Its use for the strange sphere in my story may not be accidental. “Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. “How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south.” What if some day you were to come across a thing or an experience who is nothing like shared past? The human impulse to communicate must find a let out, and where mere words are not enough we need poetry:ĭaneri’s real work lay not in the poetry but in his invention of reasons why the poetry should be admired.ĭaneri, like most good poets, didn’t invent reasons, he found them - found them in the inexplicable Aleph.īorges is not only talking about nature of language or importance of poetry, he also seems to be speculating why the descriptions of supernatural are so vague or strange: and so there must be things beyond describing powers of language. 'All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past.' Coetzee said of Borges: 'He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.' His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe.

In 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first International Publishers' Prize Prix Formentor. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library (Biblioteca Nacional) and professor of Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He was a target of political persecution during the Peron regime, and supported the military juntas that overthrew it.ĭue to a hereditary condition, Borges became blind in his late fifties. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in Surrealist literary journals. In 1914, his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school and traveled to Spain.

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo, usually referred to as Jorge Luis Borges (Spanish pronunciation: ), was an Argentine writer and poet born in Buenos Aires.

El aleph book