Jorge Luis Borges, 1942
You are the visitor, in Funes's yard on the edge of the town of Fray Bentos, one night after dinner. Thrown from a horse, crippled, he forgets nothing. From the dark back room he will talk until dawn; you will not hear him, but you will see as he sees. The story asks whether a man who keeps everything can think. Before he begins, ask the yard what things are.
Drag to look around. Click a thing to ask what it is.
Fray Bentos, 1887. The narrator, back in the town for the summer, learns that Ireneo Funes, the boy who could tell the time without a watch, has been thrown by a half-broken horse and left crippled. He lies on a cot in the back room of his mother's house, his eyes on the fig tree at the back of the yard or on a spiderweb, and forgets nothing.
The errand: the narrator has brought Latin books with him, and Funes borrows a dictionary, the Gradus ad Parnassum, and a volume of Pliny, and teaches himself the language from them. A telegram calls the narrator home to Buenos Aires; the Saturno sails in the morning, and after dinner he walks to the house to collect the books.
Funes talks from the dark until dawn. Toward dawn he says that his memory is like a rubbish heap.
Ireneo Funes died in 1889, of congestion of the lungs.
Passages are quoted from the Spanish original and translated for this page.
An interpretation of Borges's story, not the text. The yard remembers on your behalf, and the arithmetic of remembering is the point: what it costs to keep everything, and what a word is for.
Drag to look around. Click a thing to ask what it is.
Passages are quoted from the Spanish original and translated for this page.
Nineteen years he had lived like someone dreaming: he looked and did not see, he heard and did not hear, he forgot everything, or nearly everything.
Diecinueve años había vivido como quien sueña: miraba sin ver, oía sin oír, se olvidaba de todo, de casi todo.
Jorge Luis Borges, Funes el memorioso (1942)
Two or three times he had rebuilt an entire day; he had never faltered, but each rebuilding had cost an entire day.
Dos o tres veces había reconstruido un día entero; no había dudado nunca, pero cada reconstrucción había requerido un día entero.
Jorge Luis Borges, Funes el memorioso (1942)
Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree in every stand of trees, but each separate time he had perceived it or imagined it.
Funes no solo recordaba cada hoja de cada árbol de cada monte, sino cada una de las veces que la había percibido o imaginado.
Jorge Luis Borges, Funes el memorioso (1942)
…it troubled him that the dog of fourteen minutes past three (seen side-on) should carry the same name as the dog of a quarter past three (seen from the front).
…le molestaba que el perro de las tres y catorce (visto de perfil) tuviera el mismo nombre que el perro de las tres y cuarto (visto de frente).
Jorge Luis Borges, Funes el memorioso (1942)
…the heat and the pressure of a reality as unwearying as the one that closed in, day and night, on the unlucky Ireneo in his poor neighbourhood at the edge of a South American town.
…el calor y la presión de una realidad tan infatigable como la que día y noche convergía sobre el infeliz Ireneo, en su pobre arrabal sudamericano.
Jorge Luis Borges, Funes el memorioso (1942)
Sleeping was very hard for him. To sleep is to turn one's mind away from the world…
Le era muy difícil dormir. Dormir es distraerse del mundo…
Jorge Luis Borges, Funes el memorioso (1942)
To think is to forget differences, to generalise, to abstract. In Funes's crammed world there was nothing but details, almost immediate ones.
Pensar es olvidar diferencias, es generalizar, abstraer. En el abarrotado mundo de Funes no había sino detalles, casi inmediatos.
Jorge Luis Borges, Funes el memorioso (1942)