A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "Borges and I"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "Borges and I," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535819817

Book preview

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Borges and I

Jorge Luis Borges

1957

Introduction

In Borges and I, the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges meditates on the relationship between his private and public selves. The poem is quintessentially Borges: puzzling, ambiguous, and even shocking. First published in 1957 in Spanish as Borges y yo in the journal Biblioteca, the poem was included in Borges's 1960 collection, El Hacedor (The Maker). This volume was translated into English and released in 1964 as Dreamtigers. It was here that Borges and I was first made available in English.

Borges and I is very short, barely three hundred words long. However, while the vocabulary and the words of the poem are simple, the ideas contained in the poem are very complex. Indeed, even the genre of the work is hard to determine. Is Borges and I even a poem at all?

During his early career, Borges published many poems. After about 1938, however, he began writing short stories, including some of his most famous, The Garden of Forking Paths, Death and the Compass, and The Library of Babel. By 1955, however, Borges had grown nearly blind, and his work became increasingly enigmatic and brief.

During this period, he began producing short meditations he called parables. Without rhyme or meter, and without special lining, the works resemble very short fiction; nevertheless, these small pieces of writing are poetic in their images, their themes, and their allusive, metaphoric language. Borges and I, then, is best considered a prose poem, an intensely focused and sharply tuned exploration into the heart of public and private identity. When asked about his writing in several interviews, Borges always responded that he thought of himself as a poet, first and