Dreamtigers (El Hacedor, "The Maker", 1960) is a collection of poems, short essays and literary sketches by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. Divided fairly evenly between prose and verse, the collection examines the limitations of creativity. Borges regarded Dreamtigers as his most personal work. In the view of Mortimer Adler, editor of the Great Books of the Western World series, the collection was a masterpiece of 20th-century literature. Literary critic Harold Bloom includes it in his Western Canon.
The original Spanish title refers to the Scots word makar, meaning "poet".[1]
Andrew Hurley, translator of a later published English translation, titled the collection The Maker, based on information that Borges "had thought up the title in English: The Maker, and had translated it into Spanish as El hacedor, but when the book came out in the United States the American translator preferred to avoid the theological implications and used instead the title of one of the pieces: Dreamtigers.".[2]
^Jorge Luis Borges. The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933–1969: Together with Commentaries and an Autobiographical Essay. E. P. Dutton, 1978. Page 277. Norman Thomas Di Giovanni. The Lesson of the Master: On Borges and His Work. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003. Pages 164–5.
^Jorge Luis Borges. The Aleph, Penguin Books, 1998. Pages 211-212, quoting from Emir Rodriguez Monegal. Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography. Page 438.