Full Description
Dreamtigers has been heralded as one of the literary masterpieces of the twentieth century by Mortimer J. Adler, editor of Great Books of the Western World. It has been acknowledged by its author as his most personal work. Composed of poems, parables, and stories, sketches and apocryphal quotations, Dreamtigers at first glance appears to be a sampler-albeit a dazzling one-of the master's work. Upon closer examination, however, the reader discovers the book to be a subtly and organically unified self-revelation.
Dreamtigers explores the mysterious territory that lies between the dreams of the creative artist and the "real" world. The central vision of the work is that of a recluse in the "enveloping serenity " of a library, looking ahead to the time when he will have disappeared but in the timeless world of his books will continue his dialogue with the immortals of the past - Homer, Don Quixote, Shakespeare. Like Homer, the maker of these dreams is afflicted with failing sight. Still, he dreams of tigers real and imagined and reflects upon of a life that, above all, has been intensely introspective, a life of calm self-possession and absorption in the world of the imagination. At the same time he is keenly aware of that other Borges, the public figure about whom he reads with mixed emotions: "It's the other one, it's Borges, that things happen to."
Contents
Introduction
Part I
To Leopoldo Lugones
The Maker
Dreamtigers
Dialogue on a Dialogue
Toenails
The Draped Mirrors
Argumentum Ornithologicum
The Captive
The Sham
Delia Elena San Marco
Dead Men's Dialogue
The Plot
A Problem
A Yellow Rose
The Witness
Martin Fierro
Mutations
Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote
Paradiso, XXXI, 108
Parable of the Palace
Everything and Nothing
RagnarÖk
Inferno, I, 32
Borges and I
Part II
Poem about Gifts
The Hourglass
The Game of Chess
Mirrors
Elvira de Alvear
Susana Soca
The Moon
The Rain
On the Effigy of a Captain in Cromwell's Armies
To an Old Poet
The Other Tiger
Blind Pew
Referring to a Ghost of Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-Odd
Referring to the Death of Colonel Francisco Borges (1835-1874)
In Memoriam: A. R.
The Borges
To Luis de CamoËns
Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-Odd
Ode Composed in 1960
Ariosto and the Arabs
On Beginning the Study of Anglo-Saxon Grammar
Luke XXIII
AdroguÉ
Ars Poetica
Museum
On Rigor in Science
Quatrain
Limits
The Poet Declares His Renown
The Magnanimous Enemy
The Regret of Heraclitus
Epilogue
Appendix: Some Facts in the Life of Jorge Luis Borges
