SOURCE: "Chess and Mirrors: Form as Metaphor in Three Sonnets of Jorge Luis Borges," in Kentucky Romance Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 3, 1980, pp. 289-98.

In the following essay, Mandlove explores Borges 's use of archetypal patterns in his sonnets "Ajedrez I, " "Ajedrez II, " and "A un poeta del siglo XIII."

 "To the Looking-glass world it was Alice that said,
'I've a sceptre in hand, I've a crown on my head;
Let the Looking-glass creatures, whatever they be,
Come and dine with the Red Queen, the White Queen and me!'"
Lewis Carroll 

The mirror appears frequently in Borges' work as a symbolic representation of the infinite multiplication and repetition of human experience. In his short stories, Borges often uses mirrors and mirror images to show that human nature endlessly repeats itself, that a single character exists in both the past and in the future, or that he exists simultaneously in...