The Pearl or the Rose. Góngora according to Borges

Abstract

This article examines a series of commentaries on the work of Luis de Góngra that Jorge Luis Borges made throughout his life in articles, essays, interviews, and conversations. Our purpose is to show how, influenced by his readings in Marcelino Melández Pelayo, during his youth, and despite some relative swerves, Borges' opinion is mostly negative. Although in one of his last poems we see a certain sympathy for Góngora, it does not respond to an evolutoin in Borges' ideas, or to a genuine aesthetic appreciation, but rather to a philosophical intuition, whose consequences also operate on his own poetic work.