Talk:Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius/Archive 2

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Contents 1 A request 2 Uqbar a real place? 3 Tsai Khaldun 4 The Gernsback Continuum 5 Precisely who is sticking out his tongue? 6 New lead section? 7 False document? 8 Misunderstanding Berkeley 9 Schopenhauer

A request

I'd like to feature this article on the main page, but the lead section needs to be rewritten. It utterly fails to convey what the novel is about (remember - a general description is not a spoiler), or why it is important. →Raul654 22:19, Jan 14, 2005 (UTC)

It's not a novel, it's a short story. Any explanation is a bit of a spoiler, since the twists begin barely a page into this rather short story, but I've taken a shot at it. Tell me what you think. -- Jmabel | Talk 00:00, Jan 15, 2005 (UTC)

Uqbar a real place?

The following was recently anonymously added to the article. Because it is anonymous, with a dubious citation, and because this topic is so subject to hoaxes, I do not feel it can stay there without better citation. If it's true, it's fascinating, and with clear citation something about this would be very welcome. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:54, Jan 18, 2005 (UTC)

In the story, Borges mentions a few real geographical places near Uqbar, before going on about the unreal ones. In the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam, published a few years ago, s.v. Al-Uqbari (spelt "al-ukbari" in their system), is a reference to the home of the Muslim religious scholar al-Uqbari, namely, according to the encyclopedia, Uqbara ('q.v.'), located in northern Mesopotamia somewhere. However, despite the "q.v." reference to it, this place is not actually listed in the encyclopedia! (Moreover, it is a little odd that the name of the place should have a final -a. This definitely calls for further research into Arabic literary encyclopedias.) There is, however, a reference to another completely historical place, called, exactly, Uqbar, in the mountains of North Africa. It does not seem to have anything to do with Uqbara, though the name Tlön sounds vaguely like a Berber word. Borges undoubtedly had access to the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam (1913-1936) which probably should be checked. (The above information is cited from memory. It is recent memory--a few days ago--but it should be checked for precision.)

I tried to do it, but it got deleted by you or someone else. Sorry. I'll write an academic article on it or something.--Chris B

I think this may be correct; a place called `Uqbara on the Tigris is mentioned in this PDF paper. - Mustafaa 04:20, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

So does anyone have page 249 handy? (The Leiden edition, of course- who knows how the others may vary). Mark¹ 05:20, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Chris emailed me the following much more thorough set of remarks.

Although it has been believed that Uqbar is purely an imaginary invention of Borges, it is a real place--actually, two real places. He has deliberately merged two distinct historical places and their real histories and geography into a single mythical one. In the story, Borges mentions three real geographical places (Khorasan, Armenia, Erzerum) in what are now eastern Turkey (Erzerum and Armenia) and northern Iran (Khorasan). In the story, the rivers of Uqbar rise in the mountains (he doesn't say so, but they seem to be in 'the north'); these real mountainous regions are where not one but two Zâb Rivers rise, the Great Zâb and the Lesser Zâb; they run a couple of hundred miles south into the Tigris. On the left bank of the Tigris between Samarra and Baghdad was the city of ‘Ukbarâ, from which came the great BLIND Islamic grammarian, philologist, and religious scholar Al-‘Ukbarî (ca. 1143-1219), who is the author of some 60 works, many of them recently reprinted. Although the Encyclopaedia of Islam editors neglected to include an article on ‘Ukbarâ (which they list with a ‘q.v.’), a quick examination of some standard Arabic geographical references found that most of them include it. The earliest, and by far the most fascinating for anyone (it must have been especially so for Borges) is the famous early geography of Ibn Khordâdhbeh, which the translator gives the name, several times, spelled ‘Okbarâ, and locates it between Samarra and Baghdad on the Tigris. Source: The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, Vol. VI ‘Mahk-Mid’ (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991), pp. 790b-791a on Al-‘Ukbarî; Ibn Khordâdhbeh, edited and translated into French by M.M. de Goeje (Leiden: E.J. Brill 1889, in their series Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum) on the place ‘Ukbarâ.

2. ‘Uqbâr. The Fatimid ruler Ismâ‘îl al-Mansûr (d. 953), who pursued his Kharijite (or Ibâdhi) enemy into “the massif of ‘Uk.bâr [dot under the k, = q in normal (non-Brill) Arabic transcription systems] the Djabal Ma‘âdid” (popularly spelled ‘Maadid’), which is in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria, in the area where the following local dynasty had its citadel, the present ruin of Qal‘a Bani Hammad, a famous archaeological site that was excavated by the French early in the 20th century. The account of Ismâ‘îl al-Mansûr mentions his continued operations in the area of ‘Uqbâr until he “pacified the Zâb,” the “fastnesses” (mountains) of which are mentioned several times in the account. Main source: The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, Vol. X ‘T-U’ (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000), page 435a. Borges may have found the references in any number of places, one of the most likely being accounts of the excavations, of the Kharijites, and of the Ibadhis (said to be their descendants, but who claim they are falsely accused), who live in what is today called the M’zab, in the Pentapolis (five cities), the minarets of which look like obelisks with flattened tops. (The M’zab is evidently a valley with wadis [dry river courses] and oases running south from the mountains, but the geographical details should be checked by somebody. If so, it would be yet another example of the mirroring Borges refers to in the story —two real places, with the same geographical layout and the same [well, close] names, a continent apart —and shows again Borges’'s brilliant ability to transform incredibly arcane genuine historical and geographical details into a new fictional reality.) Tlön sounds like a Berber word, and might even be one (somebody should check it). The famous historical city of Tlemcen is in Algeria, and there are probably no other languages anywhere in the Middle East (and few in the world) that allow the unusual consonant cluster tl- at the beginning of a word (though Maghrebian Arabic might too), and there are also several well-known places in the area that begin with the equally rare cluster ml-. The first edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam (1913-1936) does not seem to have any references to any of these places, people, etc., so Borges got his arcane information from arcane —but mostly real —sources. One of his other references to a place in the area is Tsai Khaldun. Whatever the Tsai is from is unclear to me, but the Khaldun is undoubtedly a tribute to the great, very famous historian Ibn Khaldûn, who lived in Andalusia for awhile; his history focuses on North Africa and was probably a major source for Borges.

Chris: have you seen Brill 1889 yourself? If not, what exactly have you seen? The reason I'm asking is that this would be such a possible topic for a hoax: the key is going to be to pin down a reference that can't be a post-Borges forgery.

Is there someone who is a more established editor who has access to Brill 1889? If this is real, then of course the bulk of this belongs in the article, but with all due respect, I am extremely suspicious on this, because I have seen so many Uqbar-related forgeries, including even by respectable academics. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:17, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I checked Brill 1889 (Ibn Khordadhbeh) in the library here, myself. I also have a copy (the complete set of BGA) back home. I have used it before, and I have translated parts of it from Arabic and cited them in my research publications (for example, my 1984 article 'The Plan of the City of Peace', on Central Asian Iranian influences on the design of the 'round city' at Baghdad in the eighth century, published in Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, if you want to know; long before I ever read the Borges story, or I would've paid more attention back then). It is a very famous, very important work, and the edition (a serious critical edition, with apparatus criticus) is rock-solid (as was its great editor and translator, De Goeje), and was and is very widely cited in Islamic studies. There is no possibility of a hoax or forgery in this case, or in the case of Slane's translation of Ibn Khaldun. If there is anyone more famous than DeGoeje among early Arabists, it is probably Slane, whose dictionary of Koranic Arabic is still the 'Bible' for Islamicists. Borges may be a great writer, but no, he did not influence these works or their editors or translators, or their publishers (Brill, which celebrated its 300th aniversary a couple of decades ago? I don't think so...), who would get positively snotty if you ever suggested such a thing. (I knew the former Islamic studies editor at Brill, who recently retired after several decades of work and of service to the field of Islamic studies.) I should also mention that no one would be likely to notice, or to put the above two things together; certainly there is no link between them in the E.I. I found them only because of the many excellent indices that Brill has put out for the E.I. (also available on CD ROM for a tidy sum and more easily searchable; I only wish I could afford it). Sorry I posted a vague note first and got your suspicions up. What I would really like to see is Slane's translation of Ibn Khaldun; I wonder what other good stuff is in there that Borges might have borrowed. And a good Berber dictionary would be great too. The E.I. article cites Khatib al-Baghdadi's history of Baghdad too (a fascinating work), and they have it in the libarary at my university here, but it's a different edition and has No Index (I checked); no way I'm going to waste time trying to find anything in an Arabic text by scanning it! (Btw, I looked at the story again and noticed that Borges does not explicitly say the mountains are in the North, though it is pretty clear that they should be based on the rest of his description of Uqbar, so I fixed my text above.) Anyway, I think this little bit of mirrored beauty is just another reflection of Borges's genius. -- Chris B (I don't know how to put my user name [Cibeckwith] here; I thought the system did it by itself, but it doesn't look like it.)

Folks, judging by the above, I will presume that our initially anonymous contributor is Christopher Beckwith of Indiana University, that he knows a lot more about this than I do, that he is almost certainly right, and that, while I suppose this qualifies as original research and he should definitely publish this appropriately in an academic journal, the citations are all presumably fine and we'd be really silly not to put it in the article. Sorry for doubting you, Chris; I'm sure you understand why with the initial vague citations and an anonymous contributor on a much-hoaxed topic I was not ready to believe this. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:30, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

I have created a separate article on Uqbar, and put most of this material there; I've then added a new section — Real and fictional places— to the present (already rather long) article, summarized and referenced Uqbar there, and also added some other content including the above remark about the name Tlön. I've edited everything for Wikipedia style (although someone else will need to sort out any issues of Wikipedia-standard transliteration of Arabic).

Here's what I didn't get in there; some of this is strictly talk-page stuff, suggestive of possible future work but not encyclopedic in themselves; some of this may belong in some other article and, who knows, some of it may belong here but I just didn't see how to integrate it smoothly:

• The M’zab is evidently a valley with wadis [dry river courses] and oases running south from the mountains, but the geographical details should be checked by somebody. If so, it would be yet another example of the mirroring Borges refers to in the story —two real places, with the same geographical layout and the same [well, close] names, a continent apart —and shows again Borges’'s brilliant ability to transform incredibly arcane genuine historical and geographical details into a new fictional reality.
• Somebody should check whether Tlön actually is a Berber word
• There are probably no other languages anywhere in the Middle East (and few in the world) that allow the unusual consonant cluster tl- at the beginning of a word (though Maghrebian Arabic might too).
• Whatever the Tsai (in Tsai Khaldun) is from is unclear...
• Also, User:Cibeckwith followed my posting of his email with some interesting remarks (above), but again, I think these are strictly talk page stuff.

Please, everyone (Chris especially), check my work, make sure that this has been handled appropriately, I hope this has been done to everyone's satisfaction. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:41, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

Check this out: the aforementioned town of Ukbara was indeed a birthplace of heresiarchs, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1901-1906! ([1] supplies more details.) I think this has to be the source. - Mustafaa 00:07, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Is it unreasonable to note that one of these two heresiarchs, Mishawayh al-Ukbari, followed the principle that "all coins are counterfeit, so one might as well use the one at hand"? - Mustafaa 01:52, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Tsai Khaldun

In the body of the article, you say that Tsai Khaldun is an obvious homage to ibn Khaldun, the historian, and maybe it is.

However, "tsai" is a Chinese (Cantonese?) word meaning "leafy green vegetables" and "khaldun" is Mongolian for "mountain". Could it mean "cabbage mountain"?

The Gernsback Continuum

I see no relevance in the recent addition of a mention of The Gernsback Continuum to the article. Unless someone can make a case for why it belongs here, I intend to delete it. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:29, Jan 23, 2005 (UTC)

Precisely who is sticking out his tongue?

Recent addition to the article: "Andrew Hurley, one of Borges's translators, notes that a Spanish speaker would pronounce the last two words of this sentence in roughly the same way as an English reader would 'a ha ha ha mleurgh' — the sound of the author laughing and sticking his tongue out at the reader." While this sounds plausible enough, there is no citation, and it is MKVF's first contribution to the Wikipedia. Does someone have a citation? If not, I am going to delete this from the article as unverifiable. I'd be more than glad to have it there with a citation. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:45, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)

Close but not quite a cigar is this: [2]. Quote:

Unassuming, mute, the words on the page do not, despite some mad author's fevered dream after a night of wine and oysters, mix and mingle when the book is closed, do not rearrange themselves into unreadable and untranslatable lines such as O time thy pyramids or axaxaxas mlö (which can only be pronounced as the author's cruel, mocking laughter) that the translator must translate in the morning. —Andrew Hurley, The Zahir and I

(Emphasis mine.) Note that this particular quote only has an off-hand mention, is in a specially-prepared story and does not mention any sort of taste organ (three reasons why it's not very suitable for the article), but this does make it reasonable that Hurley made a more extensive quote elsewhere — presumably not online. JRM 14:22, 2005 Jan 26 (UTC)

Given that Hurley is a significant translator of Borges, I think this is citable, and will rewrite accordingly. If anyone has a better citation, they can improve it. I suspect, though, that the brand-new contributor paraphrased without saying so. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:32, Jan 26, 2005 (UTC)

New lead section?

Two reasons: A) The spoiler warning doesn't look nice (and I think lead sections shouldn't feature spoilers to begin with) & B) There is some needless repetition in the current version.

A possible alternative:

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a short story by the 20th century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story was first published (in Spanish) in the Argentine journal Sur, May 1940. The "postscript" dated 1947 is intended to be anachronistic, set seven years in the future. The first English-language translation of the story was published in 1961.

In the story, an encyclopedia article about a mysterious country called Uqbar is the first indication of Orbis Tertius, a massive conspiracy of intellectuals to imagine (and thereby create) a world: Tlön. Relatively long for Borges (approximately 5600 words), the story is a work of speculative fiction with certain characteristics of magical realism. One of the major themes of "Tlön, Uqbar..." is that ideas ultimately manifest themselves in the physical world and the story is generally viewed as a parabolic discussion of Berkeleian idealism — and to some degree as a protest against totalitarianism.

"Tlön, Uqbar..." has the structure of a detective fiction set in a world going mad. Although the story is quite short, it makes allusions to many leading intellectual figures both in Argentina and in the world at large, and takes up a number of themes more typical of a novel of ideas. Most of the ideas engaged are in the areas of language, epistemology, and literary criticism.

If no-one objects, I'll change the lead section in a few days. Kea 18:50, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I've rejuggled the spoiler material. What you are suggesting here sounds fine to me, go for it. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:02, Apr 15, 2005 (UTC)

False document?

Why is false document listed in the "see also" section? The work is certainly not an example of a false document: a postscript set seven years in the future at the time of its publication would have prevented anyone for mistaking it for real. It seems no more a false document than any other fictional story with a first person narrator. If someone can justify why this should be linked to, let's try to get it into the article, because the relevance is not self-explanatory. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:27, August 16, 2005 (UTC)

I'd guess (I didn't add it) that it was a reference to the encyclopedia. Mark¹ 05:57, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

The fact that Borges narrates the story as a "fictive version of himself" is what led me to refer to the "false document" article. I didn't necessarily mean that the story is an example of a false document, so much as it uses the technique to a certain extent. The more fantastical elements of the story might certainly lead a reader to disbelief, but throughout it, Borges is only repeating what he has supposedly read in the encyclopedia and elsewhere. He purports none of what he's read to be true, apart from the incident of the strangely heavy cone, which he claims to have witnessed firsthand. I can imagine, if the story were presented under the right circumstances, that an unwary reader would find themselves tricked into thinking that erroneous copies of Volume XLVI of the Anglo American Encyclopedia really did exist somewhere. I could be way off base here, and I'm open to having my edit reverted, but I feel that it's still valid to reference "false documents"--it's certainly not completely irrelevant, and definitely directly related to "Nihilartikels." Mumblingmynah 12:06, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Certainly not when it was published, with a postscript dated 7 years in the future. And, you know, the funniest part of this is that many critics have presumed, incorrectly, that the Anglo American Encyclopedia is, itself a fiction! Anyway, I'm see if I can work both of these terms into the article itself, rather than dangling of the end in a "see also" section. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:13, August 17, 2005 (UTC)

Misunderstanding Berkeley

Berkeley did not "deny the reality of the world." He merely asserted that an object, as it appears, loses its appearance when it is no longer appearing to an observer. 152.163.100.11 17:01, 14 September 2005 (UTC)Bruce Partington

Would "deny the persistent reality of the world" be better? Factitious 04:43, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

It is not a question of how long reality lasts, whether for a short or long time. The problem refers to the line in the article in which the people of Tlön are said to "hold an extreme form of Berkeleian idealism, denying the reality of the world." Berkeley did not deny the reality of the world. He claimed that what we call "reality" is simply the experience of distinct, orderly ideas or mental pictures in the mind. The ideas of real things derive from the basic data of sensations, such as sight, feeling, etc.. This is in contrast to ideas of imaginary things, such as dreams or hallucinations, in which the images are not as distinct and orderly. According to Berkeley, we can directly know only our sensations and mental ideas. We cannot know, without the mediation of our mind, anything external to our mind. Borges seemed to assume that Berkeley said that there is no external reality. Berkeley only claimed that we can't directly know any external reality. We can only immediately know sensations and mental ideational images. This is only a matter of what we can know. His book is titled The Principles of Human Knowledge.

205.188.116.12 13:48, 15 September 2005 (UTC)Bruce Partington

Remember, this is not an article about Berkeley, it is an article about a story by Borges. Most important is to describe how Borges interpreted Berkeley, not whether Borges understood him correctly. Subordinate to that, we could discuss (in moderation) whether Borges may have misinterpreted Berkeley, but it shouldn't take over the article, and it should have citation besides just citing Berkeley: it's pretty presumptuous to say "I've read this myself, and I know I understand it correctly and Borges got it wrong."

Here is the relevant passage from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in the Irby translation, probably not the best, but I have it handy.

Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlön. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language - religion, letters, metaphysics - all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial. There are no nouns in Tlön's conjectural Ursprache, from which the "present" languages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word "moon,", but there is a verb which in English would be "to moon" or "to moonate." "The moon rose above the river" is hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo, or literally: "upward behind the onstreaming it mooned."

As you can easily see, Borges is attributing to Berkeley an idealism without the qualification you want to argue belongs in the picture. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:40, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

My comments were about the Tlön article. In the section "Summary of the Story," seventh paragraph, it states that idealists "deny the reality of the world." Also, in the "Philosophical Themes" section, third paragraph, it is claimed that the Tlönian view "denies the existence of any underlying reality." Now, Borges associates idealism with Berkeley. The idealists of Tlön can't understand the anecdote of the nine copper coins. That is, they don't comprehend how the lost coins continued to exist as real objects until they were found. However, Berkeley's idealism pertained only to knowledge of objects or things as being ideas or images in someone's mind. When the coins were lost, they were no longer perceived by anyone. This has nothing to do with the coins as something other than mental representations. What the coins were and their state or condition other than as ideas in someone's mind would be nothing to a Berkeleian idealist. It is this sense that I contend that both Borges and the Wikipedian article's author have misunderstood Berkeley.

152.163.100.11 15:19, 16 September 2005 (UTC)Bruce Partington

It is clear that in the story itself (which I hope you have read; in any event, see the passage I quoted above) Borges ties the Tlönian view to Berkeley. The passage in the article says that they "hold an extreme form of Berkeleian idealism, denying the reality of the world" (emphasis mine, not in article). If you feel this could be better worded, feel free to suggest something. The article is not saying that Berkeley denied the reality of the world (although it does say—accurately, I believe—that Immanuel Kant interpreted Berkeley that way, so apparently educated people may disagree on that matter). In any event, the article must make clear that Borges explicitly discusses Berkeleian idealism (not, say, Platonic idealism), and that it is the ground he gives for the Tlönians philosophy, which is, after all, his own fictional construct. If you think this calls for more than just the word "extreme", or perhaps an allusion to "Berkeleian idealism as understood by Kant" or some such, I'm open to possibilities, as long as they don't falsify the matter. Again, the article is about Borges's story, not about your or my philosophical views or even our understandings of Berkeley. -- Jmabel | Talk 18:52, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

Schopenhauer

Borges mentions Schopenhauer many times in his fables, especially in A New Refutation of Time. However, in Tlön, etc., his reference to that philosopher seems to have been irresponsibly fabricated. He wrote that Schopenhauer "...formulates a very similar doctrine in the first volume of Parerga and Paralipomena." This doctrine of "pantheistic idealism" is that there is only one subject and that this one subject is every being in the universe. I have searched this volume and can find no such doctrine. On the contrary, Schopenhauer asserted that each individual observing animal is a unique subject, having its own point of view of the objects that it experiences. 152.163.100.11 12:22, 16 September 2005 (UTC)Toby Shandy

• I've integrated your remark into the article. I've never read the Parerga, so this one got by me. Yet another little twist between fact and fiction in the article. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:02, 17 September 2005 (UTC)