In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection
that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City.
Jorge Luis Borges
Buenos Aires, 1946
Trans. Andrew Hurley
3 min. read
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.
Translator's note. Andrew Hurley, 1998
The word "Unconscionable" here translates Desaforadas, literally, "without measure" or "outside all reason." Di Giovanni's earlier translation renders this as "Immoderate." The distinction matters: Hurley's word carries moral weight; Di Giovanni's carries only scale.
The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.†
"That vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters."
Borges · On Exactitude in Science · 1946
The story is, in its entirety, a single paragraph. Borges offers it not as an allegory but as a fragment, a quotation from a text that does not exist, by an author he invented, about an empire that never was. The joke, if it is a joke, is that the only honest map is the world itself; and that any attempt to represent a thing with complete fidelity produces not knowledge but a second, inferior world that must eventually be abandoned to the weather.
Precision, taken to its end, becomes a different kind of imprecision. The map that matches the territory no longer navigates it. The model that contains all the data no longer explains anything. There is a mercy, Borges suggests, in reduction, in the act of saying: this much, and no more.
· · ·
What the cartographers of the empire could not understand was that a map is not a record of a place. It is an argument about which features of a place deserve to be remembered. Scale is not a limitation but a position. To reduce the world to a page is to make a claim, that some things matter and others do not, that the city belongs on the map and the single house does not, that the river deserves a line and the puddle does not. Representation is always, at its core, editorial.
Borges wrote "On Exactitude in Science" in under a page. He spent, by his own account, several days on it. He rewrote the opening sentence eleven times. The finished piece has the feeling of something that could not have been otherwise, of language that has been compressed until it has the density of stone. That is the typographer's aspiration too: to find, within the constraints of the page, the arrangement that feels inevitable.
†
Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658. [Note: This source, like its author, is an invention of Borges. The date, place, and volume number are chosen to sound plausible.]
‡
The story has been cited in philosophy of science literature, most notably by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), who inverts Borges's conceit: in the contemporary world, he argues, it is the map that precedes the territory.