Susan Stewart reviews The Sonnets and Poems of the Night, both by Jorge Luis Borges, in The Nation:
In the introduction to his Obra Poética 1923–1985, brought out by Emecé Editores in Buenos Aires in 1989, Borges recalls a passage from a letter of his beloved literary ancestor Robert Louis Stevenson: “I do not set up to be a poet. Only an all-round literary man: a man who talks, not one who sings…. Excuse this apology; but I don't like to come before people who have a note of song, and let it be supposed I do not know the difference.” This borrowed strategy of first apologizing, then dazzling, was an intrinsic aspect of Borges's public persona; we find it, too, in the doubled being of his well-known little essay “Borges and I.” There he writes: “news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson; Borges shares those preferences, but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accoutrements of an actor…. I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges can spin out his literature, and that literature is my justification.”
Obscure provincial of the New World, destined to live out his life as a near invalid in a tiny apartment with his mother once he loses his “reading and writing” sight in his mid-50s; prim celibate; lover, Platonic or otherwise, of dozens of women and husband of two in his late age; firebrand of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, who brought the news of Geneva, Madrid, Seville and Majorca to Buenos Aires; publisher, in the 1920s, of the “Ultraist” Symbolist journal Prisma and of Proa, the journal of democratic reform and liberal, syncretic, poetics; high school dropout; devotee of Federico García Lorca, denigrator of García Lorca; the most learned reader of the twentieth century; in a bizarre historical irony, the third person to hold the position of director of the National Library of Argentina “whom God granted both books and blindness”; professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires and scholar of Anglo-Saxon; recipient of honorary degrees from Oxford, Columbia, Cambridge and elsewhere, of the Jerusalem Prize, the Alfonso Reyes Prize and the Cervantes Prize; longstanding supporter of the Radical Party; fearless opponent of the dictatorship of Juan Domingo Perón; willfully naïve apologist for the brutal late-1970s military regimes of Argentina and Chile. There is no end to the string of paradoxes that arise from the biographies of Borges and “Borges.”
Such contradictions were indeed part of Borges's legacy—from his family, his nation, his literary tradition.