Jorge Luis Borges: Poem “To a Cat”, Quotes, and Labyrinth

Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine short-story writer, poet, and essayist, whose tales of fantasy and dream worlds are classics of the 20th-century world literature. Most of Borges’s tales embrace universal themes – the often recurring circular labyrinth can be seen as a metaphor for life or a riddle which theme is time. And Borges left a poem To a Cat.

Jorge Luis Borges

Borges (1899-1986) began reading books in father’s library where more than 5000 books kept. He became familiar with works by Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens… in English. Outlaws, Gaucho in Spanish.

He started writing when he was six, and he translated The Happy Prince[1] by Orson Welles into Spanish when he was ten.

It appeared on El Pais with signature of Jorge Borges, everybody thought it was his father.

After several years of staying in Europe, Borges and his family came back in Buenos Aires in 1921, began working on writing novels in earnest.

Borges was profoundly influenced by European culture, English literature, and such thinkers as Berkeley[2], who argued that there is no material substance; the sensible world consists only of ideas, which exists for so long as they are perceived.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

Jorge Luis Borges > Quotes (goodreads)

 

Poem To a Cat

Mirrors are not more silent
nor the creeping dawn more secretive;
in the moonlight, you are that panther
we catch sight of from afar.
By the inexplicable workings of a divine law,
we look for you in vain;
More remote, even, than the Ganges or the setting sun,
yours is the solitude, yours the secret.
Your haunch allows the lingering
caress of my hand. You have accepted,
since that long forgotten past,
the love of the distrustful hand.
You belong to another time. You are lord
of a place bounded like a dream.

To a Cat (All Poetry)

Style and Magic Realism[3]

Borges is often credited as the man who opened up the way for the Magic Realist boom in South America.

It is an acceptance of magic in the rational world. Also, sometimes it’s called fabulism, in reference to the conventions of fables, myths, and allegory.

Borges liked to use concise words with a clear structure, brief and to the point. Hence the short story suits his style.

One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.

Jorge Luis Borges Quotes (BrainyQuote)

Eyesight and Imagination

He became completely blind at the age of 55.

He never learned braille and so became unable to read which may have helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination alone.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorge Luis Borges Quotes (goodreads)

Labyrinth of Borges

Borges’s world is full of wonders and evoke questions in reader’s mind. The Library of Babel[4], endless bookshelves and infinite corridors, the library in this book is huge and mysterious.

Time, order, and disorder… Borges’s favorite themes are in it. The Garden of Forking Paths[5], what is time and what is reality, again his themes considered in depth here.

It might be a good idea to be lost in his labyrinth, when you can’t find the right words.

Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.

Jorge Luis Borges > Quotes (goodreads)

 

Writer’s Destiny

In his final days in Geneva, Borges began brooding about the possibility of an afterlife.

Borges declared himself an agnostic, clarifying: Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

Jorge Luis Borges > Quotes (goodreads)

References

To a Cat (All Poetry)

[1]]The Happy Prince & Other Stories (Amzaon)

[2]]George Berkeley (Wikipedia)

[3]]Magic realism (Wikipedia)

[4]]The Library of Babel (goodreads)

[5]]The Garden of Forking Paths (goodreads)

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