SOURCE: “Outside and Inside the Mirror in Borges' Poetry,” in Borges and the Kabbalah: And Other Essays on His Fiction and Poetry, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 107–15.

In the following essay, Alazraki discusses the significance of mirrors in Borges's poetry.

In the Preface to his fifth book of poetry—In Praise of Darkness—Borges writes: “To the mirrors, mazes, and swords which my resigned reader already foresees, two new themes have been added: old age and ethics.”¹ Mirrors are a constant in Borges' poetry, but long before becoming a major theme or motif in his works, mirrors had been for Borges an obsession that goes back to his childhood years. To his friends he has told that as a child he feared that the images reflected on his bedroom mirror would stay there even after darkness had effaced them. For the boy, the images inhabiting mirrors were like the...