Dreamtigers - Borges Work Made Me Confused
Hello, Steemers! Does one of you who adore Borges?
Jorge Luis Borges (24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986), was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language literature. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges)
One that I like from the work of Borges, he was successful mix between fiction and reality. I will not be bored to learn Borges. I feel the real stories of Borges. Although essentially a fiction.
Here I quote a Borges short story entitled Dreamtigers:
In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger—not the jaguar, that spotted "tiger" that inhabits the floating islands of water hyacinths along the Paraná and the tangled wilderness of the Amazon, but the true tiger, the striped Asian breed that can be faced only by men of war, in a castle atop an elephant. I would stand for hours on end before one of the cages at the zoo; I would rank vast encyclopedias and natural history books by the splendor of their tigers. (I still remember those pictures, I who cannot recall without error a woman's brow or smile.) My childhood outgrown, the tigers and my passion for them faded, but they are still in my dreams. In that under-ground sea or chaos, they still endure. As I sleep I am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly I realize that it's a dream. At those moments, I often think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will, and since I have unlimited power, I am going to bring forth a tiger.
Oh, incompetence! My dreams never seen to engender the creature I so hunger for. The tiger does appear, but it is all dried up, or it's flimsylooking, or it has impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it's al-together too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or bird than like a tiger.
What Steemers feel?
I felt a brief story above is a dream beyond a dream. It could be a dream which has been achieved, or dreams always come repeatedly. This is where I am increasingly difficult to understand Dreamtigers.
An understanding of the absence of a deserted from the hubbub of life desires, obliteration of personal identity by the cosmological relation stranded scouring endless, whack Borges to look at "infinity always be a serial story, an echo of replication". This echo of replication analogous through a mirror image, dizzying repetition venturing up to the idea of an endless desert, outlines the aesthetic fascination, where the overflow water poured possibility sublime tension of identity: the saga about negation and self-affirmation alternating constantly.
This is where the shrewdness Borges. Keywords are always specify Borges was a dream, duplication, mirrors, and a maze. Borges liked to play with history, facts and fiction.
Maybe Steemers can solve this mystery, mystery about Dreamtigers from Jorge Luis Borges.
Reference:
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Hi there, I had the opportunity to read the original text in spanish. I think the story and the idea behind the text is much simpler than that. This is remembrance story about his childhood in libraries, his devotion to books, the image he had of the outside world provided by the books in his library, the past, his family, etc. Its a confort story, but Borges wrote it, so, yeah, bring the dreams on.
I wish I could read Borges in Spanish.
Someday maybe you will! Never say never.
You'll never completely unravel the mystery of Borges.
Like you would never unravel your own.
You said something there.