到着: "No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sinking into the sacred mud...What is certain is that the grey man kissed the mud, climbed up the bank without pushing aside (probably without feeling) the blades which were lacerating his flesh, and crawled, nauseated and blood-stained, up to the circular enclosure crowned with a stone tiger or horse..."

休み: "The stranger stretched himself out beneath the pedestal. He was awakened by the sun high overhead. He was not astonished to find that his wounds had healed; he closed his pallid eyes and slept, not through weakness of flesh but through determination of will...he knew that his immediate obligation was to sleep. Toward midnight he was awakened by the disconsolate shriek of a bird."

弟子: "One afternoon (now afternoons were also given over to sleep, now he was awake only for a couple of hours at dawn) he dismissed the vast illusory student body for good and kept only one pupil. He was a taciturn, sallow boy, at times intractable, and whose sharp features resembled those of the dreamer...after a few private lessons, his progress was enough to astound the teacher."

不眠: "One day the man emerged from his sleep as if from a viscous desert, looked at the useless afternoon light which he immediately confused with the dawn, and understood that he had not dreamed. All that night and all day long, the intolerable lucidity of insomnia fell upon him. He tried exploring the forest, to lose his strength; among the hemlock he barely succeeded in experiencing several short snatches of sleep, veined with fleeting, rudimentary visions that were useless. In his almost perpetual sleeplessness, tears of anger burned his old eyes."

男を築く: "Almost immediately he dreamt a beating heart. He dreamt that it was warm, secret, about the size of a clenched fist, and of a garnet color... during fourteen lucid nights he dreamt of it with meticulous love...On the fourteenth night he lightly touched the pulmonary artery with his index finger, then the whole heart, outside and inside...Within a year he had come to the skeleton and the eyelids. The innumerable hair was perhaps the most difficult task. He dreamed an entire man - a young man, but one who did not sit up or talk, who was unable to open his eyes. Night after night, the man dreamt him asleep."

火神: "This multiple god revealed to him that his earthly name was Fire, and that in this circular temple (and in others like it) people had once made sacrifices to him and worshiped him, and that he would magically animate the dreamed phantom, in such a way that all creatures, except Fire itself and the dreamer, would believe to be a man of flesh and blood. He commanded that once this man had been instructed in all the rites, he should be sent to the other ruined temple whose pyramids were still standing downstream, so that some voice would glorify him in that deserted edifice."

別れ: "Secretly, he was pained at the idea of being separated from him. On the pretext of pedagogical necessity, each day he increased the number of hours dedicated to dreaming...Gradually, he began accustoming him to reality. Once he ordered him to place a flag on a faraway peak. The next day the flag was fluttering on the peak. He tried other analogous experiments, each more daring than the last. With a certain bitterness he understood that his son was ready - and perhaps impatient - to be born. That night he kissed him for the first time and sent him off to the other temple whose remains appeared white downstream, across many miles of inextricable jungle and marshes."

幻想: "The man’s victory and peace became blurred with boredom. In the twilight times of dusk and dawn, he would prostrate himself before the stone figure...The purpose of his life had been fulfilled; the man remained in a kind of ecstasy...In a dawn without birds, the magician saw the concentric fire licking the walls. For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the water, but then he understood that death was coming to crown his old age and absolve him from his labors. He walked toward the sheets of flame. They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was an illusion, dreamt by another."

-excerpted from: "The Circular Ruins" by Jorge Luis Borges