SOURCE: “Jorge Luis Borges,” in The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. XXII, No. 4, Autumn, 1998, pp. 109–14.

In the following excerpt, Hirsch discusses Borge’s love of reading and of languages, focusing on his conception of poetry as “a collaborative act between writer and the reader.”

We tend to think of Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) exclusively in terms of fiction, as the author of luminous and mind-bending metaphysical parables that cross the boundaries between the short story and the essay. But Borges always identified himself first as a reader, then as a poet, finally as a prose writer. He found the borders between genres permeable and lived in the magic space, the imaginary world, created by books. “If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library,” he said in 1970. “In fact, sometimes I think I have never strayed outside that library.”

Borges was so...