Part of the fun of reading Borges is peeling the layers: structural, narrative, symbolic, no matter – there’s a rabbit hole waiting in earnest. One such type of rabbit hole consists in trying to follow his quotes, whether real or made up.

In some cases they are obviously made up, and the clue is literally in the title: “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” (the story) is a discussion of “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” (a fictional story), set up with such surgical distance to almost remind of the quadruple framing of MP Shiel’s “The Purple Cloud”. Similarly, the Don Quixote written by Pierre Menard, the work of Herbert Quain and the infinite volumes of the Babylon Library are declaredly fictional entities.

Erudite literary plot devices needn’t be in the title to provide fundamental support to a story (“The Enemies” by Jaromir Hladik), mild support (the “AngloAmerican Cyclopaedia” of “Tlön, Uqbar, Urbis Tertius”) or minor support (the Gaelic translation of Shakespeare’s “Julius Ceasar” mentioned in “Theme of the traitor and the hero”) and those are found so often and so profusely throughout the book to barely register.

Sticking to “The Secret Miracle”, in a mildly more interesting narrative contraption it is revealed that Jaromir published a fictional translation of the Sefer Yetzirah for the very real Hermann Barsdorf publishing house (which while no longer in existence, most famously published Freud’s books).

Borges revels in this type of tomfoolery. For example, in “Death and the Compass” we learn that the just-died Tetrarch of Galilee had authored a translation of the Sepher Yezirah himself, as well as a “Vindication of the cabala”

Hladik had apparently also written something by a similar title.

Unlike for the character in “Death and the Compass”, in this case Borges ventured into a much more interesting exercise, of actually discussing the contents of a fictional book – stuffing entire worlds into just a few, dense sentences.

The entirety of “Tlön” is this, but sticking to strict literary quotes:

Or this gem from “Menard”

Finally, a less creative but just as evocative and effective trick is to accuse a fragment to be made up.

[…] afterwards, in the enormous dialogue of that night, i learned that they made up the first paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of the “Historia Naturalis”. The subject of this chapter is memory; the last words are “ut nihil non iisedm verbis redderetus auditum”

This fragment very much exists, but there is of course no indication that it is made up.

Conversely, sometimes a quote is so rarefied that even if it they did exist, they are so hard to attributed that they might as well be made up. For example the “Robertson” quote here conceivably refers to Frederick William Robertson (a reverend known for his sermons).

Of the surviving, internet-accessible bibliography, I could find nothing that really substantiated this quote. Maybe he made it up, maybe it was lost, maybe there is no difference. “My solitude rejoices in this elegant hope”.