The mirror and the mask

The Mirror and the Mask is a story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges that integrates The Book of Sand, collection of stories and stories published in 1975.

This is the seventh story in that volume, it presents certain similarities with other stories by Borges, in particular the search for the text that reveals the absolute, or the destructive obsession that an object awakens ('El Zahir). In The Library of Babel there is the following quote, which anticipates this story:

In some hexagon of some hexagon (...) there must be a book that is the number and the perfect compendium of all others: some librarian has traveled and is analogous to a god.

Synopsis

The story narrates the meeting between the High King and the Poet after the Battle of Clontarf, in which the former orders the latter to sing of his victory and glory, granting him a year's time. Once that year has passed, the poet recites a perfect poem according to all the canons of art. The King thanks him and gives him a silver mirror, and then commissions him to write a new poem at the end of a new year.

The poet returns with a work that is imperfect according to conventions, but that "annihilates" everything that came before, "marvels and dazzles." The King gives him a golden mask and commissions him to write the third poem.

A year later the poet returns, pale and fearful, and pronounces the only line of his new work before the King. The King gives him a dagger, with which the poet commits suicide, and he becomes a beggar who travels through his ancient kingdom without ever repeating the final poem.