Borges 2014 Bio

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Jorge Luis Borges
Borges in 1951, by Grete Stern
Born Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges
24 August 1899
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Died 14 June 1986 (aged 86)
Geneva, Switzerland
Occupation Writer, poet, critic, librarian
Language Spanish
English
French
Nationality Argentine
Signature
Jorge Luis Borges
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Borges" redirects here. For other uses, see Borges (disambiguation).
For other people of the same name, see Borges (surname).
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges, KBE
(Spanish: [!xorxe !lwis !!orxes] audio ; 24 August 1899
14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer,
essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. His
work embraces the "character of unreality in all
literature".
[1]
His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions)
and The Aleph (El Aleph), published in the 1940s, are
compilations of short stories interconnected by common
themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors,
ctional writers, philosophy, and religion.
Borges's works have contributed to philosophical
literature and also to the fantasy genre. Critic ngel
Flores, the rst to use the term magical realism to dene a
genre that reacted against the dominant realism and
naturalism of the 19th century,
[2]
considers the beginning
of the movement to be the release of Borges's A Universal
History of Infamy (Historia universal de la infamia).
[2][3]
However, some critics would consider Borges to be a
predecessor and not actually a magical realist. His late
poems dialogue with such cultural gures as Spinoza,
Cames, and Virgil.
In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland, where he
studied at the Collge de Genve. The family travelled
widely in Europe, including stays in Spain. On his return
to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems
and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked
as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955 he was
appointed director of the National Public Library and
professor of Literature at the University of Buenos Aires.
He became completely blind at the age of 55; as he never
learned braille, he became unable to read. Scholars have
suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to
create innovative literary symbols through imagination.
[4]
In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the rst Prix International, which he shared with
Samuel Beckett. In 1971 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His work was translated and published widely in the
United States and in Europe. Borges himself was uent in several languages. He dedicated his nal work,
The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland.
[5]
His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by his works being available in English, by
the Latin American Boom and by the success of Garca Mrquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.
[6]
Writer
and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of ction and thus
opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists."
[7]
Contents
1 Life and career
1.1 Early life and education
1.2 Early writing career
1.3 Later career
1.4 International renown
1.5 Later personal life
2 Political opinions
2.1 Anti-Communism
2.2 Anti-Fascism
2.3 Anti-Peronism
2.4 Military junta
3 Works
3.1 Hoaxes and forgeries
3.2 Criticism of Borges' work
3.3 Sexuality
3.4 Nobel Prize omission
4 Fact, fantasy and non-linearity
4.1 Borgesian conundrum
5 Culture and Argentine literature
5.1 Martn Fierro and Argentine tradition
5.2 Argentine culture
5.3 Multicultural Inuences
6 Inuences
6.1 Modernism
6.2 Political inuences
6.3 Mathematics
7 Ancestry
8 Notes
9 References
Jorge Luis Borges in 1921
10 Further reading
10.1 Documentaries
11 External links
Life and career
Early life and education
Jorge Luis Borges was born into an educated middle-class family on
24 August 1899. They were in comfortable circumstances but not
wealthy enough to live in downtown Buenos Aires. They resided in
Palermo, then a poorer suburb. Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo
Surez, came from a traditional Uruguayan family of criollo
(Spanish) origin. Her family had been much involved in the
European settling of South America and the Argentine War of
Independence, and she spoke often of their heroic actions.
[8]
Borges's
1929 book Cuaderno San Martn includes the poem "Isidoro
Acevedo", commemorating his grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo
Laprida, a soldier of the Buenos Aires Army. A descendant of the
Argentine lawyer and politician Francisco Narciso de Laprida,
Acevedo fought in the battles of Cepeda in 1859, Pavn in 1861, and
Los Corrales in 1880. Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida died of pulmonary
congestion in the house where his grandson Jorge Luis Borges was
born. Borges grew up hearing about the faded family glory. Borges's
father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was part Spanish, part
Portuguese, and half English, also the son of a colonel. Borges
Haslam, whose mother was English, grew up speaking English at
home and took his own family frequently to Europe. England and English pervaded the family home.
[8]
At nine, Jorge Luis Borges translated Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince into Spanish. It was published in a
local journal, but his friends thought the real author was his father.
[9]
Borges Haslam was a lawyer and
psychology teacher who harboured literary aspirations. Borges said his father "tried to become a writer and
failed in the attempt." He wrote, "as most of my people had been soldiers and I knew I would never be, I felt
ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action."
[8]
Borges was taught at home until the age of 11, was bilingual in Spanish and English, reading Shakespeare in
the latter at the age of twelve.
[8]
The family lived in a large house with an English library of over one
thousand volumes; Borges would later remark that "if I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I
should say my father's library."
[10]
His father gave up practicing law due to the failing eyesight that would
eventually afict his son. In 1914, the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, and spent the next decade in
Europe.
[8]
Borges Haslam was treated by a Geneva eye specialist, while his son and daughter Norah
attended school, where Borges junior learned French. He read Thomas Carlyle in English, and he began to
read philosophy in German. In 1917, when he was eighteen, he met Maurice Abramowicz and began a
Adolfo Bioy Casares, Victoria
Ocampo and Borges in 1935
literary friendship that would last for the rest of his life.
[8]
He received his baccalaurat from the Collge de
Genve in 1918.
[11][Notes 1]
The Borges family decided that, due to political unrest in Argentina, they would
remain in Switzerland during the war, staying until 1921. After World War I, the family spent three years
living in various cities: Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid.
[8]
At that time, Borges discovered the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and Gustav Meyrink's The Golem
(1915) which became inuential to his work. In Spain, Borges fell in with and became a member of the
avant-garde, anti-Modernist Ultraist literary movement, inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire and Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti, close to the Imagists. His rst poem, "Hymn to the Sea," written in the style of Walt
Whitman, was published in the magazine Grecia.
[12]
While in Spain, he met noted Spanish writers,
including Rafael Cansinos Assens and Ramn Gmez de la Serna.
Early writing career
In 1921, Borges returned with his family to Buenos Aires. He had little formal education, no qualications
and few friends. He wrote to a friend that Buenos Aires was now "overrun by arrivistes, by correct youths
lacking any mental equipment, and decorative young ladies".
[8]
He brought with him the doctrine of
Ultraism and launched his career, publishing surreal poems and essays in literary journals. Borges published
his rst published collection of poetry, Fervor de Buenos Aires, in 1923 and contributed to the avant-garde
review Martn Fierro. Borges co-founded the journals Prisma, a broadsheet distributed largely by pasting
copies to walls in Buenos Aires, and Proa. Later in life, Borges regretted some of these early publications,
attempting to purchase all known copies to ensure their destruction.
[13]
By the mid-1930s, he began to explore existential questions and
ction. He worked in a style that Argentinian critic Ana Mara
Barrenechea has called "Irreality." Many other Latin American
writers, such as Juan Rulfo, Juan Jos Arreola, and Alejo Carpentier,
were also investigating these themes, inuenced by the
phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger and the existentialism of
Jean-Paul Sartre. In this vein, his biographer Williamson underlines
the danger in inferring an autobiographically-inspired basis for the
content or tone of certain of his works: books, philosophy and
imagination were as much a source of real inspiration to him as his
own lived experience, if not more so.
[8]
From the rst issue, Borges
was a regular contributor to Sur, founded in 1931 by Victoria
Ocampo. It was then Argentina's most important literary journal and
helped Borges nd his fame.
[14]
Ocampo introduced Borges to
Adolfo Bioy Casares, another well-known gure of Argentine
literature, who was to become a frequent collaborator and close friend. Together they wrote a number of
works, some under the nom de plume H. Bustos Domecq, including a parody detective series and fantasy
stories. During these years, a family friend Macedonio Fernndez became a major inuence on Borges. The
two would preside over discussions in cafs, country retreats, or Fernandez's tiny apartment in the Balvanera
district. He appears by name in Borges's "Dialogue about a Dialogue",
[15]
in which the two discuss the
immortality of the soul.
Jorge Luis Borges in the 1940s
In 1933, Borges gained an editorial appointment at the literary supplement of the newspaper Crtica, where
he rst published the pieces collected as Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy) in
1935.
[8]
The book includes two types of writing: the rst lies somewhere between non-ctional essays and
short stories, using ctional techniques to tell essentially true stories. The second consists of literary
forgeries, which Borges initially passed off as translations of passages from famous but seldom-read works.
In the following years, he served as a literary adviser for the publishing house Emec Editores and from
1936 to 1939 wrote weekly columns for El Hogar. In 1938, Borges found work as rst assistant at the
Miguel Can Municipal Library. It was in a working class area
[16]
and there were so few books that
cataloguing more than one hundred books per day, he was told, would leave little to do for the other staff
and so look bad. The task took him about an hour each day and the rest of his time he spent in the basement
of the library, writing and translating.
[8]
Later career
Borges's father died in 1938. This was a particular tragedy for the
writer as the two were very close. On Christmas Eve that year,
Borges suffered a severe head injury; during treatment, he nearly
died of septicemia. While recovering from the accident, Borges
began playing with a new style of writing for which he would
become famous. His rst story written after his accident, "Pierre
Menard, Author of The Quixote" came out in May 1939. One of his
most famous works, "Menard" examines the nature of authorship, as
well as the relationship between an author and his historical context.
His rst collection of short stories, El jardn de senderos que se
bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), appeared in 1941,
composed mostly of works previously published in Sur.
[8]
The title
story concerns a Chinese professor in England, Dr. Yu Tsun, who
spies for Germany during World War I, in an attempt to prove to the
authorities that an Asian person is able to obtain the information that they seek. A combination of book and
maze, it can be read in many ways. Through it, Borges arguably invented the hypertext novel and went on to
describe a theory of the universe based upon the structure of such a novel.
[17][18]
Eight stories taking up over
sixty pages, the book was generally well received, but El jardn de senderos que se bifurcan failed to garner
for him the literary prizes many in his circle expected.
[19][20]
Victoria Ocampo dedicated a large portion of
the July 1941 issue of Sur to a "Reparation for Borges." Numerous leading writers and critics from
Argentina and throughout the Spanish-speaking world contributed writings to the "reparation" project.
With his vision beginning to fade in his early thirties and unable to support himself as a writer, Borges began
a new career as a public lecturer.
[Notes 2][21][22]
He became an increasingly public gure, obtaining
appointments as President of the Argentine Society of Writers and as Professor of English and American
Literature at the Argentine Association of English Culture. His short story "Emma Zunz" was made into a
lm (under the name of Das de odio, Days of Hate, directed in 1954 by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson).
[23]
Around this time, Borges also began writing screenplays.
In 1955, he was nominated to the directorship of the National Library. By the late 1950s, he had become
completely blind. Neither the coincidence nor the irony of his blindness as a writer escaped Borges:
[8]
Borges at L'Htel, Paris, 1969
Nadie rebaje a lgrima o reproche
esta declaracin de la maestra
de Dios, que con magnca irona
me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.
No one should read self-pity or reproach
Into this statement of the majesty
Of God; who with such splendid irony,
Granted me books and night at one touch.
[24]
The following year the University of Cuyo awarded Borges the rst of many honorary doctorates and in
1957 he received the National Prize for Literature .
[25]
From 1956 to 1970, Borges also held a position as a
professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires and other temporary appointments at other
universities.
[25]
In the fall of 1967 and spring of 1968, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at
Harvard University.
[26]
As his eyesight deteriorated, Borges relied increasingly on his mother's help.
[25]
When he was not able to
read and write anymore (he never learned to read Braille), his mother, to whom he had always been close,
became his personal secretary.
[25]
When Pern returned from exile and was re-elected president in 1973,
Borges immediately resigned as director of the National Library.
International renown
Eight of Borges's poems appear in the 1943 anthology of
Spanish American Poets by H.R. Hays.
[27][Notes 3]
"The
Garden of Forking Paths", one of the rst Borges stories to
be translated into English, appeared in the August 1948
issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, translated by
Anthony Boucher.
[28]
Though several other Borges
translations appeared in literary magazines and anthologies
during the 1950s, his international fame dates from the
early 1960s.
[29]
In 1961, Borges received the rst Prix International, which
he shared with Samuel Beckett. While Beckett had garnered
a distinguished reputation in Europe and America, Borges
had been largely unknown and untranslated in the English-
speaking world and the prize stirred great interest in his
work. The Italian government named Borges
Commendatore and the University of Texas at Austin
appointed him for one year to the Tinker Chair. This led to
his rst lecture tour in the United States. In 1962, two major
anthologies of Borges's writings were published in English
by New York presses: Ficciones and Labyrinths. In that
year, Borges began lecture tours of Europe. Numerous
honors were to accumulate over the years such as a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery
Writers of America "for distinguished contribution to the mystery genre" (1976),
[30]
the Balzan Prize (for
Mara Kodama at the 2010 Frankfurt
Book Fair
Philology, Linguistics and literary Criticism) and the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca and the Cervantes Prize
(all 1980), as well as the French Legion of Honour (1983).
In 1967, Borges began a ve-year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di
Giovanni, through whom he became better known in the English-speaking world. He also continued to
publish books, among them El libro de los seres imaginarios (Book of Imaginary Beings, (1967, co-written
with Margarita Guerrero), El informe de Brodie (Dr. Brodie's Report, 1970), and El libro de arena (The Book
of Sand, 1975). He also lectured prolically. Many of these lectures were anthologized in volumes such as
Siete noches (Seven Nights) and Nueve ensayos dantescos (Nine Dantesque Essays). His presence, also in
1967, on campus at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA) inuenced a group of students among
whom was Jared Loewenstein, who would later become founder and curator of the Jorge Luis Borges
Collection at UVA,
[31]
one of the largest repositories of documents and manuscripts pertaining to the early
works of JLB.
[32]
Later personal life
In 1967, Borges married the recently widowed Elsa Astete Milln.
Friends believed that his mother, who was 90 and anticipating her
own death, wanted to nd someone to care for her blind son. The
marriage lasted less than three years. After a legal separation, Borges
moved back in with his mother, with whom he lived until her death at
age 99.
[33]
Thereafter, he lived alone in the small at he had shared
with her, cared for by Fanny, their housekeeper of many decades.
[34]
From 1975 until the time of his death, Borges traveled
internationally. He was often accompanied in these travels by his
personal assistant Mara Kodama, an Argentine woman of Japanese
and German ancestry. In April 1986, a few months before his death,
he married her via an attorney in Paraguay, in what was then a
common practice among Argentines wishing to circumvent the
Argentine laws of the time regarding divorce.
On his religious views, Borges declared himself as an agnostic.
[35]
Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer in 1986 in Geneva and was
buried there in the Cimetire des Rois. Kodama, his widow and heir
on the basis of the marriage and two wills, gained control over his works. Her assertive administration of his
estate resulted in a bitter dispute with the French publisher Gallimard regarding the republication of the
complete works of Borges in French, with Pierre Assouline in Le Nouvel Observateur (August 2006) calling
her "an obstacle to the dissemination of the works of Borges". Kodama took legal action against Assouline,
considering the remark unjustied and defamatory, asking for a symbolic compensation of one
euro.
[36][37][38]
Kodama also rescinded all publishing rights for existing collections of his work in English,
including the translations by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in which Borges himself collaborated, and from
which di Giovanni would have received an unusually high fty percent of the royalties. Kodama
commissioned new translations by Andrew Hurley, which have become the standard translations in
English.
[39]
Borges and the Argentine writer
Ernesto Sabato.
Political opinions
Anti-Communism
In an interview with Richard Burgin during the late 1960s, Borges
described himself as an adherent of Classical Liberalism. He further
recalled that his opposition to Marxism and Communism was
absorbed in his childhood. "Well, I have been brought up to think
that the individual should be strong and the State should be weak. I
couldn't be enthusiastic about theories where the State is more
important than the individual."
[40]
After the overthrow via coup
d'etat of President Juan Domingo Pern in 1955, Borges supported
efforts to purge Argentina's Government of Peronists and dismantle
the former President's welfare state. He was enraged that the
Communist Party of Argentina opposed these measures and sharply
criticized them in lectures and in print. Borges's opposition to the
Party in this matter ultimately led to a permanent rift with his
longtime lover, Argentine Communist Estela Canto.
[41]
In later years,
Borges frequently expressed contempt for Marxists and Communists
within the Latin American intelligentsia. In an interview with Burgin,
Borges referred to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda as "a very ne poet"
but a "very mean man" for unconditionally supporting the Soviet
Union and demonizing the United States.
[42]
Anti-Fascism
In 1934, Argentine ultra-nationalists, sympathetic to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, asserted Borges was
secretly Jewish, and by implication, not a "true" Argentine. Borges responded with the essay "Yo, Judo" ("I,
a Jew"), a reference to the old "Yo, Argentino" ("I, an Argentine"), a defensive phrase used during pogroms
of Argentine Jews to make it clear to attackers that an intended victim was not Jewish.
[43]
In the essay he
says that he would be proud to be a Jew, with a backhanded reminder that any "pure" Castilian might be
likely to have Jewish ancestry from a millennium ago.
[43]
Both before and during the Second World War, Borges regularly published essays attacking the Nazi police
state and its racist ideology. His outrage was fueled by his deep love for German literature. In an essay
published in 1937, Borges attacked the Nazi Party's use of children's books in order to iname antisemitism.
He wrote, "I don't know if the world can do without German civilization, but I do know that its corruption
by the teachings of hatred is a crime."
[44]
In a 1938 essay, Borges reviewed an anthology which rewrote German authors of the past to t the Nazi
party line. He was disgusted by what he described as Germany's "chaotic descent into darkness" and the
attendant rewriting of history. He argues that such books sacrice culture, history and honesty in the name of
defending German honour. Such practices, he writes, "perfect the criminal arts of barbarians."
[45]
In a 1944
essay, Borges postulated,
Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena's hell. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie
for it, wound and kill for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I
shall risk this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is blindly collaborating with the
inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon, (which must
have known that they were monsters), collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules."
[46]
In 1946, Borges published the short story "Deutsches Requiem", which masquerades as the last testament of
Otto Dietrich zur Linde, a condemned Nazi war criminal. In a 1967 interview with Burgin, Borges recalled
how his interactions with Argentina's Nazi sympathisers led him to create the story.
And then I realized that those people that were on the side of Germany, that they never thought
of German victories or the German glory. What they really liked was the idea of the Blitzkrieg,
of London being on re, of the country being destroyed. As to the German ghters, they took no
stock in them. Then I thought, well now Germany has lost, now America has saved us from this
nightmare, but since nobody can doubt on which side I stood, I'll see what can be done from a
literary point of view in favor of the Nazis. And then I created the ideal Nazi.
[47]
Anti-Peronism
In 1946, Juan Pern began transforming Argentina into a Justicialist system with the assistance of his wife
Eva. Almost immediately, the spoils system was the rule of the day, as ideological critics of the new order
were dismissed from government jobs. During this period, Borges was informed that he was being
"promoted" from his position at the Miguel Can Library to a post as inspector of poultry and rabbits at the
Buenos Aires municipal market. Upon demanding to know the reason, Borges was told, "Well, you were on
the side of the Allies, what do you expect?"
[48]
In response, Borges resigned from Government service the
following day.
Pern's treatment of Borges became a cause clbre for the Argentine intelligentsia. The Argentine Society
of Writers (SADE) held a formal dinner in his honour. At the dinner, a speech was read which Borges had
written for the occasion. It said,
Dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships breed servility, dictatorships breed cruelty; more
loathsome still is the fact that they breed idiocy. Bellboys babbling orders, portraits of caudillos,
prearranged cheers or insults, walls covered with names, unanimous ceremonies, mere
discipline usurping the place of clear thinking... Fighting these sad monotonies is one of the
duties of a writer. Need I remind readers of Martn Fierro or Don Segundo that individualism is
an old Argentine virtue."
[49]
In the aftermath, Borges found himself much in demand as a lecturer and one of the intellectual leaders of
the Argentine opposition. In 1951 he was asked by anti-Peronist friends to run for president of SADE.
Borges, then suffering from depression caused by a failed romance, reluctantly accepted. He later recalled
that he would awake every morning and remember that Pern was President and feel deeply depressed and
ashamed.
[50]
Pern's government had seized control of the Argentine mass media and regarded SADE with
indifference. Borges later recalled, however, "Many distinguished men of letters did not dare set foot inside
its doors."
[51]
Meanwhile, SADE became an increasing refuge for critics of the regime. SADE ofcial Luisa
Mercedes Levinson noted, "We would gather every week to tell the latest jokes about the ruling couple and
Borges in 1976.
even dared to sing the songs of the French Resistance, as well as 'La Marseillaise'."
[51]
After Evita's death on July 26, 1952, Borges received a visit from two policemen, who ordered him to put up
two portraits of the ruling couple on the premises of SADE. Borges indignantly refused, calling it a
ridiculous demand. The policemen icily retorted that he would soon face the consequences.
[52]
The regime
placed Borges under 24-hour surveillance and sent policemen to sit in on his lectures; in September it
ordered SADE to be permanently closed down. Like much of the Argentine opposition to Pern, SADE had
become marginalized due to persecution by the State, and very few active members remained.
According to Edwin Williamson,
Borges had agreed to stand for the presidency of the
SADE in order [to] ght for intellectual freedom, but
he also wanted to avenge the humiliation he believed
he had suffered in 1946, when the Peronists had
proposed to make him an inspector of chickens. In his
letter of 1950 to Attilio Rossi, he claimed that his
infamous promotion had been a clever way the
Peronists had found of damaging him and
diminishing his reputation. The closure of the SADE
meant that the Peronists had damaged him a second
time, as was borne out by the visit of the Spanish
writer Julin Maras, who arrived in Buenos Aires
shortly after the closure of the SADE. It was
impossible for Borges, as president, to hold the usual
reception for the distinguished visitor; instead, one of
Borges' friends brought a lamb from his ranch, and
they had it roasted at a tavern across the road from
the SADE building on Calle Mexico. After dinner, a
friendly janitor let them into the premises, and they
showed Maras around by candlelight. That tiny
group of writers leading a foreign guest through a
dark building by the light of guttering candles was
vivid proof of the extent to which the SADE had been
diminished under the rule of Juan Pern.
[53]
On September 16, 1955, General Pedro Eugenio
Aramburu's Revolucin Libertadora toppled the elected
government and forced Pern to ee into exile. Borges was overjoyed and joined demonstrators marching
through the streets of Buenos Aires. According to Williamson, Borges shouted, "Viva la Patria," until his
voice grew hoarse. At his mother's prompting, the de facto Aramburu regime appointed Borges as the
Director of the National Library.
[54]
In his subsequent essay L'Illusion Comique, Borges denounced the conspiracy theories which the Peronist
State had spread through the press and speeches. In conclusion, he wrote:
...one can only denounce the duplicity of the ctions of the former regime, which can't be
believed and were believed. It will be said that the public's lack of sophistication is enough to
explain the contradiction; I believe that the cause is more profound. Coleridge spoke of the
"willing suspension of disbelief," that is, poetic faith; Samuel Johnson said, in defense of
Shakespeare, that the spectators at a tragedy do not believe they are in Alexandria in the rst act
and Rome in the second but submit to the pleasure of a ction. Similarly, the lies of a
dictatorship are neither believed nor disbelieved; they pertain to an intermediate plane, and their
purpose is to conceal or justify sordid or atrocious realities.
[55]
In a 1967 interview, Borges said, "Pern was a humbug, and he knew it, and everybody knew it. But Pern
could be very cruel. I mean, he had people tortured, killed. And his wife was a common prostitute."
[56]
When Pern returned from exile in 1973 and regained the Presidency, Borges was enraged. In a 1975
interview for National Geographic, he said "Damn, the snobs are back in the saddle. If their posters and
slogans again dele the city, I'll be glad I've lost my sight. Well, they can't humiliate me as they did before
my books sold well."
[57]
After being accused of being unforgiving, Borges quipped, "I resented Pern's
making Argentina look ridiculous to the world... as in 1951, when he announced control over thermonuclear
fusion, which still hasn't happened anywhere but in the sun and the stars. For a time, Argentinians hesitated
to wear band aids for fear friends would ask, 'Did the atomic bomb go off in your hand?' A shame, because
Argentina really has world-class scientists."
[57]
After Borges' death in 1986, the Peronist Partido Justicialista declined to send a delegate to the writer's
memorial service in Buenos Aires. A spokesman for the Party said that this was in reaction to "certain
declarations he had made about the country."
[58]
One Peronist declared that Borges had made statements
about Evita Pern which were "unacceptable." Later, at the City Council of Buenos Aires, a storm raged
when Peronist politicians decided to give only conditional support for a condolence on the writer's death.
[58]
Military junta
During the 1970s, Borges at rst expressed support for Argentina's military junta, but was scandalized by the
junta's actions during the Dirty War. In protest against their support of the regime, Borges ceased publishing
in the newspaper La Nacin.
[59]
In 1985 he wrote a short poem about the Falklands War called Juan Lpez y John Ward, about two ctional
soldiers (one from each side), who died in the Falklands, in which he refers to "islands that were too
famous". He also said about the war: "The Falklands thing was a ght between two bald men over a
comb."
[60]
Works
Main article: Jorge Luis Borges bibliography
Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort argue that Borges "may have been the most important gure in Spanish-
language literature since Cervantes. He was clearly of tremendous inuence, writing intricate poems, short
stories, and essays that instantiated concepts of dizzying power."
[61]
Tomb of Jorge Luis Borges, Cimetire
des Rois, Plainpalais.
In addition to short stories for which he is most noted, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, screenplays, literary
criticism, and edited numerous anthologies. His longest work of ction is a fourteen-page story, "The
Congress", rst published in 1971.
[8]
His late-onset blindness strongly inuenced his later writing. Borges
wrote: "When I think of what I've lost, I ask, 'Who know themselves better than the blind?' for every
thought becomes a tool."
[62]
Paramount among his intellectual interests are elements of mythology,
mathematics, theology, integrating these through literature, sometimes playfully, sometimes with great
seriousness.
[63]
Borges composed poetry throughout his life. As his eyesight waned (it came and went, with a struggle
between advancing age and advances in eye surgery), he increasingly focused on writing poetry, since he
could memorize an entire work in progress.
[64]
His poems embrace the same wide range of interests as his
ction, along with issues that emerge in his critical works and translations, and from more personal musings.
For example, his interest in idealism runs through his work, reected in the ctional world of Tln in "Tln,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and in his essay "A New Refutation of Time".
[65]
It also appears as a theme in "On
Exactitude in Science" and in his poems "Things" and "El Golem" ("The Golem") and his story "The
Circular Ruins".
Borges was a notable translator. He translated works of literature in English, French, German, Old English,
and Old Norse into Spanish. His rst publication, for a Buenos Aires newspaper, was a translation of Oscar
Wilde's story "The Happy Prince" into Spanish when he was nine.
[66]
At the end of his life he produced a
Spanish-language version of a part of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda. He also translated (while
simultaneously subtly transforming) the works of, among others, William Faulkner, Andr Gide, Hermann
Hesse, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf.
[Notes 4]
Borges
wrote and lectured extensively on the art of translation, holding that a translation may improve upon the
original, may even be unfaithful to it, and that alternative and potentially contradictory renderings of the
same work can be equally valid.
[67]
Borges also employed the devices of literary forgery and the review of
an imaginary work, both forms of modern pseudo-epigrapha.
Hoaxes and forgeries
Borges's best-known set of literary forgeries date from his early work
as a translator and literary critic with a regular column in the
Argentine magazine El Hogar. Along with publishing numerous
legitimate translations, he also published original works, for
example, in the style of Emanuel Swedenborg
[Notes 5]
or One
Thousand and One Nights, originally claiming them to be
translations of works he had chanced upon. In another case, he added
three short, falsely attributed pieces into his otherwise legitimate and
carefully researched anthology El matrero.
[Notes 5]
Several of these
are gathered in the A Universal History of Infamy.
At times he wrote reviews of nonexistent writings by some other
person. The key example of this is "Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quixote", which imagines a twentieth-century Frenchman who tries
to write Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote verbatim, not by having
Jorge Luis Borges Monument in
Santiago de Chile
memorized Cervantes's work but as an "original" narrative of his own invention. Initially the Frenchman
tries to immerse himself in sixteenth-century Spain, but he dismisses the method as too easy, instead trying
to reach Don Quixote through his own experiences. He nally manages to (re)create "the ninth and thirty-
eighth chapters of the rst part of Don Quixote and a fragment of chapter twenty-two." Borges's "review" of
the work of the ctional Menard uses tongue-in-cheek comparisons to explore the resonances that Don
Quixote has picked up over the centuries since it was written. He discusses how much "richer" Menard's
work is than that of Cervantes's, even though the actual text is exactly the same.
While Borges was the great popularizer of the review of an imaginary work, he had developed the idea from
Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a book-length review of a non-existent German transcendentalist work,
and the biography of its equally non-existent author. In This Craft of Verse, Borges says that in 1916 in
Geneva "[I] discovered, and was overwhelmed by, Thomas Carlyle. I read Sartor Resartus, and I can recall
many of its pages; I know them by heart."
[68]
In the introduction to his rst published volume of ction, The
Garden of Forking Paths, Borges remarks, "It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the
madness of composing vast books, setting out in ve hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related
orally in ve minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a
summary, a commentary on them." He then cites both Sartor Resartus and Samuel Butler's The Fair Haven,
remarking, however, that "those works suffer under the imperfection that they themselves are books, and not
a whit less tautological than the others. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to
write notes on imaginary books."
[69]
On the other hand, Borges was wrongly attributed some works, like the poem "Instantes".
[70][71]
Criticism of Borges' work
Borges's change in style from regionalist criollismo to a more
cosmopolitan style brought him much criticism from journals such as
Contorno, a left-of-centre, Sartre-inuenced Argentine publication
founded by David Vias and his brother, along with other
intellectuals such as No Jitrik and Adolfo Prieto. In the post-
Peronist Argentina of the early 1960s, Contorno met with wide
approval from the youth who challenged the authenticity of older
writers such as Borges and questioned their legacy of
experimentation. Magic realism and exploration of universal truths,
they argued, had come at the cost of responsibility and seriousness in
the face of society's problems.
[72]
The Contorno writers
acknowledged Borges and Eduardo Mallea for being "doctors of
technique" but argued that their work lacked substance due to their
lack of interaction with the reality that they inhabited, an
existentialist critique of their refusal to embrace existence and reality
in their artwork.
[72]
Sexuality
Jorge Luis Borges Monument in
Lisbon
With a few notable exceptions, women are almost entirely absent from the majority of Borges's ctional
output.
[73]
There are, however, some instances in Borges's writings of romantic love, for example the story
"Ulrikke" from The Book of Sand. The protagonist of the story "El muerto" also lusts after the "splendid,
contemptuous, red-haired woman" of Azevedo Bandeira
[74]
and later "sleeps with the woman with shining
hair".
[75]
Although they do not appear in the stories, women are signicantly discussed as objects of
unrequited love in his short stories "The Zahir" and "The Aleph".
[76]
The plot of La Intrusa was based on a
true story of two friends. Borges turned their ctional counterparts into brothers, excluding the possibility of
a homosexual relationship.
[77]
Nobel Prize omission
Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, something which continually distressed the
writer.
[8]
He was one of several distinguished authors who never received the honour.
[78]
Borges
commented, "Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition; since I was born they
have not been granting it to me."
[79]
Some observers speculated that Borges did not receive the award in his
later life because of his conservative political views; or more specically, because he had accepted an
honour from dictator Augusto Pinochet.
[80][81]
Fact, fantasy and non-linearity
Many of Borges's best-known stories deal with the nature of time
("The Secret Miracle"), innity ("The Aleph"), mirrors ("Tln,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius") and labyrinths ("The Two Kings and the Two
Labyrinths", "The House of Asterion", "The Immortal", "The Garden
of Forking Paths"). Williamson writes, "His basic contention was that
ction did not depend on the illusion of reality; what mattered
ultimately was an authors ability to generate 'poetic faith' in his
reader."
[8]
His stories often have fantastical themes, such as a library
containing every possible 410-page text ("The Library of Babel"), a
man who forgets nothing he experiences ("Funes, the Memorious"),
an artifact through which the user can see everything in the universe
("The Aleph"), and a year of still time given to a man standing before
a ring squad ("The Secret Miracle"). Borges also told realistic
stories of South American life, of folk heroes, streetghters, soldiers,
gauchos, detectives, and historical gures. He mixed the real and the
fantastic, fact with ction. His interest in compounding fantasy,
philosophy, and the art of translation are evident in articles such as
"The Translators of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights". In
the Book of Imaginary Beings, a thoroughly researched bestiary of
mythical creatures, Borges wrote, "There is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way
erudition."
[82]
Borges's interest in fantasy was shared by Bioy Casares, with whom he coauthored several
collections of tales between 1942 and 1967.
Often, especially early in his career, the mixture of fact and fantasy crossed the line into the realm of hoax or
literary forgery.
[Notes 5]
"The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941) presents the idea of forking paths through networks of time, none of
which is the same, all of which are equal. Borges uses the recurring image of "a labyrinth that folds back
upon itself in innite regression" so we "become aware of all the possible choices we might make."
[83]
The
forking paths have branches to represent these choices that ultimately lead to different endings. Borges saw
man's search for meaning in a seemingly innite universe as fruitless and instead uses the maze as a riddle
for time, not space.
[83]
Borges also examined the themes of universal randomness and madness ("The
Lottery in Babylon") and ("The Zahir"). Due to the success of the "Forking Paths" story, the term
"Borgesian" came to reect a quality of narrative non-linearity.
[Notes 6]
Borgesian conundrum
The philosophical term "Borgesian conundrum" is named after him and has been dened as the ontological
question of "whether the writer writes the story, or it writes him."
[84]
The original concept put forward by
Borges is in Kafka and His Precursorsafter reviewing works that were written before Kafka's, Borges
wrote:
If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not
mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. The second fact is the more signicant. In each of
these texts we nd Kafka's idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never
written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem
"Fears and Scruples" by Browning foretells Kafka's work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly
sharpens and deects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the
critics' vocabulary, the word 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all
connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His
work modies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future."
[85]
Culture and Argentine literature
Martn Fierro and Argentine tradition
Main article: Borges on Martn Fierro
Along with other young Argentine writers of his generation, Borges initially rallied around the ctional
character of Martn Fierro. Martn Fierro, a poem by Jos Hernndez, was a dominant work of 19th century
Argentine literature. Its eponymous hero became a symbol of Argentine sensibility, untied from European
values a gaucho, free, poor, pampas-dwelling.
[86]
The character Fierro is illegally drafted to serve at a
border fort to defend it against the indigenous population but ultimately deserts to become a gaucho matrero,
the Argentine equivalent of a North American western outlaw. Borges contributed keenly to the avant garde
Martn Fierro magazine in the early 1920s.
Borges in 1976
As Borges matured, he came to a more nuanced attitude toward the Hernndez poem. In his book of essays
on the poem, Borges separates his admiration for the aesthetic virtues of the work from his mixed opinion of
the moral virtues of its protagonist.
[87]
In his essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition" (1951), Borges
celebrates how Hernndez expresses the Argentine character. In a key scene in the poem, Martn Fierro and
El Moreno compete by improvising songs on universal themes such as time, night, and the sea, reecting the
real-world gaucho tradition of payadas, improvised musical dialogues on philosophical themes.
[86][88]
Borges points out that Hernndez evidently knew the difference between actual gaucho tradition of
composing poetry versus the "gauchesque" fashion among Buenos Aires literati.
In his works he refutes the arch-nationalist interpreters of the poem and disdains others, such as critic
Eleuterio Tiscornia, for their Europeanising approach. Borges
denies that Argentine literature should distinguish itself by
limiting itself to "local colour", which he equates with
cultural nationalism.
[88]
Racine and Shakespeare's work, he
says, looked beyond their countries' borders. Neither, he
argues, need the literature be bound to the heritage of old
world Spanish or European tradition. Nor should it dene
itself by the conscious rejection of its colonial past. He
asserts that Argentine writers need to be free to dene
Argentine literature anew, writing about Argentina and the
world from the point of view of those who have inherited the
whole of world literature.
[88]
Williamson says "Borges's main
argument is that the very fact of writing from the margins
provides Argentine writers with a special opportunity to
innovate without being bound to the canons of the centre, [...]
at once a part of and apart from the centre, which gives them
much potential freedom".
[86]
Argentine culture
Borges focused on universal themes, but also composed a substantial body of literature on themes from
Argentine folklore and history. His rst book, the poetry collection Fervor de Buenos Aires (Passion for
Buenos Aires), appeared in 1923. Borges's writings on things Argentine, include Argentine culture ("History
of the Tango"; "Inscriptions on Horse Wagons"), folklore ("Juan Muraa", "Night of the Gifts"), literature
("The Argentine Writer and Tradition", "Almafuerte"; "Evaristo Carriego"), and national concerns
("Celebration of the Monster", "Hurry, Hurry", "The Mountebank", "Pedro Salvadores"). Ultranationalists,
however, continued to question his Argentine identity.
[89]
Borges's interest in Argentine themes reects, in part, the inspiration of his family tree. Borges had an
English paternal grandmother who, around 1870, married the criollo Francisco Borges, a man with a
military command and a historic role in the Argentine Civil Wars in what is now Argentina and Uruguay.
Spurred by pride in his family's heritage, Borges often used those civil wars as settings in ction and quasi-
ction (for example, "The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz," "The Dead Man," "Avelino Arredondo") as well as
poetry ("General Quiroga Rides to His Death in a Carriage"). Borges's maternal great-grandfather, Manuel
Isidoro Surez, was another military hero, whom Borges immortalized in the poem "A Page to
Commemorate Colonel Surez, Victor at Junn." The city of Coronel Surez in the south of Buenos Aires
Province is named after him.
His non-ction explores many of the themes found in his ction. Essays such as "The History of the Tango"
or his writings on the epic poem "Martn Fierro" explore Argentine themes, such as the identity of the
Argentine people and of various Argentine subcultures. The varying genealogies of characters, settings, and
themes in his stories, such as "La muerte y la brjula", used Argentine models without pandering to his
readers or framing Argentine culture as "exotic".
[89]
In fact, contrary to what is usually supposed, the
geographies found in his ctions often do not correspond to those of real-world Argentina.
[90]
In his essay
"El escritor argentino y la tradicin", Borges notes that the very absence of camels in the Qur'an was proof
enough that it was an Arabian work. He suggested that only someone trying to write an "Arab" work would
purposefully include a camel.
[89]
He uses this example to illustrate how his dialogue with universal
existential concerns was just as Argentine as writing about gauchos and tangos.
Multicultural Inuences
At the time of the Argentine Declaration of Independence in 1816, the population was predominantly criollo
(of Spanish ancestry). From the mid-1850s on waves of immigration from Europe, especially Italy and
Spain, arrived in the country, and in the following decades the Argentine national identity diversied.
[8][91]
Borges therefore was writing in a strongly European literary context, immersed in Spanish, English, French,
German, Italian, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature. He also read translations of Near Eastern and Far
Eastern works. Borges's writing is also informed by scholarship of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and
Judaism, including prominent religious gures, heretics, and mystics.
[92]
Religion and heresy are explored in
such stories as "Averroes's Search", "The Writing of the God", "The Theologians", and "Three Versions of
Judas". The curious inversion of mainstream Christian concepts of redemption in the latter story is
characteristic of Borges's approach to theology in his literature.
In describing himself, he said, "I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the
people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my
ancestors."
[79]
As a young man, he visited the frontier pampas which extend beyond Argentina into Uruguay
and Brazil. Borges said that his father wished him "to become a citizen of the world, a great cosmopolitan,"
in the way of Henry and William James.
[93]
Borges lived and studied in Switzerland and Spain as a young
student. As Borges matured, he traveled through Argentina as a lecturer and, internationally, as a visiting
professor; he continued to tour the world as he grew older, nally settling in Geneva where he had spent
some of his youth. Drawing on the inuence of many times and places, Borges's work belittled nationalism
and racism.
[89]
Portraits of diverse coexisting cultures characteristic of Argentina are especially pronounced
in the book Six Problems for don Isidoro Parodi (co-authored with Bioy Casares) and the story "Death and
the Compass", which may or may not be set in Buenos Aires. Borges wrote that he considered Mexican
essayist Alfonso Reyes "the best prose-writer in the Spanish language of any time."
[94]
Borges was also an admirer of some Oriental culture, e.g. the ancient Chinese board game of Go, about
which he penned some verses,
[95]
while The Garden of Forking Paths had a strong oriental theme.
Inuences
Plaque Jorge Luis Borges at 13 rue
des Beaux-Arts in Paris
Modernism
Borges was rooted in the Modernism predominant in its early years
and was inuenced by Symbolism.
[96]
Like Vladimir Nabokov and
James Joyce, he combined an interest in his native culture with
broader perspectives, also sharing their multilingualism and
inventiveness with language. However, while Nabokov and Joyce
tended toward progressively larger works, Borges remained a
miniaturist. His work progressed away from what he referred to as
"the baroque": his later style is far more transparent and naturalistic
than his earlier works. Borges represented the humanist view of
media that stressed the social aspect of art driven by emotion. If art
represented the tool, then Borges was more interested in how the tool
could be used to relate to people.
[61]
Existentialism saw its apogee during the years of Borges's greatest artistic production. It has been argued
that his choice of topics largely ignored existentialism's central tenets. Critic Paul de Man notes, "Whatever
Borges's existential anxieties may be, they have little in common with Sartre's robustly prosaic view of
literature, with the earnestness of Camus' moralism, or with the weighty profundity of German existential
thought. Rather, they are the consistent expansion of a purely poetic consciousness to its furthest limits."
[97]
Political inuences
As a political conservative, Borges "was repulsed by Marxism in theory and practice. Abhorring
sentimentality, he rejected the politics and poetics of cultural identity that held sway in Latin America for so
long."
[98]
As a universalist, his interest in world literature reected an attitude that was also incongruent
with the Peronist Populist nationalism. That government's conscation of Borges's job at the Miguel Can
Library fueled his skepticism of government. He labeled himself a Spencerian anarchist, following his
father.
[99][100]
Mathematics
Main article: Borges and mathematics
The essay collection Borges y la Matemtica (Borges and Mathematics, 2003) by Argentine mathematician
and writer Guillermo Martnez, outlines how Borges used concepts from mathematics in his work. Martnez
states that Borges had, for example, at least a supercial knowledge of set theory, which he handles with
elegance in stories such as "The Book of Sand".
[101]
Other books such as The Unimaginable Mathematics of
Borges' Library of Babel by William Goldbloom Bloch (2008) and Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges,
Mathematics, and the New Physics by Floyd Merrell (1991) also explore this relationship.
Ancestry
Notes
1. ^ Edwin Williamson suggests in Borges (Viking, 2004) that Borges did not nish his baccalaurat (pp. 79-80): "he
1. ^ Edwin Williamson suggests in Borges (Viking, 2004) that Borges did not nish his baccalaurat (pp. 79-80): "he
cannot have been too bothered about his baccalaurat, not least because he loathed and feared examination. (He was
never to nish his high school education, in fact)."
2. ^ "His was a particular kind of blindness, grown on him gradually since the age of thirty and settled in for good after
his fty-eighth birthday." From Manguel, Alberto (2006) With Borges. London: Telegram Books pp. 1516.
3. ^ The Borges poems in H. R. Hays, ed. (1943) 12 Spanish American Poets are "A Patio", "Butcher Shop",
"Benares", "The Recoleta", "A Day's Run", "General Quiroga Rides to Death in a Carriage", "July Avenue," and
"Natural Flow of Memory".
4. ^ Notable translations also include work by Melville, Faulkner, Sir Thomas Browne, and G. K. Chesterton.
5. ^
a

b

c
His imitations of Swedenborg and others were originally passed off as translations, in his literary column in
Crtica. "El telogo" was originally published with the note "Lo anterior ... es obra de Manuel Swedenborg, eminente
ingeniero y hombre de ciencia, que durante 27 aos estuvo en comercio lcido y familiar con el otro mundo." ("The
preceding [...] is the work of Emanuel Swedenborg, eminent engineer and man of science, who during 27 years was
in lucid and familiar commerce with the other world.") See "Borges y Revista multicolor de los sbados:
confabulados en una escritura de la infamia" by Raquel Atena Green in Wor(l)ds of Change: Latin American and
Iberian Literature Volume 32 2010 Peter Lang publishers, ISBN 978-0-8204-3467-4
6. ^ Non-linearity was key to the development of digital media. See Murray, Janet H. "Inventing the Medium" The New
Media Reader. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003
References
1. ^ Jozef, Bella. "Borges: linguagem e metalinguagem". In: O espao reconquistado. Petrpolis, RJ: Vozes, 1974,
p.43.
2. ^
a

b
Theo L. D'Haen (1995) "Magical Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centers", in: Louis P.
Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Magical Realism: Theory, History and Community. Duhan and London, Duke
University Press pp. 191208.
3. ^ On his conference "Magical Realism in Spanish American" (Nova York, MLA, 1954), published later in Hispania,
38 (2), 1955.
4. ^ In short, Borges's blindness led him to favour poetry and shorter narratives over novels. Ferriera, Eliane Fernanda
C. "O (In) visvel imaginado em Borges". In: Pedro Pires Bessa (ed.). Riqueza Cultural Ibero-Americana. Campus de
Divinpolis-UEMG, 1996, pp. 313314.
5. ^ Borges on Life and Death (http://southerncrossreview.org/48/borges-barili.htm) Interview by Amelia Barili
6. ^ (Portuguese) Masina, Lea. (2001) "Murilo Rubio, o mgico do conto". In: O pirotcnico Zacarias e outros
contos escolhidos. Porto Alegre: L & PM, p5.
7. ^ Coetzee, J.M. "Borges's Dark Mirror", New York Review of Books, Volume 45, Number 16. October 22, 1998
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a

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d

e

f

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9. ^ Harold Bloom (2004) Jorge Luis Borges (Bloom's biocritiques) Infobase Publishing ISBN 0-7910-7872-8
10. ^ Borges, Jorge Luis, "Autobiographical Notes", The New Yorker, 19 September 1970.
11. ^ Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art (http://books.google.co.uk/books?
11. ^ Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art (http://books.google.co.uk/books?
id=oHzs8vuBQU8C&pg=PA16&dq=borges++Coll%C3%A8ge+de+Gen%C3%A8ve+baccalaur%C3%A9at&hl=en
&sa=X&ei=G-
PDULCbCMK30QXuroD4Dg&sqi=2&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=borges%20%20Coll%C3%A8ge%20
de%20Gen%C3%A8ve%20baccalaur%C3%A9at&f=false) (1999) Gene H. Bell-Villada, University of Texas Press,
p. 16 ISBN 9780292708785
12. ^ Wilson, Jason (2006). Jorge Luis Borges. Reaktion Books. p. 37. ISBN 1-86189-286-1.
13. ^ Borges: Other Inquisitions 19371952. Full introduction by James Irby. University of Texas ISBN 978-0-292-
76002-8 (http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/exboroth.html) Accessed 2010-08-16
14. ^ "Ivonne Bordelois, "The Sur Magazine" Villa Ocampo Website"
(http://www.villaocampo.org/ing/historico/cultura_1.htm). Villaocampo.org. Retrieved 2011-08-24.
15. ^ Borges, Jorge Luis. Trans. Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland. Dreamtigers. University of Texas Press, 1985, p.
25.
16. ^ Boldy (2009) p. 32
17. ^ Bolter, Jay David; Joyce, Michael (1987). "Hypertext and Creative Writing" (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?
id=317431). Hypertext '87 Papers. ACM. pp. 4150.
18. ^ Moulthrop, Stuart (1991). "Reading From the Map: Metonymy and Metaphor in the Fiction of 'Forking Paths' ". In
Delany, Paul; Landow, George P. Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London,
England: The MIT Press.
19. ^ "Borges, Jorge Luis (Vol.32)" (http://www.enotes.com/poetry-criticism/borges-jorge-luis). enotes. Retrieved 2008-
12-03.
20. ^ Wardrip-Fruin, Noah & Montfort, Nick (2003). The New Media Reader. MIT Press.
21. ^ , Alberto Manguel (2006) With Borges, London:Telegram Books pp. 1516.
22. ^ Woodall, J: The Man in Mirror of the Book, A Life of Luis Borges, (1996) Hodder and Stoughton pxxx.
23. ^ "Days of Hate" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046947/). Imdb. Retrieved 2008-12-04.
24. ^ Jorge Luis Borges (1984) Seven Nights, A New Directions Book pp 109-110.
25. ^
a

b

c

d
Burgin (1988) p xvii
26. ^ "The Craft of Verse: The Norton Lectures, 1967-68" (http://www.ubu.com/sound/borges.html). UbuWeb: Sound.
Retrieved 1 January 2014.
27. ^ H. R. Hays, ed. (1943) 12 Spanish American Poets. New Haven: Yale University Press p118-139.
28. ^ Jeffrey Alan Marks (2008) Anthony Boucher: A Biobibliography McFarland publishers, p77 ISBN 9780786433209
29. ^ Borges, Jorge Luis (1998) Collected Fictions Viking Penguin. Translation and notes by Andrew Hurley. Editorial
note p 517.
30. ^ Edgar Awards (http://theedgars.com/edgarsDB/index.php)
31. ^ UVA, Special Collections Library. http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/small/collections/borges/
32. ^ Montes-Bradley, Eduardo. "Cada pieza es de un valor incalculable" Cover Article. Revista , Diario Clarin.
Buenos Aires, September 5th, 2011.
33. ^ Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, The Lessons of the Master
34. ^ "Fanny", El Seor Borges
35. ^ Israel Shenker (April 6, 1971). "Borges, a Blind Writer With Insight"
(http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/31/reviews/borges-insight.html). New York Times. Retrieved 30 April 2013.
(http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/31/reviews/borges-insight.html). New York Times. Retrieved 30 April 2013.
"Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that
anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of
world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant."
36. ^ Mara Kodama demanda a un periodista francs por difamacin y reclama nada ms que 1 euro
(http://edant.revistaenie.clarin.com/notas/2008/05/14/01671869.html)
37. ^ Se suspendi un juicio por obras de Borges: reaccin de Kodama
(http://edant.revistaenie.clarin.com/notas/2008/05/15/01672570.html)
38. ^ (Spanish) Octavi Mart, Kodama frente a Borges, El Pas (Madrid), Edicin Impresa, 16 August 2006. Abstract
online (http://www.elpais.es/articulo/revista/agosto/Kodama/frente/Borges/elpporcul/20060816elpepirdv_1/Tes); full
text accessible online by subscription only.
39. ^ Richard Flanagan, "Writing with Borges",
(http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/07/12/1057783281684.html)The Age (Australia), 12 July 2003. Accessed
2010-08-16
40. ^ Burgin (1968). p. 104.
41. ^ Edwin Williamson, Borges: A Life, pp. 332333.
42. ^ Burgin (1968) pp. 956
43. ^
a

b
De Costa, Ren (2000) Humor in Borges (Humor in Life & Letters). Wayne State University Press p. 49 ISBN
0-8143-2888-1
44. ^ Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Nonctions, p 200.
45. ^ Selected Nonctions, page 201.
46. ^ Borges, Selected Nonctions, page 211.
47. ^ Burgin (1968), pp 31-332.
48. ^ Williamson (2004) p. 292
49. ^ Williamson (2004) p. 295
50. ^ Williamson (2004) p. 312
51. ^
a

b
Williamson (2004) p. 313
52. ^ Williamson (2004) p. 320.
53. ^ Williamson (2004) pp. 320-321.
54. ^ (Spanish) Jorge Luis Borges. Galera de Directores, Biblioteca Nacional (Argentina).
(http://web.archive.org/web/20080416034854/http://www.bibnal.edu.ar/paginas/galeriadirec.htm#borges) (archived
from the original (http://www.bibnal.edu.ar/paginas/galeriadirec.htm#borges), on 16 April 2008.)
55. ^ Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Nonctions, p. 410.
56. ^ Burgin (1969), p 121
57. ^
a

b
National Geographic, March 1975. p. 303.
58. ^
a

b
Williamson (2004) p. 491
59. ^ Willis Barnstone, With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires, University of Illinois Press, 1993. pp. 30-
31.
60. ^ Falkland Islands: Imperial pride (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/feb/19/falkland-islands-
editorial)
editorial)
61. ^
a

b
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Nick Montfort, ed. (2003). The New Media Reader. Cambridge: The MIT Press,
p. 29. ISBN 0-262-23227-8
62. ^ Borges, Jorge Luis. (1994) Siete Noches. Obras Completas, vol. III. Buenos Aires: Emec
63. ^ Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics (1991) Floyd Merrell, Purdue
University Press pxii ISBN 9781557530110
64. ^ New York Times May 7, 1972 "The Other Borges Than the Central One"
(http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/31/reviews/borges-brodie.html)
65. ^ Reading Borges After Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History (2008) Kate Jenckes, SUNY Press,
p136, p117, p101, p136 ISBN 9780791469903
66. ^ Kristal, Efran (2002). Invisible Work. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. p. 37. ISBN 0-8265-1408-1.
67. ^ Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse, Harvard University Press, 2000. pp. 5776. Word Music and Translation,
Lecture, Delivered February 28, 1968.
68. ^ Borges This Craft of Verse (p104)
69. ^ Borges Collected Fictions, p67
70. ^ University of Pittsburgh, Borges Center (http://www.borges.pitt.edu/bsol/iainst.php) Jorge Luis Borges, autor del
poema "Instantes", by Ivn Almeida. Retrieved January 10, 2011
71. ^ Internetaleph (http://www.internetaleph.com/detail/showdetail.asp?objtype=4&objid=4&langid=en&pid=74),
Martin Hadis' site on The Life & Works of Jorge Luis Borges. Retrieved January 10, 2011
72. ^
a

b
Katra, William H. (1988) Contorno: Literary Engagement in Post-Pernist Argentina. Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson UP, pp. 5657
73. ^ The Queer Use of Communal Women in Borges's "El muerto" and "La intrusa", paper presented at XIX Latin
American Studies Association (LASA) Congress held in Washington DC in September 1995.
74. ^ Hurley, Andrew (1988) Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin p197.
75. ^ Hurley, Andrew (1988) Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin p200
76. ^ Hurley, Andrew 1988) Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin
77. ^ Keller, Gary; Karen S. Van Hooft (1976). "Jorge Luis Borges's `La intrusa:' The Awakening of Love and
Consciousness/The Sacrice of Love and Consciousness.". In Eds. Lisa E. Davis and Isabel C. Tarn. The Analysis
of Hispanic Texts: Current Trends in Methodology. Bilingual P. pp. 300319.
78. ^ Feldman, Burton (2000) The Nobel Prize: a History of Genius, Controversy and Prestige, Arcade Publishing p57
79. ^
a

b
Guardian prole. "Jorge Luis Borges" 22 July 2008
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/10/jorgeluisborges). Accessed 2010-08-15
80. ^ "Briton Wins the Nobel Literature Prize." James M. Markham. The New York Times 7 October 1983
(http://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/07/books/83nobel.html). Accessed 2010-08-15
81. ^ Feldman, Burton (2000) The Nobel Prize: a History of Genius, Controversy and Prestige, Arcade Publishing p81
82. ^ Borges, Luis Borges (1979) Book of Imaginary Beings Penguin Books Australia p. 11 ISBN 0-525-47538-9
83. ^
a

b
Murray, Janet H. "Inventing the Medium" The New Media Reader. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.
84. ^ Ella Taylor (July 18, 2010). "Book review: The Thieves of Manhattan by Adam Langer". Los Angeles Times.
85. ^ Jorge Luis Borges (February 1988). Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. New Direction Books. p. 201.
86. ^
a

b

c
Gabriel Waisman, Sergio (2005) Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery Bucknell
86. ^
a

b

c
Gabriel Waisman, Sergio (2005) Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery Bucknell
University Press pp. 1269 ISBN 0-8387-5592-5
87. ^ Borges and Guerrero (1953) El "Martn Fierro ISBN 84-206-1933-7
88. ^
a

b

c
Borges, Jorge Luis and Lanuza, Eduardo Gonzlez (1961) "The Argentine writer and tradition" Latin
American and European Literary Society
89. ^
a

b

c

d
Takolander, Maria (2007) Catching butteries: bringing magical realism to ground Peter Lang Pub Inc pp.
5560. ISBN 3-03911-193-0
90. ^ David Boruchoff (1985), In Pursuit of the Detective Genre: La muerte y la brjula of Jorge Luis Borges, Inti:
Revista de Literatura Hispnica no. 21, pp. 13-26.
91. ^ "Velez, Wanda (1990) ''South American Immigration: Argentina''. Yale University, New Haven Teachers Institute"
(http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1990/1/90.01.06.x.html). Yale.edu. Retrieved 2011-08-24.
92. ^ Bell-Villada, Gene Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art
(http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/exbelbor.html) University of Texas Press ISBN 978-0-292-70878-5
93. ^ Williamson, Edwin (2004). Borges: a life. Viking. p. 53. ISBN 0-670-88579-7.
94. ^ Borges Siete Noches, p156
95. ^ "El Go" (http://gobase.org/reading/stories/?id=12). GoBase. Retrieved 26 August 2011.
96. ^ Britton, R (July 1979). "History, Myth, and Archetype in Borges's View of Argentina". The Modern Language
Review (Modern Humanities Research Association) 74 (3): 607616. doi:10.2307/3726707
(http://dx.doi.org/10.2307%2F3726707). JSTOR 3726707 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3726707).
97. ^ de Man, Paul. "A Modern Master", Jorge Luis Borges, Ed. Harold Bloom, New York: Chelsea House Pub, 1986. p.
22.
98. ^ New york Times Article. Paid Subscription only
(http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/31/reviews/970831.31gonz01.html)
99. ^ Yudin, Florence (1997). Nightglow: Borges' Poetics of Blindness. City: Universidad Ponticia de Salamanca.
p. 31. ISBN 84-7299-385-X.
100. ^ Bell-Villada, Gene (1981). Borges and His Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. p. 13.
ISBN 0-8078-1458-X.
101. ^ Martinez, Guillermo (2003) Borges y la Matemtica (Spanish Edition) Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires.
ISBN 950-23-1296-1
102. ^ Boldy, Steven. A Companion to Jorge Luis Borges. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2009. pp. 914. ISBN 9781855661899
Further reading
Agheana, Ion (1988). The Meaning of Experience in the Prose of Jorge Luis Borges. Frankfurt Am Main: P. Lang.
ISBN 0-8204-0595-7.
Agheana, Ion (1984). The Prose of Jorge Luis Borges. Frankfurt Am Main: P. Lang. ISBN 0-8204-0130-7.
Aizenberg, Edna (1984). The Aleph Weaver: Biblical, Kabbalistic and Judaic Elements in Borges. Potomac: Scripta
Humanistica. ISBN 0-916379-12-4.
Aizenberg, Edna (1990). Borges and His Successors. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. ISBN 0-8262-0712-X.
Alazraki, Jaime (1988). Borges and the Kabbalah. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-30684-1.
Alazraki, Jaime (1987). Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges. Boston: G.K. Hall. ISBN 0-8161-8829-7.
Balderston, Daniel (1993). Out of Context. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-1316-2.
Barnstone, Willis (1993). With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
ISBN 0-252-01888-5.
Barrenechea, Ana Mara (1965 LC 65-10764). Borges the Labyrinth Maker. Edited and Translated by Robert Lima.
New York City: New York University Press.
Bell-Villada, Gene (1981). Borges and His Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-
1458-X.
Bioy Casares, Adolfo (2006). Borges. City: Destino Ediciones. ISBN 978-950-732-085-9.
Bloom, Harold (1986). Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. ISBN 0-87754-721-1.
Bulacio, Cristina; Grima, Donato (1998). Dos Miradas sobre Borges. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de Arte Gaglianone.
ISBN 950-554-266-6. Illustrated by Donato Grima.
Burgin, Richard (1969) Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, Holt Rhinehart Winston
Burgin, Richard (1998) Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, University Press of Mississippi
De Behar, Block (2003). Borges, the Passion of an Endless Quotation. Albany: State University of New York Press.
ISBN 1-4175-2020-5.
Di Giovanni, Norman Thomas (1995). The Borges Tradition. London: Constable in association with the Anglo-
Argentine Society. ISBN 0-09-473840-8.
Di Giovanni, Norman Thomas (2003). The Lesson of the Master. London: Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-6110-7.
Dunham, Lowell (1971). The Cardinal Points of Borges. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 0-8061-
0983-1.
Fishburn, Evelyn (2002). Borges and Europe Revisited. City: Univ of London. ISBN 1-900039-21-4.
Frisch, Mark (2004). You Might Be Able to Get There from Here. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
ISBN 0-8386-4044-3.
Kristal, Efran (2002). Invisible Work. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. ISBN 0-585-40803-3.
Lan Corona, Guillermo. "Borges and Cervantes: Truth and Falsehood in the Narration. Neophilologus, 93 (2009):
421-37.
Lan Corona, Guillermo. "Teora y prctica de la metfora en torno a Fervor de Buenos Aires, de Borges.
Cuadernos de Aleph. Revista de literatura hispnica, 2 (2007): 79-93.
http://cuadernosdealeph.com/revista_2007/A2007_pdf/06%20Teor%C3%ADa.pdf
Lima, Robert (1993). "Borges and the Esoteric". Crtica hispnica. Special issue (Duquesne University) 15 (2).
ISSN 0278-7261 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0278-7261).
Lindstrom, Naomi (1990). Jorge Luis Borges. Boston: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0-8057-8327-X.
Manguel, Alberto (2006). With Borges. City: Telegram. ISBN 978-1-84659-005-4.
Manovich, Lev, New Media from Borges to HTML, 2003 (http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-
intro-manovich-excerpt.pdf)
McMurray, George (1980). Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Ungar. ISBN 0-8044-2608-2.
Molloy, Sylvia (1994). Signs of Borges. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-1406-1.
Murray, Janet H., Inventing the Medium, 2003 (http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-intro-murray-
excerpt.pdf)
excerpt.pdf)
Nez-Faraco, Humberto (2006). Borges and Dante. Frankfurt Am Main: P. Lang. ISBN 978-3-03910-511-3.
Racz, Gregary (2003). Jorge Luis Borges (18991986) as Writer and Social Critic. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press.
ISBN 0-7734-6904-4.
Rodrguez, Monegal (1978). Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Dutton. ISBN 0-525-13748-3.
Rodrguez-Luis, Julio (1991). The Contemporary Praxis of the Fantastic. New York: Garland. ISBN 0-8153-0101-4.
Sarlo, Beatriz (2007). Jorge Luis Borges: a Writer on the Edge. London: Verso. ISBN 978-1-84467-588-3.
Shaw, Donald (1992). Borges' Narrative Strategy. Liverpool: Francis Cairns. ISBN 0-905205-84-7.
Stabb, Martin (1991). Borges Revisited. Boston: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0-8057-8263-X.
Sturrock, John (1977). Paper Tigers. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-815746-0.
Todorov, Tzvetan (1970). Introduction la littrature fantastique. Paris: Seuil.
Toro, Alfonso (1999). Jorge Luis Borges. Frankfurt Am Main: Vervuert. ISBN 3-89354-217-5.
Volek, Emil (1984). "Aquiles y la Tortuga: Arte, imaginacin y realidad segn Borges". In: Cuatro claves para la
modernidad. Analisis semitico de textos hispnicos. Madrid.
Waisman, Sergio (2005). Borges and Translation. Lewisburg Pa.: Bucknell University Press. ISBN 0-8387-5592-5.
Williamson, Edwin (2004). Borges: A Life. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-88579-7.
Wilson, Jason (2006). Jorge Luis Borges. London: Reaktion Books. ISBN 978-1-86189-286-7.
Woscoboinik, Julio (1998). The Secret of Borges. Washington: University Press of America. ISBN 0-7618-1238-5.
Mualem, Shlomy (2012). Borges and Plato: A Game with Shifting Mirrors. Madrid and Frankfurt:
Iberoamericana/Vervuert. ISBN 978-8484895954.
Documentaries
Eduardo Montes-Bradley (Writer/Director) (1999). Harto The Borges (Feature Documentary). USA: Patagonia Film
Group, US.
Ricardo Wullicher (Director) (1978). Borges para millones (Feature Documentary). Argentina.
David Wheatley (Director) (1983). Prole Of A Writer: Borges and I (http://ubu.com/lm/borges_portrait.html)
(Feature Documentary). Arena.
External links
Jorge Luis Borges (http://www.dmoz.org/Arts/Literature/Authors/B/Borges%2C_Jorge_Luis/) at
DMOZ
Works by Jorge Luis Borges on Open Library at the Internet Archive
Ronald Christ (WinterSpring 1967). "Jorge Luis Borges, The Art of Fiction No. 39"
(http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4331/the-art-of-ction-no-39-jorge-luis-borges). Paris
Review.
BBC Radio 4 discussion programme (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076182) from In our time.
(Audio 45 mins)
Jorge Luis Borges at The Modern Word (http://www.themodernword.com/borges/index.html)
Borges Center, University of Pittsburgh (http://www.borges.pitt.edu/).
The Friends of Jorge Luis Borges Worldwide Society & Associates (http://amigos-de-
borges.net/site/english/main/)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jorge_Luis_Borges&oldid=607639236"
Categories: Jorge Luis Borges 1899 births 1986 deaths Classical liberals Argentine agnostics
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