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Infinite Library
Rediscovering Jorge Luis Borges—and poetry—in our archives.
One of my privileges as the intern here at The Wilson Quarterly is having access to our archives, which date back to the 1970s. Re-shelving old issues has been a great way to discover gems serendipitously rather than systematically, leafing through hard copies instead of browsing tables of contents online. One treasure I unearthed from a particularly deep stack of issues is a piece on Jorge Luis Borges in the Autumn 1998 issue, along with reprints of several of his poems. Borges is most known for his mind-bending short stories that tackle metaphysical questions and ponder the limits of language, but as the then-WQ poetry editor Edward Hirsch points out in his introduction, the Argentine actually saw himself more as a poet than a prose writer.
While many other Latin American literary giants used their writings as platforms for social activism, Borges did not. He has been criticized for his political aloofness during the 1976–83 rule of the military junta, but in spite of this, Borges is still very much revered in Argentina. When I lived in his hometown of Buenos Aires during my junior year of college, I could walk around the city and find plaques marking his former apartments as national landmarks.
In the latter part of his life, Borges went blind due to a genetic degenerative condition. Many of his poems consider mortality and the ephemeral nature of life, but they also allude to something lasting and eternal. In the poem “Camden 1892,” Borges imagines Walt Whitman in his final year, cast as a frail old man. But in the last lines, the American poet’s dignity is redeemed by a glorification of his writing: