The Riddle of Poetry by Jorge Luis Borges, or Borges: el misterio esencial: Conversaciones en universidades de los Estados Unidos – Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges is included on The Bokklubben World Library’s Best 100 Books of All Time, while on The Greatest Books of All Time site you find it in 45th place – there are thousands of reviews on magnum opera from the aforementioned and other web pages on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html and YouTube channel

 

The Riddle of Poetry by Jorge Luis Borges, or Borges: el misterio esencial: Conversaciones en universidades de los Estados Unidos – Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges is included on The Bokklubben World Library’s Best 100 Books of All Time, while on The Greatest Books of All Time site you find it in 45th place – there are thousands of reviews on magnum opera from the aforementioned and other web pages on my blog  https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html and YouTube channel

 

9 out of 10

 

Jorge Luis Borges https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-garden-of-forking-paths-by-jorge.html is one of the greatest writers of all time, although he is a bit cryptic, too sophisticated for me - however, The Riddle of Poetry is much more accessible, for these are lectures in which he explains…The Riddle of Poetry

 

Nevertheless, he starts with modesty, by saying that he does not possess the secret, does not know what the riddle is, indeed, he is so charming throughout the six lectures, during which he often uses self-deprecating humor: ‘maybe this is my discovery, but maybe I have read it somewhere’, words to that effect

One of the poets that is quoted a few times, and yet, Magister Ludi Kingsley Amis https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-letters-of-kingsley-amis-edited-by.html was very hard on the one who wrote ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ I am biased and would rather take his word above almost all else

 

‘Keats was a boring, conceited, self-pitying, self-indulgent silly little fool, as well as an incompetent, uninteresting, affected, salacious poet. He's still better than Shelley, though. Shelley didn't have Keats's excuse of not knowing any better…’ Jorge Luis Borges would have had a dialogue on this subject, he comes across a gentle luminary

Borges mentions quite a few striking facts: ‘the apple does not have the taste within, just like a human does not, the taste comes from the meeting’, this was not the way he said, but then it is used when he states ‘if the lectures were any good, then the audience has merits’ and it is extended to books in general

 

Readers have a contribution- I am reminded of https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/01/according-to-mark-by-penelope-lively.html According To Mark by Penelope Lively: “the novelist has an infinity of choices, He chooses what is to happen, to happens, and in what way he will relate what happens, the picture he constructs is complete on its own terms”

 

 

Other humorous aspects were: Borges talks of Don Quixote of…Kansas, the fact that he had readers come to him to ask ‘why is so and so silent before answering?’ and then Borges confesses ‘he had to think who so and so was and why was he silent, but then answered that so and so was silent because we are silent before answering’

The lecturer refers to Shakespeare https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2026/05/hamlet-by-william-shakespeare-is-one-of.html and the ‘uncouth’ use of coitus, which is not used in common language – well, there were other times, now the orange leader of the free world says fucking – but we find it in Shakespeare

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