SOURCE: “The Return of the Repressed: Objects in Borges' Literature,” in Borges the Poet, edited by Carlos Cortinez, The University of Arkansas Press, 1986, pp. 142-47.

In the following essay, Lagos discusses the shift in Borges's experience of himself and of the world which is indicated by a shift in his poetic subjects and images during the 1930's.

Contrary to the physical and spiritual plenitude of his poems written during the decade of the twenties, Borges' work after the thirties begins to exhibit a deep change that exalts the disjunction, restlessness, frustration, and breaking up of the harmony that impregnates his first three books. The pleasant strolls are no longer a current activity, and there is no joy either in contemplating the country landscape or in remembering his idyllic childhood. The serenity of the poems becomes internal agitation. The process becomes invisible torture, insomnia, and agony.

His lyric process...