Here it seems we cannot avoid condemning the phrase "the sun shines on the slanting roofs and on the windows." Enrique Banchs wrote these lines in a suburb of Buenos Aires, and in the suburbs of Buenos Aires there are no slanting roofs, but rather flat roofs. "Nightingales try to say they are in love": the nightingale is less a bird of reality than of literature, of Greek and Germanic tradition. However, I would say that in the use of these conventional images, in these anomalous roofs and nightingales, Argentine architecture and ornithology are of course absent, but we do find in them the Argentine's reticence, his constraint; the fact that Banchs, when speaking of this great suffering which overwhelms him, when speaking of this woman who has left him and has left the world empty for him, should have recourse to foreign and conventional images like slanted roofs and nightingales, is significant: significant of Argentine reserve, distrust and reticence, of the difficulty we have in making confessions, in revealing our intimate nature.
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”
