特隆、乌克巴尔、奥尔比斯·特蒂乌斯 (1940)

特隆、乌克巴尔、奥比斯·特提乌斯（Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius）是20世纪阿根廷作家豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯创作的短篇小说。1940年5月，该小说首次发表在阿根廷杂志Sur上。该文收录于他的1941年首次出版的小说集《小径分叉的花园》中，该部小说集也是后来1944年出版的小说集《虚构集》的一大组成部分。1961年，该小说首次翻译成英文。

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a short story by the 20th-century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story was first published 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, by James E. Irby, was published in 1961 in New World Writing N° 18. In 1962 it was included in the short story collection Labyrinths (New Directions), the first collection of Borges' works published in English.

Told in a first-person narrative, the story focuses on the author's discovery of the mysterious and possibly fictional country of Uqbar and its legend of Tlön, a mythical world whose inhabitants believe a form of subjective idealism, denying the reality of objects and nouns, as well as Orbis Tertius, the secret organization that created both fictional locations. Relatively long for Borges (approximately 5,600 words), the story is a work of speculative fiction.

The story alludes 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 metaphysics, language, epistemology, and literary criticism.

Summary

The reportage unfolds as a first-person narrative and contains many references (see below) to real people, locations, literary works and philosophical concepts, besides some fictional or ambiguous ones. It is divided into two parts and a postscript. Events and facts are revealed roughly in the order that the narrator becomes aware of them or their relevance. The timing of events in Borges's story is approximately from 1935 to 1947; the plot concerns events going back as far as the early 17th century and culminating in the postscript, set in 1947.

Part one

Borges and his friend and collaborator, Adolfo Bioy Casares, are developing their next book in a country house near Buenos Aires, in 1940. In an observation, Bioy quotes that "mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men", a saying by a heresiarch of a land named Uqbar. Borges, impressed with the "memorable" sentence, asks for its source. Bioy replies that he read it in the chapter about Uqbar of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, "a literal if inadequate reprint" of the 1902 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica. They check the book and are unable to find the said chapter, to Bioy's surprise. The two then search for the name 'Uqbar' in numerous atlases and other encyclopedias, trying different alternative spellings, to no avail.

The following day, Bioy tells Borges he has found the chapter they were looking for in a different reprint of the same encyclopedia. The chapter, although brief and full of names unfamiliar to Borges and Bioy, entices their curiosity. It describes Uqbar as an obscure region, located in Iraq or Asia Minor, with an all-fantastic literature taking place in the mythical worlds of Mlejnas and Tlön. Afterwards, they keep searching for Uqbar in other sources, but are unable to find any mention.

Part two

The engineer Herbert Ashe, an English friend of Borges' father with a peculiar interest in duodecimal systems, dies of an aneurysm rupture. Borges inherits a packet containing a book, which was left by Ashe in a pub. That book is revealed to be the eleventh volume of an English-language encyclopedia entirely devoted to Tlön, one of the worlds in which Uqbar's legends are set. The book contains two oval blue stamps with the words Orbis Tertius inscribed in blue. From that point, as Borges reads the tome, part two comprehensively describes and discusses Tlön's culture, history, languages and philosophy.