Three short texts published in the 1928 collection The Language of the Argentines, El idioma de los argentinos, point both to founding preoccupations within Borges's corpus: metaphysics and time, the cult of courage and the duel, and to a key textual practice: rewriting, and reusing similar or identical pieces in different contexts. Michel Lafon, in Borges ou la réécriture, studies and theorizes the textual manoeuvres in great detail. These texts are ‘El truco’; ‘Men Fought’, ‘Hombres pelearon’; and ‘Feeling in Death’, ‘Sentirse en muerte’. In the three cases the process is different. The short and schematic text of ‘Men Fought’ is published first with two different titles; it is radically rewritten with abundant use of local colour and dialect, again with two different titles, best known as ‘El hombre de la esquina rosada’; much later, in a more metafictional mode, a character from the second version becomes the narrator who corrects Borges's story in ‘The Story from Rosendo Juárez’, ‘Historia de Rosendo Juárez’. The very personal experience recounted in ‘Feeling in Death’ is reproduced twice with virtually no textual modifications, but inserted into two larger, highly philosophical, essays: ‘History of Eternity’ and ‘A New Refutation of Time’. ‘El truco’ is first published as verse in the 1923 Fervor de Buenos Aires; it is translated into prose and expanded in The Language of the Argentines; two years later this prose piece is reproduced as a ‘complementary page’ in Evaristo Carriego; the poem is rewritten in the 1969 edition of his poetry. Lafon points to the fact that the later version of the poem incorporates elements of the prose version.

Metaphysics: eternity and the refutation of time

At the beginning of his essay ‘A New Refutation of Time’, dated 1946 and included in Otras inquisiciones, in the very title of which the temporal adjective ‘new’ knowingly torpedoes the refutation, Borges muses on his lifelong preoccupation with the refutation of time, in which he does not believe, ‘de la que yo mismo descreo’, but which visits him ‘with the illusory force of a truism’ (TL 318), ‘con ilusoria fuerza de axioma’ (II 137). Paradox and oxymoron are at the heart of the matter. He goes on to point to the centrality of the process in all his work, and points out the texts where it is ‘prefigured’: