The first letter is dated March of 1989. It is one page, typed on onionskin, and it begins with an apology for the typewriter's drifting e.
The writer is a retired hydrologist in Pune named Aravind Sule. The recipient is a high school Spanish teacher in Saskatoon named Marguerite Auclair. They have never met. They will never meet.
What they share is a translation, in progress, of El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan. Each is making one. Each has begun to suspect the other's will be better.
Sule found Auclair through a listserv hosted by a university in Iowa. The listserv is long defunct. The letters survived because Auclair was a person who kept things.
Her sister donated the box to a small archive at the University of Regina in 2019. It contains four hundred and twelve letters, the last dated August of 2016, three months before Auclair's death.
The correspondence is not, on its surface, dramatic. They argue about sendero versus path versus track. They argue about whether se bifurcan should be rendered with a verb at all.
In a 1994 letter, Sule writes that he has spent three months on a single semicolon. Auclair replies that she has spent four on the word casi.
The argument, when one reads the letters in sequence, is not really about Spanish. It is about what a sentence is for.
“The argument, when one reads the letters in sequence, is not really about Spanish.”
Sule believes a sentence is a delivery system. Auclair believes a sentence is a room. The room has weather. The reader walks in and notices the weather before noticing anything else.
Borges, of course, is the wrong author to settle this question. He wrote sentences that are both, and a few that are neither.
By 1998 the correspondence has slowed. Sule's wife is ill. Auclair has taken on a second job tutoring. Letters come every four or five months, then every eight.
They never stop. The 2001 letters discuss a single footnote for the length of a small novella. Auclair, in one of them, writes: "I think we have been translating each other, and Borges has been a pretext."
Sule does not respond to this for nine months. When he does, he encloses a photograph of his grandson and a revised version of the opening paragraph. He does not mention the line about the pretext.
Neither translation was ever published. Auclair's manuscript, eighty-three pages long, is folded into the archive box. Sule's was lost when his daughter cleared his apartment in 2018.
What remains is the conversation around the absent thing. The scaffolding without the building.
The archivist at Regina, a man named Devon Cree, told me he had read every letter twice. He said the second reading was harder than the first.
He said the difficulty was that you began to hear the silences between the letters. The months when neither wrote. The pages where one of them was clearly grieving and could only talk about verbs.
I asked him what he thought they had been doing, really, for twenty-seven years. He thought for a long time.
"They were keeping each other reading," he said. "That was the whole project. Borges was the excuse."
The last letter, from Auclair, is half a page. It says her eyes are going. It says she has reread his 1993 version of the labyrinth passage and finds it better than her own. It says she is grateful.
Sule did not write back. There is no record of why. He outlived her by four years.
The box sits on a metal shelf in Regina, beside the papers of a forgotten provincial poet. It is catalogued under Auclair, M. — Correspondence, Translation.
No one has asked to see it since 2022. Cree said he checks on it sometimes, the way one checks on a sleeping animal, to be sure it is still breathing.
