A DREAM

by Jorge Luis BorgesJULY 6, 2009

In a deserted place in Iran there is a not very tall stone tower that has neither door nor window. In the only room (with a dirt floor and shaped like a circle) there is a wooden table and a bench. In that circular cell, a man who looks like me is writing in letters I cannot understand a long poem about a man who in another circular cell is writing a poem about a man who in another circular cell . . . The process never ends and no one will be able to read what the prisoners write.

(Translated, from the Spanish, by Suzanne Jill Levine.)

The New Yorker saw it fit to reprint this Borges poem in the light of what's happening there.