Borges makes the act of reading part of the puzzle. A speaking self can separate from an author’s name; an invented world can begin to govern the account that describes it. Start with one small device, follow its consequences, and keep track of who claims to know what.
A name and a speaking self come apart
The other one, Borges, is to whom things happen.
“Borges and I” begins by assigning events to another figure who bears the author’s name. The speaker distinguishes private experience from the public writer, even while describing their dependence on one another.
Keep three positions visible: the historical author, the speaker saying “I,” and the “Borges” that speaker describes. The piece puts their boundaries under pressure.
I don’t know which of the two writes this page.
The ending unsettles the apparent authority of the voice that has drawn the distinction. Return to the first sentence and ask who can now be understood to have said it. This is a reading problem created by the piece’s arrangement, rather than a simple key to the author’s private life.
The two excerpts follow Ilan Stavans’s translation, published by FSG in 2011. The publisher provides the complete short piece for comparison.
Follow a premise into the rules it changes
In his “Autobiographical Notes”, Borges describes “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” as an imagined world replacing the present one. Use that premise as a question to take into the story: how does a reported invention acquire authority?
As you read, distinguish the narrator’s report, a document quoted or described within it, and an event that appears to confirm the document. Record what makes each level convincing. A precise title, a catalogue entry or a scholarly tone can invite confidence before its basis has been established.
The exercise follows a premise through consequences while preserving the difference between an assertion and its support. Apply the same discipline to a complete story, allowing its later details to change your account of the earlier ones.
Give skepticism a specific task
His chief gift to me was to make me read skeptically.
Borges is recalling Macedonio Fernández’s influence on him. Treat the remark as a prompt for examining how a text secures your confidence.
- Choose one apparently authoritative statement and name the voice making it.
- Identify the evidence offered inside the work. Separate a source’s existence from the truth of what it claims.
- Read to the next change in that evidence. Record whether the claim strengthens, narrows or becomes unstable.
- Return to your first note and revise it. State what changed your mind.
You can enjoy a fiction’s convincing detail while examining how that conviction is produced. Keep external checking and internal interpretation distinct: one investigates a real publication or historical reference; the other asks how a device functions in this particular work.
Choose a text whose wording you can identify
Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley, gathers the fiction in one English volume; its contents include Fictions (1944) and The Aleph (1949). The wording will differ from the Stavans selection above.
Labyrinths is an English-language selection first published by New Directions in 1962. Check the translator credited to the particular piece you cite. A collection title alone does not identify every translation within it.
For your notes, retain author, story or essay title, translator, collection and page. When two versions differ, compare one sentence at a time and describe the effect of each choice before making a claim about the original.
Continue with reader participation and the limits of inference or Cather on what a story leaves the reader to supply.
Updated October 8, 2026
About these selections
Source notes identify the wording and edition used. Interpretations and exercises are Yenra’s. Follow the linked text when citing or comparing a passage.