Status Updates From Borges: A Life

...."you have wasted the years and they have wasted you,/ and still you have not written the poem." As he was to tell an interviewer, he reproached himself for having squandered his talents: "I have received the gift of unhappiness this evening, and even this has not been sufficient to make me a great poet." pg. 319

the cycle of desire & frustration that characterize this tale of pointless revenge is encapsulated in the bilingual pun latent in name Recabarren. Recabar - "to ask for, to demand, to insist on," but in "Recabarren" the word recabar is fused with the Eng word "barren," so the name itself suggests that all our efforts to assert a unique, authentic self are futile: we must be resigned to open-endedness & irresolution