Two new works by Jorge Luis Borges, The Gold of the Tigers: Selected Later Poems, and The Book of Sand, a collection of prose tales, offer a deeper realization of the intriguing network of symbols in the Argentinian writer's artistic world. Primarily, though, they embody human insights: throughout his work, the most striking effects, as well as true meanings, are to be found not in his allegory, however fascinating, but in his construction of images and characters.

So, too, with the new collections. The Gold of the Tigers is pervaded with polarities of blindness and sight, those contrasts Borges has developed throughout his work. In his "Preface to The Unending Rose," which appears in this book, he writes: "Blindness is a confinement, but it is also a liberation, a solitude propitious to invention, a key and an algebra." In Borges' poetic world, to be blind is to live with the reality of darkness, for to see in an illusory world is actually a delusion….

At an extreme from those perceptions of darkness are the images of radiant light, presented as golden moments of awareness. Often they are generated by thoughts of great images in literature or by myths, which are, to Borges, the poet's touchstones, or "talismans" in a world without substance. In "The White Deer," that animal is perceived in "a moment's flash." The speaker dreams of "a lithe, illusory creature, half-remembered/and half-imagined," suspecting it has originated from an English ballad or "Persian etching." The speaker's identification with the deer is based on his conviction that both he and the animal are illusory in a gossamer world: "I too am dream, lasting a few days longer/than that bright dream of whiteness and green fields."

Often those luminous images occur in moments of passion, as in "Tankas":

               High on the summit
               the garden is all moonlight,
               the moon is golden.
               More precious is the contact
               of your lips in the shadow.

And in the beautiful title poem of this collection, the speaker imagines brilliant touchstones such as "the blazing tiger of Blake, burning bright" and "the amorous gold shower disguising Zeus." The poem ends in an excited outcry:

         O sunsets, O tigers, O wonders
         of myth and epic,
         O gold more dear to me, gold of your hair
         which these hands crave to touch.

Another of the striking antinomies in this book is that of solitude and unity. (p. 74)

In "You," many notable figures—Ulysses, Abel, Cain—are presented as one solitary man: "One man alone has looked on the enormity of dawn." In "Proteus," on the other hand, one figure becomes many: the god takes on "the substance of a lion or a bonfire/or a tree." The poet enjoins: "Do not take fright at Proteus the Egyptian,/you, who are one, and also many men."

In these remarkable poems, Borges creates an image of man alone in a universe filled with curious contradictions, having only his talismans, his brief glimpses of light, his loves, his memories of beauty. The truth is remote, and can be known only after he is dead, as we learn in the amazing poem, "The Unending Rose."…

The Book of Sand is a collection of fables that, like many literary ballads, contain precise information about irrelevant details, while the central situation is veiled in mystery. "Exact dates are of no account," he writes in "Congress," then proceeds to give exact dates, places and names….

Despite their appearance of reality, however, the tales are filled with wonder. The title story concerns a bibliophile who exchanges a black-letter Wycliffe Bible for a Book of Sand, so-named because, like sand, the pages have no beginning or end. He acquires the book from a stranger "with nondescript features" that are, nevertheless, described in detail. Alone with the infinite book, the pedantic narrator is overcome by the nightmarish, terrifying object.

Unlike his poems, Borges' prose does not often turn on the theme of love. An exception is the beautiful story "Ulrike," in which the narrator, an aging bachelor, is loved by a young Norwegian woman. At the moment of their erotic union, the author suspends his detailed narrative, for love itself is the central mystery….

More commonly, Borges' stories exhibit the theme of the double, and concern two people who, the author states in an "Afterword," are "sufficiently different to be two persons and alike enough to be one." An example of this use of the theme is found in "The Other," a tale in which Borges points unquestionably to himself by using his own name for the bemused speaker who meets a stranger of the same name. Appropriately, the stranger is writing a book on the brotherhood of man. In their meeting, the central character learns more about himself. And yet that very knowledge is illusory, since it is an insubstantial reflection of a person whose very existence is doubtful.

For me, the most haunting story in this collection is "The Mirror and the Mask," in which Ollan, the court poet of Ireland, is given a silver mirror for composing songs of war. Taking the mirror with him, the bard invents an ode that was "not a description of the battle—it was the battle." After the king gives him a mask, Ollan composes a single line that tells of Beauty. Then, for the sin of knowing Beauty, the poet kills himself and the king becomes a beggar in his own kingdom.

The mirror, the double, memory—all are symbols of knowing reality that may itself be unknowable. And yet at times we are closer to the truth, as when we perceive we are familiar with the darkness that rules our lives. That is the truth of Borges who, though resigned to darkness, loves the light. Although he knows that truth may be illusory, he pursues truth. And while he understands that solitude may be the law of life, he persists in seeking out the other. (p. 75)