Poetry: El otro, el mismo

Overview
Published in 1964, El otro, el mismo gathers Borges’s mid-century poems into a concentrated map of his preoccupations: identity and its doubles, time’s paradoxes, memory’s labyrinths, and the austere enchantments of books, knives, and city streets. The title proposes a tension at the heart of the volume: the poet encounters an “other” that is also himself, an alter whose presence unsettles any secure notion of the self. The collection marks Borges’s confident return to verse after years of celebrated prose, carrying over the metaphysical rigor and the taste for fable while recovering the sonorous precision and classical balance of his early poetry.

Central Themes
Identity is staged as a dialogue between masks. The poet speaks as someone who observes, and also as the observed, a double that proliferates in mirrors, in names, and in remembered gestures. Time appears as a circular or branching pattern rather than a linear march, so that present moments are haunted by ancestral figures, mythic prototypes, and future echoes. Knowledge is both desired and distrusted: the poems admire systems, philosophy, theology, Kabbalah, yet repeatedly confess their insufficiency before the mystery they hope to explain. Love emerges not as sentimental fulfillment but as an event that threatens and exposes, a force that names the poet and therefore makes him vulnerable. Fate and chance cross like streets of Buenos Aires, where a turn can lead to a knife, a milonga, or a library.

Imagery and Motifs
The book’s emblematic objects recur in steady rotations. Mirrors multiply the self and annul it. Labyrinths, whether literal or textual, draw the mind into patterns that promise meaning and deliver vertigo. Tigers, both heraldic and living, embody an ancient splendour that the poet can imagine more surely than he can touch. The city, its patios, corners, and damp courtyards, anchors the metaphysical in the tangible, as does the knife, a token of courage and fatality. Jewish mysticism surfaces most famously in the figure of the Golem, an artificial creation that dramatizes the limits of human language before the divine Name. Libraries glow and darken at once, charged with the irony of a blind reader entrusted with infinite books.

Form and Voice
Borges writes with deliberate classicism: sonnets with clear voltae, syllabic regularity, and unobtrusive rhyme sit beside spare free verse and the cadence of the milonga. The voice is learned without pedantry, intimate without confessionality. Enumerations, aphoristic turns, and balanced clauses give the poems an air of considered inevitability, even as they confess uncertainty. The Spanish is plain and luminous, a diction that makes paradox feel like common speech. Across the volume, form serves as an ethical stance: self-limitation as a way to approach what is limitless.

Notable Passages and Pieces
Poema de los dones transposes personal fate, blindness and the directorship of a vast library, into a theological parable, finding a hard gratitude in the elegant cruelty of providence. El golem recounts the Prague legend to ponder whether human words can ever reach the creative Word, and whether our creations inevitably reflect our incompleteness. El amenazado presents love as a peril and a revelation, the moment when the merely literary “Borges” is betrayed by a woman’s name that exposes the man. El otro tigre toys with the desire to seize the real tiger rather than the symbol, only to discover that the animal of the poem can never escape the poem’s language.

Arc and Significance
Read together, the poems trace a movement from erudite curiosity toward stoic acceptance. The double of the title becomes less an adversary than a companion: the other self that writes, remembers, and finally consents to limits, of knowledge, of desire, of sight. The book consolidates Borges’s late style, where metaphysical adventure and neighborhood detail illuminate each other, and where the restraint of classical forms contains an inexhaustible sense of wonder. It is a mirror that does not flatter, but it opens into a labyrinth readers willingly enter.