Borges vs Sábato: should a story escape the world or expose it?

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BORGES vs ERNESTO SÁBATO go head to head — and every jab is rooted in real history.

BORGES

Literature is a labyrinth of mirrors and tigers, Ernesto - the writer's task is to dream, not to file a police report on his own century.

ERNESTO SÁBATO

Jorge, I abandoned physics and left the mirrors to you; I chose the tunnel, the anguish, the disappeared - a story must bleed where the nation bleeds.

BORGES

But eternity outlasts every dictator; I wrote of Babel and forking paths precisely so the truth could survive when the newspapers rot.

ERNESTO SÁBATO

And I chaired the commission that named the tortured dead - your paradise of paper means nothing to the man screaming in the cellar you refused to enter.

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