Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges
File:Borges.jpg Argentine writer
Born
August 24, 1899 Buenos Aires, Argentina
Died
June 14, 1986 Geneva, Switzerland

Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899—June 14, 1986) was an Argentine poet, essayist, and short-story author who is considered one of the foremost figures in world literature of the 20th century. One of the most thoroughly inventive and creative writers to have ever lived, Borges' fame rests primarily on his notoriously complex and original short-stories. Borges' stories are dream-like, where fantastic and impossible events happen, and they often take the form of a philodophical invesitgation or thought-experiment. Beginning with relatively simple philosophical propositions—What would it be like to be immortal? What would it be like if one could not forget anything?—Borges' stories conclude, again and again, with the profound truths and paradoxes that are revealed when philodophical ideas are fully imagined in a masterful narrative.

However, Borges, it is important to stress, was not just an author of short-stories. In the Spanish-speaking world, Borges is known just as much if not more as a poet and essayist than he is as a fiction-writer; though it has only been in recent decades that Borges' formidable talents as a poet have come to light in the world at large.

Borges belonged to the school of literary Modernism, being contemporary with many of the modern giants such as Joyce and Pound. He also explicitly noted his debt to early modern writers such as Whitman and Kafka. Yet despite all this, Borges is a very unusual Modernist. Unlike many other modern writers, Borges never composed an enormous masterpiece like Joyce's Ulysses or Pound's Cantos that would serve as a summation of all his thought. Instead, he preferred tinkering with his so-called "miniatures": stories, poems, and essays that almost never exceed a dozen pages in length. He even went so far as to invent a form, the review of an imaginary book, where, instead of writing lengthy books himself he would simply imagine someone else had already written them and commence writing a review. He would often remark that there was no point in dedicating hundreds of pages of fiction to working out an idea that can be summarized in a few paragraphs, and in this respect Borges is distinct from the majority of writers of the Modernist period. As he grew older his style became increasingly spare and realistic, moving away from the Modernist tendency for what he called "the baroque"—prose and poetry that has become so over-complicated as to be unreadable. Borges is one of the most unique literary voices in the 20th-century, and his influence extends beyond the bounds of Modernism, realism, or any other category; he is a literature unto himself.

Life

Youth

Borges was born in Buenos Aires. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was a lawyer and psychology teacher, who also had literary aspirations ("he tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt", Borges once said. "He composed some very good sonnets"). Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from an old Uruguayan family. His father was part Spanish, part Portuguese, and half British; his mother was Spanish, and possibly Portuguese. At his home, both Spanish and English were spoken and from earliest childhood Borges was effectively bilingual.

Jorge Guillermo Borges was forced into early retirement from the legal profession owing to the same failing eyesight that would eventually afflict his son; and in 1914, the family moved to Geneva, where Borges, senior, was treated by a Geneva eye-specialist while Borges and his sister Norah (born 1902) attended school. There Borges learned French, which he apparently had initial difficulties with, and taught himself German, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève 1918.

After World War I ended, the Borges family spent three years variously in Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid. In Spain, Borges became a member of the avant-garde Ultraist literary movement. His first poem, "Hymn to the Sea," written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published in the magazine Grecia ("Greece", in Spanish). While in Spain Borges frequented such notable Spanish writers as Rafael Cansinos Assens and Ramón Gómez de la Serna.

Early writing career

In 1921, Borges returned with his family to Buenos Aires where he imported the doctrine of Ultraism and launched his career as a writer by publishing poems and essays in literary journals. Borges' first collection of poetry was Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923). He contributed to the avant-garde review Martín Fierro, co-founded the journals Prisma (1921–1922) and Proa (1922–1926). He was, from the first issue, a regular contributor to Sur, founded in 1931, by Victoria Ocampo, which became Argentina's most important literary journal. Ocampo herself introduced Borges to Adolfo Bioy Casares, who was to become Borges's frequent collaborator and Ocampo's brother-in-law, and another well-known figure of Argentine literature.

In 1933 Borges was appointed editor of the literary supplement of the newspaper Crítica, and it was there that the pieces later published in Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy) appeared. These pieces lay somewhere between non-fictional essays and fictional short stories, using fictional techniques to tell essentially true stories, and literary forgeries, which typically claimed to be translations of passages from famous but seldom read works. In the following years, he served as a literary adviser for the publishing house Emecé Editores and wrote weekly columns for El Hogar, which appeared from 1936 to 1939.

Starting in 1937, friends of Borges found him work at the Miguel Cané branch of the Buenos Aires Municipal Library as a first assistant. When Juan Perón came to power in 1946, Borges was effectively fired by being "promoted" to the position of poultry inspector for the Buenos Aires municipal market, from which he immediately resigned. Borges' offenses against the Peronistas up to that time had apparently consisted of little more than adding his signature to pro-democratic petitions; but shortly after his resignation he addressed the Argentine Society of Letters saying, in his characteristic style, "Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy."

Borges's father died in 1938, a great blow because the two were very close. On Christmas Eve 1938, Borges suffered a severe head wound in an accident; during treatment for that wound, he nearly died of septicemia. (He based his 1941 short story El Sur on this event.) While recovering from the accident, he began writing in the hyper-learned and complex style he became famous for, and his first collection of short stories, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths) appeared in 1941. Though generally well received, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan failed to garner the literary prizes many in his circle expected for it. 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 in praise of Borges' neglected volume. El jardin has since gone on to become one of Borges' most beloved volumes.

Maturity

Left without a job, his vision beginning to fade, and unable to fully support himself as a writer, Borges began a new career as a public lecturer. Despite a certain amount of political persecution, he was reasonably successful, and became an increasingly public figure, obtaining appointments as President of the Argentine Society of Writers (1950–1953) and as Professor of English and American Literature (1950–1955) at the Argentine Association of English Culture. His short story Emma Zunz was turned into a film (under the name of Días de odio, which in English became Days of Wrath) in 1954 by Argentine director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson. Around this time, Borges also began writing screenplays.

In 1955, and after the initiative of Ocampo, the new anti-Peronist military government appointed him head of the National Library.[1] By that time, he had become fully blind. Neither coincidence nor the irony escaped Borges and he commented on them in his work:

Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche

esta demostración de la maestría

de Dios, que con magnífica ironía

me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.

Let nobody debase into tear or reproach

This demonstration of the skill

Of God, who with excellent irony

Gave me at once books and darkness.

The following year he received the National Prize for Literature and the first of many honorary doctorates, this one from the University of Cuyo. From 1956 to 1970, Borges also held a position as a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires, while frequently holding temporary appointments at other universities.

International recognition

Borges's international fame dates from the early 1960s. In 1961, he received the Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. The prize helped Borges to gain the attention of an English-speaking audience. Shortly thereafter, Borges commenced his first lecture tour of the United States. The first translations of his work into English were to follow in 1962, with lecture tours of Europe and the Andean region of South America in subsequent years.

Though a contender since at least the late 1960s, Borges did not win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Especially in the late 1980s, when Borges was clearly growing old and infirm, the failure to award him the prize became a glaring omission. It was speculated at the time and since that it was his support for (or at least failure to condemn) the coup d'etat and subsequent dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile which ultimately led to his not receiving the award. Borges joined a distinguished list of non-winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, which includes Graham Greene, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and Leo Tolstoy, among others.

Later Life

When Perón returned from exile and was re-elected president in 1973, Borges immediately resigned as director of the National Library.

Borges was twice married. In 1967 his mother, then over 90 years old and fearing her own death, wanted to find someone to care for her blind son. Thus she and his sister Norah arranged for Borges to marry the recently widowed Mrs Elsa Astete Millán. The marriage lasted less than three years. After legal separation, Borges moved back in with his mother, with whom he lived all his life until her death at 99. Thereafter, he lived alone in the small flat he had shared with her and was cared for by their housekeeper of many decades.

Although he had done quite a bit of travelling previously, after 1975, the year his mother died, Borges started a series of extensive visits to countries all over the world, continued until the time of his death. In these travels, he was often accompanied by his amanuensis and research assistant, María Kodama, an Argentine woman of Japanese and German ancestry. This companionship soon developed into a very close personal relationship. The two would eventually mary quite late in Borges' life, and Kodama would be made Borges' sole literary executor, a position she continues to fulfill to this day.

Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer in Geneva and is buried in the Cimetière des Rois in Plainpalais.

Work

In addition to his short stories for which he is most famous, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, several screenplays, and a considerable volume of literary criticism, prologues, and reviews, edited numerous anthologies, and was a prominent translator of English-, French- and German-language literature into Spanish. His blindness (which, like his father's, developed in adulthood) strongly influenced his later writing. Borges had to dictate all of his stories and poems to an amamneunsis after he became blind, and the results are quite striking: while the early Borges' prose is often florid and exuberantly verbose, the later Borges' writing is remarkably spare and focused.

Borges lived through most of the twentieth century, and so was rooted in the Modernist period of literature. His fiction is profoundly learned, and always concise. Unlike many other Modernists with whom Borges contemporary, such as James Joyce or Ezra Pound, Borges veered dramatically away from what he called "the baroque"—poetry and fiction that has been made so complicated as to be unreadable. His poetry, always, remained bound to the strictures of conventional meter and rhyme and his stories—even though the are often confoundingly diffuclt—can nevertheless be unraveled if one is patient enough to follow all of the details. Borges, particularly in his old age, perhaps has more in common with other semi-anacrhonistic Modernists like Robert Frost than any of the more revolutionary-minded English- and Spanish-language writers with whom Borges often associated with.

Many of his most popular stories concern the nature of time, infinity, mirrors, labyrinths, reality, and identity. A number of stories focus on fantastic themes, such as a library containing every possible text ("The Library of Babel"), a man who cannot forget ("Funes, the Memorious"), an artifact through which the user can see everything in the universe ("The Aleph"), and a year of time standing still, given to a man standing before a firing squad so that he can finish the epic poem he had been working on all his life ("The Secret Miracle"). The same Borges also wrote more ror less realistic stories of South American life: stories of folk heroes, streetfighters, soldiers, gauchos, (Argentinian cowboys) all deeply imbued in the gruff history of his native homeland.

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), Borges increasingly focused on writing poetry, because he could memorize an entire work in progress. His poems embrace the same wide range of interests as his fiction, along with issues that emerge in his critical works and translations, and from more personal musings. This breadth of interest can be found in his fiction, nonfiction, and poems. For example, his interest in philosophical idealism is reflected in the fictional world of Tlön in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", in his essay "New Refutation of Time", and in his poem "Things." Similarly, a common thread runs through his story "The Circular Ruins" and his poem "El Golem" ("The Golem").

At times, confronted with an idea for a work that bordered on the conceptual, Borges chose — instead of following through with the idea in the obvious way, by writing a piece that fulfilled the concept — to write a review of a nonexistent work, writing as though the work had already been created by some other person. The most famous example of this is "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", which imagines a twentieth-century Frenchman who so immerses himself in the world of sixteenth-century Spain that he can sit down and create a large portion of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote verbatim, not by having memorized Cervantes's work, but as an "original" work of his own mind. Borges's "review" of the work of the fictional Menard effectively discusses the resonances that Don Quixote has picked up over the centuries since it was written, by way of overtly discussing how much richer Menard's work is than Cervantes's (verbatim identical) work.

While Borges was certainly the great popularizer of the review of an imaginary work, it was not his own invention. It is likely that he first encountered the idea in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a book-length review of a non-existent German transcendentalist philosophical work and biography of its equally non-existent author. This Craft of Verse (p. 104), records Borges as saying that in 1916 in Geneva he "discovered — and was overwhelmed by — Thomas Carlyle. I read Sartor Resartus, and I can recall many of its pages; I know them by heart." In the introduction to his first published volume of fiction, 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 five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five 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." [Collected Fictions, p.67]

International themes in Borges

• Argentina: Biographer of Evaristo Carriego; earnest reader of Leopoldo Lugones, Almafuerte, others; "History of the Tango", "Our Poor Individualism", "Horse Cart Inscriptions", "Celebration of the Monster", "The South", "The Mountebank"

• China: "The Garden of Forking Paths", "The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate"

• Czech Republic: Prague setting for "The Secret Miracle" (part of Czechoslovakia at the time);

strongly influenced by Franz Kafka (born in what was at the time Bohemia, Austro-Hungarian empire)

• France: influenced by Leon Bloy; fan of/essay about Guillaume Apollinaire

• Germany: Special affinity for Heinrich Heine, influenced by Kurd Lasswitz; earnest reader of Fritz Mauthner, Arthur Schopenhauer; "Deutsches Requiem", "German Literature in the Age of Bach"

• India: setting for "Man on the Threshold" and "The Approach to Al Mu'tasim"

• Iran (Persia): "The Masked Dyer Hakim of Merv"; "The Simurgh and the Eagle" based on Farid ad-Din Attar; "The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald" who based his most famous work on Omar Khayyam

• Ireland: Influenced by John Scotus Erigena, Jonathan Swift George Bernard Shaw, subjective idealist metaphysicist George Berkeley who was also an Irish bishop; translated Oscar Wilde into Spanish; reviews of James Joyce; setting of "The Form of the Sword" and "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero".

• Italy: Borges had a special affinity for Dante's The Divine Comedy, the subject of Nine Dantesque Essays

• Japan: "The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kotsuke no Suke"

• Mexico: "The Writing of the God" (also translated as "The God's Script")

• Spain: Borges makes frequent reference to Don Quixote and to the 17th century writer Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas. Setting for "Averroes' Search"

• Portugal: scattered references to Eça de Queiroz.

• United Kingdom: Extensive study of English/Anglo Saxon literature; influenced by Samuel Butler, G.K. Chesterton, Thomas de Quincey, David Hume, Rudyard Kipling, Herbert Spencer, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Carlyle; "Everything and Nothing", "Shakespeare´s Memory"

• United States: translator of William Faulkner into Spanish; special affinity for Walt Whitman, influenced by/essays about Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne; Mark Twain-inspired "The Dreaded Redeemer Lazarus Morel"; many reviews of films, e.g. Citizen Kane ("An Overwhelming Film");

• Scandinavia: setting for "Undr"; lectures on Norse Sagas; learned Old Norse

• Uruguay: historical fiction "Avelino Arredondo"

Religious themes in Borges: Mainline, heretical, and mystical

• Buddhist: "Theme of the Beggar and the King", lecture on Buddhism in Seven Nights

• Christian: Influenced by John Scotus Erigena; "The Mirror of Enigmas" partially based on ideas of Léon Bloy; "A History of Eternity", "Three Versions of Judas", "The Sect of the Thirty", "The Theologians", "The Gospel of Mark", "The Theologian in Death", an early work in imitation of Emanuel Swedenborg

• Gnostic: "A Defense of Basilides the False"

• Islamic: "Approach to Al Mu'tasim", "Averroes' Search", "Hakim, Masked Dyer of Merv", "The Chamber of Statues"; "The Simurgh and the Eagle" based on Farid ad-Din Attar; "The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald" who based his most famous work on Omar Khayyam; strongly influenced by/studied several translations of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights

• Jewish: "Death and the Compass", "The Golem", "A Defense of the Cabala", lectures on Cabala and on Shmuel Agnon

• Pagan: "The House of Asterion", "The Circular Ruins", "The Immortals"

• Fictional: The heresiarchs of Uqbar in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "The Sect of the Phoenix"

Quotations

• "The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it." — (dogma of a fictional religion in "Hakim, the masked dyer of Merv").

• "The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry."

• "I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as 'The Masses'. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time." — Introduction to The Book of Sand

Critical bibliography

• You might be able to get there from here: reconsidering Borges and the postmodern / Frisch, Mark F., 2004
• Jorge Luis Borges (Bloom's BioCritiques) / Bloom, Harold., 2004
• Jorge Luis Borges as writer and social critic / Racz, Gregary Joseph., 2003
• The lesson of the master: on Borges and his work / Di Giovanni, Norman Thomas., 2003
• Borges, the passion of an endless quotation / Block de Behar, Lisa., 2003
• Jorge Luis Borges (Bloom's Major Short Story Writers) / Bloom, Harold., 2002
• Invisible work: Borges and translation / Kristal, Efraín., 2002
• Borges and his fiction: a guide to his mind and art / Bell-Villada, Gene., 1999
• Jorge Luis Borges: thought and knowledge in the XXth century / Toro, Alfonso de., 1999
• The secret of Borges: a psychoanalytic inquiry into his work / Woscoboinik, Julio., 1998
• Borges and Europe revisited / Fishburn, Evelyn., 1998
• Nightglow: Borges' poetics of blindness / Yudin, Florence., 1997
• The Borges tradition / Di Giovanni, Norman Thomas., 1995
• Signs of Borges / Molloy, Sylvia., 1994
• Cervantes and the modernists: the question of influence / Williamson, Edwin., 1994
• Out of context: historical reference and the representation of reality in Borges / Balderston, Daniel., 1993
• Jorge Luis Borges: a writer on the edge / Sarlo, Beatriz., 1993
• Borges revisited / Stabb, Martin S., 1991
• The contemporary praxis of the fantastic: Borges and Cortázar / Rodríguez-Luis, Julio., 1991
• Borges and his successors: the Borgesian impact on literature and the arts / Aizenberg, Edna., 1990
• Jorge Luis Borges: a study of the short fiction / Lindstrom, Naomi., 1990
• Borges and the Kabbalah: and other essays on his fiction and poetry / Alazraki, Jaime., 1988
• The meaning of experience in the prose of Jorge Luis Borges / Agheana, Ion Tudro., 1988
• Critical essays on Jorge Luis Borges / Alazraki, Jaime., 1987
• Jorge Luis Borges (Modern Critical Views) / Bloom, Harold., 1986
• Jorge Luis Borges, life, work, and criticism / Yates, Donald A., 1985
• The prose of Jorge Luis Borges: existentialism and the dynamics of surprise / Agheana, Ion Tudro., 1984
• The aleph weaver: biblical, kabbalistic and Judaic elements in Borges / Aizenberg, Edna., 1984
• Borges and his fiction: a guide to his mind and art / Bell-Villada, Gene H., 1981
• Jorge Luis Borges / McMurray, George R., 1980
• Paper tigers: the ideal fictions of Jorge Luis Borges / Sturrock, John., 1977
• The Cardinal points of Borges / Dunham, Lowell., 1971

External links

• The Modern Word: The Garden of Forking Paths. A comprehensive Web site dedicated to exploring Borges and his work, including pages that discuss writers that Borges influenced.

• The Borgesian Cyclopaedia. "Being a Virtual Reference to the World of Jorge Luis Borges".

• Internetaleph. Fully bilingual (English/Spanish) portal dedicated to Jorge Luis Borges. Links, recent news, reading suggestions and an introduction for beginners.

• Jorge Luis Borges: a first introduction to the author's prose work.

• The Jorge Luis Borges Center for Studies and Documentation

• The Friends of Jorge Luis Borges Worldwide Society & Associates A non-Governmental and not for profit organization with four distinctive entities that aim to promote artistic and intellectual talents along with civic virtues in new generations of mankind. Borges's works ("a writer of writers" for his extensive and insightful readings) are celebrated as a thread of Ariadne to walk the labyrinths of Philosophy and Literature and all fields of knowledge in quest of wisdom.
• Three stories by Borges

• Borges Stories Annotations

• Don’t abandon me Colm Tóibín writes about Edwin Williamson's 2005 biography of Borges

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