- published: 01 Feb 2015
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"The Library of Babel" (Spanish: La biblioteca de Babel) is a short story by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format.
The story was originally published in Spanish in Borges's 1941 collection of stories El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths). That entire book was, in turn, included within his much-reprinted Ficciones (1944). Two English-language translations appeared approximately simultaneously in 1962, one by James E. Irby in a diverse collection of Borges's works titled Labyrinths and the other by Anthony Kerrigan as part of a collaborative translation of the entirety of Ficciones.
Borges's narrator describes how his universe consists of an enormous expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters, spaces and punctuation marks). Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely, for many of the texts some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of a vast number of different contents.
You can have an adventure in a far away land
You can learn about a tuba in a marching band
You can travel to the stars, or the deep blue sea
When you learn to borrow books from the library
But please don't be loud shh, so that everyone here can read
You will be proud when you take a book home from the library
You can have an adventure in a far away land
You can learn about a tuba in a marching band
You can travel to the stars, or the deep blue sea
When you learn to borrow books from the library
But please don't be loud shh, so that everyone here can read
You will be proud when you take a book home from the library
You can have an adventure in a far away land
You can learn about a tuba in a marching band
You can travel to the stars, or the deep blue sea
When you learn to borrow books from the library