Two new works by Jorge Luis Borges, The Gold of the Tigers: Selected Later Poems, and The Book of Sand, a collection of prose tales, offer a deeper realization of the intriguing network of symbols in the Argentinian writer's artistic world. Primarily, though, they embody human insights: throughout his work, the most striking effects, as well as true meanings, are to be found not in his allegory, however fascinating, but in his construction of images and characters.

So, too, with the new collections. The Gold of the Tigers is pervaded with polarities of blindness and sight, those contrasts Borges has developed throughout his work. In his "Preface to The Unending Rose," which appears in this book, he writes: "Blindness is a confinement, but it is also a liberation, a solitude propitious to invention, a key and an algebra." In Borges' poetic world, to be blind is to live...