Nian Liu

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

I didn’t really enjoy reading this story because it seemed as if I was reading about something I have no idea about. It talked about an investigation in the different volumes of encyclopedias that took these adventurers months to discover and inside they reveal a passage in the encyclopedia about a hidden world called Tlon. There was a difference in language in the world of Tlon where nouns do not exists but instead verbs are replaces the noun. For instance the sentence, “The moon rose above the river, ”would be said in Tlon, “holor u fang ataxias mlo” which translates in English as, “Upward, behind the on streaming it mooned.” After reading this I didn’t really enjoy the parallels of this world because it made me feel uncomfortable trying to understand how the world in Tlon worked since it greatly differed from our world. This story reminds me of one the projects I had to do this semester and that was to create a civilization. Borges created this civilization out of straight imagination, and to consolidate the astrology, calendars, geography, culture, and literature of a civilization takes immense skill and I think Borges wrote this story because he wanted to challenge himself to see if he is up to the task and he did it.