And at least you had an idea of why his friend Attilio Rossi, the artist and boss at Losada, put that circle with the shining rays on top of the Aleph thingamajig in his illustration for the cover.īut the jury was right when it rejected Borges for the National Literary Prize back in 1944. There was Borges with his foreign name games again! At least you now had some inkling of where the "sacred" squiggle came from, and what it stood for-Hebrew, Cabala, En Soph. Para la Cabala, esa letra significa el En Soph, la ilimitada y pura divinidad tambien se dijo que tiene la forma de un hombre que senala el cielo y la tierra, para indicar que el mundo inferior es el espejo y es el mapa del superior para la Mengenlehre, es el simbolo de los numeros transfinitos" (OC 627).
Su aplicacion al disco de mi historia no parece casual. Este, como es sabido, es el de la primera letra del alfabeto de la lengua sagrada. to the story that he also called "El Aleph," he finally had the "courtesy" to explain: "Dos observaciones quiero agregar: una, sobre la naturaleza del Aleph otra, sobre su nombre. Unless you were one of his initiated, he purposely kept you in the dark until the very end, when in a P.S. Couldn't the man just write in plain and simple Castilian, and stop bothering readers with his foreign names and illegible signs? (1) But then, he'd already shown before that he was downright un-Argentine. Whatever it meant, and however you pronounced it, the "ph" at the end didn't help matters.
What was Borges up to in his latest volume? The symbol on the cover looked weird and the name sounded strange: El Aleph.