day. I have seen him be ridiculous in some situations, pathetic in others. And, as I have always had him in front of me, I have ended up identifying with him.

In Borges's short stories there are very many selections like this, but it's mostly pseudo-realistic wisdom (or paradox) that's the product of Borges's own mind.

He also throws in some wonderfully obscure historical references: "Last night I killed a man in Brunanburh"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Brunanburh

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