Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Labyrinths 1. Set in a grid, the streets of San Telmo should have been easy to navigate, but the symmetry meant all intersections looked the same. All corners were rightangled. Inside the maze, it was hard to remember which direction was north. The streets were named after countries in the Americas, and so we wandered up and down Venezuela, Per ú and Chile, or did we wander east and west? The world map was useless. Here, in Buenos Aires, Estados Unidos was south of M é xico. Where was the oldstyled parilla al carb ó n we liked? What was its name? On our last afternoon we stumbled on La Poesia Café and sat beside Victoria Ocampo at the bar. 2. Friday afternoon  milonga at the Confiter í a Ideal . The mazy footwork of tango crisscrossed the palatial dance hall. The light was the color of dust. After a set of songs, the dancing couples released each other and returned to their own tables. The women sat along one wall like a gallery of yellowing photographs. ...

There are marvels in Borges's mazes, but there are no monsters, or more precisely, the monster is the maze. The thin line between fiction and fact, the multiplying paths of choice, the confusion of chance and fate, the interdependence of memory and forgetfulness, the regressions of infinity: these are the speculative themes embodied in his short stories, which are ostensibly about secret cabals, German spies, an endless library, ancient sacrifice, murder mystery, theological controversies, and the failure of a medieval Muslim intellectual to understand the Greek categories of comedy and tragedy. Borges takes a popular genre, such as crime thriller or science fiction, and, by exploring and subverting its conventions, exposes our assumptions about reality. My favorite stories in this collection are "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius," "The Garden of Forking Paths," "The Library of Babel," "Funes the Memorious" and "Death and the Compass." I...

Laid out in a grid, the streets of San Telmo should have been easy to navigate, but the perfectly symmetrical arrangement meant all intersections looked roughly the same. All corners were right-angled. Inside the maze, it was hard to remember what direction was North or West. The streets were named after countries in the Americas, and so we wandered all over the map, in Peru, Bolivia and Estados Unidos. In which state was the old-styled parilla we liked at which we had dinner one night? What was its name? On our last afternoon in Buenos Aires we stumbled on La Poesia Cafe. * Friday afternoon  milonga at the Confiteria Ideal. The mazy footwork of tango crossed the palatial dance hall. After a set of songs, the dancing couples separated and returned to their own tables. The women sat along one wall like a gallery of yellowing portrait photographs. The men hardly touched their beer. A short elderly woman threaded her way through the small tables to ask me to dance. I shook my he...

Remedial reading continues. TLS August 1 2008. From Chris Andrews' review of Donald L. Shaw's Spanish American Poetry after 1950: Beyond the vanguard : [Shaw] points out, for example, how [Olga] Orozco's Esbozos frente a un modelo (Sketches in Front of a Model), where the idea that writing poetry is like trying to "translate a text written in a constantly changing code", echoes Borges's famous statement in La Muralla y los libros (The Wall and the Books): "this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon". * The young ultraist Borges believed that metaphors are the primordial element of poetry, and that they should be both novel and "effective" ( eficaz ), but by the 1950s he had decided that the real primordial element is rhythm and that all good metaphors are variations on familiar ones. Shaw suggests that Borges had lost faith in metaphor's capacity to "open up new dimensions of reality...