Here is the iron coin. Let us interrogate
The two opposing faces that will be the answer
To the demanding question nobody has put:
Why does a man require that a woman should love him?
Let us consider. On the upper side are woven
The fourfold firmament that supports the heavenly flood
And the unalterable planetary stars.
Adam, the youthful father; youthful Paradise.
The evening and the morning. God in every creature.
In that immaculate labyrinth is your reflection.
Let us flip over the iron coin and look at it
For it is also an enchanted mirror. The other side
Is no one, nothing, darkness, blindness. You are those.
Of iron the two faces forge a single echo.
Your hands, your tongue, are both unfaithful witnesses.
God is the ungraspable center of the jewel.
He neither damns nor glorifies. Better, forgets.
Why do they fail to love you, stained with infamy?
In the other’s shadow we are seeking our own shadow,
And the other’s glass, our complementary glass.
Jorge Luis Borges
Of Jorge Luis Borges, J.M. Coetzee said, "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists." A controversial political and literary figure, Borges was educated in Switzerland and Spain and embraced the surrealism and magical realism that would come to dominate Latin American writing. He is the most widely translated Latin American writer of the twentieth century.
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