Jorge Luis Borges’s Poetic Response To the Arab-Israeli Six Day War

Authors

Stephen Silverstein, Baylor University

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Winter 2014

Abstract

At variance with the pro-Arab stance that most Latin American intellectuals assumed during the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War (June 5-10, 1967), Jorge Luis Borges’s life-long connection to “lo hebreo,” as he called it, translated into “an immediate taking of sides” with Israel (“Autobiographical Essay” 257). As war erupted between Israel and its Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian neighbors, Borges expressed his felt kinship to the Jewish state in the poem “A ISRAEL.” In the war’s aftermath he penned a second poem, “ISRAEL.” Whereas the Jewish motifs that proliferate in Borges’s prose have been well studied, his poetry has received much less critical attention. What is more, Borges’s belletristic conceptualization of the Jewish state has gone completely unstudied. Toward remedying these critical oversights, this article will offer a close reading of the two poems Borges composed in the summer of 1967.

Volume

19

First Page

29

Last Page

40

ISSN

1553-3018

Comments

Copyright of the published works remains property of Hipertexto, Online Journal.

Recommended Citation

Silverstein, Stephen. "Jorge Luis Borges’s Poetic Response to the Arab-Israeli Six Day War." Hipertexto 19 (2014): 29-40.