Abstract
My favorite Borges poem of all time is La cifra, the title work of one of his last books (1981).The poem’s overt subject is the inconstant moon, about which Borges wrote so often throughout his career, perhaps as a response to Leopoldo Lugones, Borges’s famous precursor who, following Laforgue, had turned it into a staple of modern Hispanic poetics. But for this old poet, whose persona permeates the bulk of Borges’s late works, the poem is not so much about the moon as what the moon has meant poetically and paradoxically, being both present in memory and inconstant physically. It reads:
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Notes
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Thus, “cipher, n. f[rom] Arab sifr. … 1 an arithmetic symbol, 0, of no value by itself, but used to occupy a vacant place in decimal etc. numeration, 2 a numeral; especially an Arabic numeral… 3 a secret or disguised system of writing.…,” The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, ed. Lesley Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), vol. 1,402. For histories and speculations, see: Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is. A Natural History of Zero (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)
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© 2005 Enrico Mario Santí
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Santí, E.M. (2005). Introduction. In: Ciphers of History. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12245-2_1
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