Months later, Borges receives a call from Argentino who says that his landlords, under the pretext of extending the bar, are going to tear down his house. The narrator halfheartedly agrees it is clear he has no intention of following through. Fearing the purpose of their meeting might be to request an introduction for the volume, Borges is relieved when his confidant instead asks him to reach out to another writer friend to provide one. Argentino announces his intent to publish the first cantos of his poem. He reads several pretentious passages aloud, followed by humorously self-aggrandizing analyses of each line and comparisons between himself and classical poets, making it clear, the narrator says, that his “work had lain not in the poetry but in the invention of reasons for accounting the poetry admirable” (122).Īrgentino later invites Borges for a drink at a bar owned by his landlords, a setting seemingly as hollow as Argentino’s verse, described by the narrator as “relentlessly modern only slightly less horrendous than I had expected” (124). Gradually, he becomes a confidant of Beatriz’s first cousin Carlos Argentino Daneri, a man he describes as being full of “pointless analogies and idle scruples” (120).Įncouraged by the narrator’s offering of brandy, Argentino announces on one visit that he has been laboring on an epic poem titled The Earth, through which he “proposed to versify the planet” (122). He visits her family on her birthday to pay his respects, a practice he intends to repeat annually. Stricken by fear that time and nature will simply move on from her, Borges determines to consecrate himself to her.

It starts with the death of Beatriz Viterbo, the narrator’s friend and love interest, who faced her mortal illness with dignity. The story is narrated in first person by a fictionalized version of the author, implementing a literary device called autofiction. The story begins with epigraphs from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space”) and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (“But they will teach us that Eternity is the Standing still of the Present Time, a Nunc-stans (as the Schools call it) which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than they would a Hic-stans for an Infinite greatness of place”) (118).

This guide refers to the Penguin Classics edition of the story translated by Andrew Hurley and released in 1998.

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