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Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges | |
|---|---|
| Error creating thumbnail: Borges in 1969 | |
| Born | Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges 24 August 1899 |
| Died | 14 June 1986 (aged 86) |
| Occupations | Writer, poet, essayist, translator, literary critic, librarian, teacher, editor |
| Spouse(s) |
María Kodama |
| Partner(s) | Concepción Guerrero Estela Canto |
| Writing career | |
| Language | Spanish |
| Signature | |
 | |
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (Buenos Aires, 24 August 1899 – Geneva, 14 June 1986) was an Argentine writer of short stories, essays and poems, widely considered a key figure both for Spanish-language literature and for world literature.[2]
His two best-known books, Ficciones and El Aleph, published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories connected by common themes, such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional authors and European mythology, with plots that explore philosophical ideas related, for example, to memory, eternity, postmodernity and metafiction.[3]
Borges's works have contributed broadly to philosophical literature, to the fantastic genre and to post-structuralism. According to numerous critics, the beginning of magical realism in 20th-century Hispanic American literature is due in large part to his work.[4]
Born in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Borges moved to Switzerland with his family in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family would travel extensively through Europe, including Spain. After his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary magazines while working as a librarian, teacher and lecturer. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Library of the Argentine Republic and professor of English literature at the University of Buenos Aires. At the age of 55 he became completely blind; numerous researchers have suggested that his progressive blindness motivated him to create innovative literary symbols through the imagination.[5]
Awarded numerous distinctions,[6] he was also controversial for his conservative political positions. The Mexican writer and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Carlos Fuentes went so far as to state that "Borges was a literary genius and a political idiot",[7] something that has been pointed to as the main cause that prevented him from obtaining the Nobel himself,[8][9] for which he was a candidate for almost thirty years.
Life and career
Early years
Borges considered that he had inherited two traditions from his ancestors: a military one and a literary one. His family tree connects him with illustrious Argentine families of criollo and Anglo-Saxon lineage, as well as Spanish and Portuguese. He descends from military men who took part in Argentine independence, such as Francisco Narciso de Laprida, who presided over the Congress of Tucumán and signed the Act of Independence; Francisco Borges Lafinur—his paternal grandfather—, a Uruguayan Colonel; Edward Young Haslam—his paternal great-grandfather, a Romantic poet who edited one of the first English newspapers of the Río de la Plata, the Southern Cross; Manuel Isidoro Suárez—his maternal great-grandfather—was a Colonel of the wars of Independence; Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur—his paternal great-uncle—an Argentine poet, author of Romantic and patriotic compositions and professor of Philosophy; Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida—his maternal grandfather—a military man who fought against Juan Manuel de Rosas.[10]
His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, who belonged to a family of Portuguese origin,[11] was an Argentine lawyer, born in Entre Ríos, who devoted himself to teaching psychology. He was an avid reader and had literary aspirations that he realized in a novel, El caudillo, and some poems; he also translated Omar Khayyam from the English version by Edward FitzGerald. By 1970, Jorge Luis remembered his father with these words: «He revealed to me the power of poetry: the fact that words are not only a means of communication but also magic symbols and music».[12]
His mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, was from Buenos Aires, although some sources consider her Uruguayan because she was the daughter of Uruguayans.[11] She learned English from her husband and translated several works into Spanish. His father's family had Spanish, Portuguese and English origins; his mother's, Spanish and possibly Portuguese. Both Castilian and English were spoken at home,[13] and therefore JLB grew up bilingual.[13][14]
Jorge Luis was born on 24 August 1899 at eight months of gestation, in a late-19th century Buenos Aires house with a patio and a cistern, two elements that would recur like an echo in his poetry. The house where he was born was at 840 Tucumán Street, but his childhood was spent a little farther north, at 2135 Serrano, in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo.
His relationship with literature began at a very early age; at four he already knew how to read and write. He would say, at 71, that «If I had to point out the capital event of my life, I would say my father's library. In fact, I believe I have never left that library. It is as if I were still seeing it… I clearly remember the steel engravings of Chambers's Encyclopaedia and of the Britannica».[14]
In 1905 he began taking his first lessons with a British governess.[n. 1] The following year he wrote his first story, La visera fatal, following pages of the Quixote. He also sketched out in English a brief essay on Greek mythology. At the age of eleven he translated from English The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde,[16] a text that was published in the newspaper El País signed by Jorge Borges (h).[14] In the neighborhood of Palermo, which at that time was a marginal neighborhood of immigrants and knife fighters, he learned of the exploits of the compadritos who later populated his fictions. Borges entered school directly in the fourth grade.[17] The start of his formal education at the age of 9, in a public school, was a traumatic experience for Borges; his classmates mocked that know-it-all, who wore glasses, dressed like a rich child, was not interested in sports and spoke with a stammer. During the four years he spent at that school, Borges learned little more than a few words of lunfardo and several strategies for going unnoticed.[18]
In 1914 Borges's father was forced to give up his profession, retiring from teaching because of the same progressive and hereditary blindness that decades later would also affect his son.[19] Together with the family, he went to Europe to undergo special ophthalmological treatment. To take refuge from the First World War, the family settled in Geneva (Switzerland), where the young Borges and his sister Norah—born on 4 March 1901[11]—would attend school. Borges studied French and completed his secondary education at the Lycée Jean Calvin.[17] The atmosphere in that Protestant-inspired institution was completely different from that of his previous school in Palermo; his classmates, many of them foreigners like him, now appreciated his knowledge and intelligence and did not mock his stammer.[20] During that time he read above all the prose writers of French Realism and the Expressionist and Symbolist poets, especially Rimbaud. At the same time, he discovered Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Mauthner, Carlyle and Chesterton. With only the help of a dictionary he taught himself German and wrote his first verses in French.[17]
Thanks to the end of hostilities, and after the death of his maternal grandmother, the Borges family went to Spain in 1919. They first settled in Barcelona and then moved to Palma de Mallorca. In the latter city Borges wrote two books that he did not publish: Los ritmos rojos, poems praising the Russian Revolution, and Los naipes del tahúr, a book of short stories. In Madrid and Seville he took part in the Ultraist literary movement, which he would later lead in Argentina and which would powerfully influence his first lyrical work. He contributed poems and literary criticism to the magazines Ultra, Grecia, Cervantes, Hélices and Cosmópolis. His first poem, Himno al mar, written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published in the magazine Grecia on 31 December 1919.[21]
Oh, sea! oh, myth! oh, long bed!
And I know why I love you. I know that we are very old.
That we have both known each other for centuries.
I know that in your venerable and laughing waters the dawn of Life blazed.
(In the ash of a Tertiary afternoon I vibrated for the first time in your womb).
Oh, protean one, I have come out of you.
Both of us chained and nomadic!
Both of us with an intense thirst for stars;
both with hopes and disappointments;
both, air, light, strength, darknesses;
both with our vast desire and both with our great misery.
— [21]
At this time he met his future brother-in-law, Guillermo de Torre, and some of the principal Spanish writers of the day, such as Rafael Cansinos-Assens—whom he frequented at the famous Café Colonial and whom he always considered his master—, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Valle Inclán and Gerardo Diego.[17]
Beginnings of his literary career
On 4 March 1921, together with his paternal grandmother—Frances Haslam, who had joined them in Geneva in 1916—, his parents and his sister, Borges embarked at the port of Barcelona on the Reina Victoria Eugenia, which would return them to Buenos Aires. Waiting for them at the port was the writer, philosopher of paradox and surreal humorist Macedonio Fernández, whose friendship Borges would inherit from his father. Contact with Buenos Aires led the poet into an exalted relationship of «discovery» with his native city. Thus he began to shape the mythification of the suburban neighborhoods, on which he would base part of his constant idealization of the real. Back in Buenos Aires he published in the Spanish magazine Cosmópolis, founded the wall magazine Prisma (of which only two issues were published) and also published in Nosotros, directed by Alfredo Bianchi. Around that time he met Concepción Guerrero, a sixteen-year-old girl with whom he fell in love. In 1922 he visited Leopoldo Lugones together with Eduardo González Lanuza to deliver to him the latest issue of Prisma. In August 1924 he founded the Ultraist magazine Proa together with Ricardo Güiraldes, author of Don Segundo Sombra; Alfredo Brandán Caraffa and Pablo Rojas Paz, although he would gradually abandon that aesthetic.[17][22] In 1923, on the eve of a second trip to Europe, Borges published his first book of poetry, Fervor de Buenos Aires, in which, in Borges's own words, all his later work is prefigured. It was an edition into which some errata slipped and which, moreover, lacked a prologue. His sister Norah made an engraving for the cover. Some three hundred copies were printed; the few that survive are considered treasures by bibliophiles, and some show handwritten corrections made by Borges himself. It is in Fervor de Buenos Aires that he confessed that, finally, «the streets of Buenos Aires/are now my very core». It consists of thirty-three heterogeneous poems that allude to a card game (truco), to Juan Manuel de Rosas, or to exotic Benares; without sparing room to take delight in an anonymous patio of Buenos Aires, «in the dark friendship/ of an entrance hall, a vine and a cistern». About the spirit of this book Borges wrote that «at that time I sought sunsets, the outskirts and unhappiness».[22]
After a year in Spain, and settled permanently in his native city from 1924, Borges contributed to some literary magazines and, with two additional books, Luna de enfrente and Inquisiciones—which he never reissued—, would by 1925 establish his reputation as leader of the youngest avant-garde. Over the following thirty years Borges would become one of the most brilliant and most controversial writers of America. Tired of the Ultraism that he himself had brought from Spain, he attempted to found a new kind of regionalism, rooted in a metaphysical perspective on reality. He wrote stories and poems about the Buenos Aires suburbs, about the tango, about fatal knife fights, such as Hombre de la esquina rosada and El puñal. He soon tired of this «ism» as well and began to speculate in writing about fantastic or magical narrative, to the point of producing over two decades—from 1930 to 1950—some of the most extraordinary fictions of the 20th century: Historia universal de la infamia, Ficciones, El Aleph, among others.[13][14]
Later he contributed, among other publications, to Martín Fierro, one of the key magazines in the history of Argentine literature in the first half of the 20th century. That magazine engaged in polemics on behalf of its own writers, who, in the context of meeting in cafés of the downtown area such as the one called Richmond, became known as the Florida Group, versus the writers who published with Editorial Claridad and met at the Café El Japonés, identified as the Boedo Group; that rivalry remained in the history of Argentine literature, even though Borges would later play down its significance. Despite his Europeanist education, he championed his Argentine roots and in particular those of Buenos Aires, in poetry collections such as Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), Luna de enfrente (1925) and Cuaderno San Martín (1929). He composed lyrics for tangos and milongas, although he shunned «the mawkishness of the inconsolable tango-song» and the systematic use of lunfardo, which «infuses an artificial air into simple couplets». His lyrics and some of his stories narrate the dubious exploits of the knife fighters and compadres, whom he shows in all their stark brutality, though within a tragic, if not almost epic, atmosphere.
In 1930 Borges published the essay Evaristo Carriego thanks to the publisher Manuel Gleizer and wrote the foreword for an exhibition by the Uruguayan painter Pedro Figari. He also met a young writer only 17 years old, who would later become his friend and with whom he would publish numerous texts, Adolfo Bioy Casares.[23] In the first issue of the magazine Sur, directed by Victoria Ocampo, Borges contributed an article devoted to Colonel Ascasubi. This first issue, published in 1931, also had contributions by Victoria Ocampo herself, Waldo Frank, Alfonso Reyes, Jules Supervielle, Ernest Ansermet, Walter Gropius, Ricardo Güiraldes and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle.[14] Two years later Borges published a collection of essays and literary criticism titled Discusión, which covers subjects as diverse as gauchesque poetry, the Kabbalah, philosophical topics, the art of narrative and even his opinion on film classics. On 12 August 1933 he began to direct, together with Ulyses Petit de Murat, the Revista Multicolor de los Sábados, a color-printed cultural supplement of the populist newspaper Crítica that would last until October 1934.[24] In 1935 he published Historia universal de la infamia, a series of short stories, among them Hombre de la esquina rosada.[25] In it he remains interested in the mythical profile of Buenos Aires begun in Evaristo Carriego. The following year the essays of Historia de la eternidad were published, in which—among other subjects—Borges inquires into metaphor. In the fortnightly magazine El Hogar he began to publish a column of criticism of foreign books and authors, which he kept until 1939. There he published every two weeks a great number of book reviews, brief biographies of writers and essays. He also contributed to the magazine Destiempo, edited by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Manuel Peyrou, with illustrations by Xul Solar. For the Sur publishing house he translated A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf and, the following year, the novel Orlando by the same author.[16] In 1940 he published Antología clásica de la literatura argentina.
The avant-garde and later bucolic Borges was transformed in the 1930s into the Borges of the magazine Sur, with his high-flying cosmopolitanism; into the metaphysical Borges who speculated about time and space and the infinite, life and death, and whether there is a destiny for man; into the Borges who makes a show of erudition and who already devises his celebrated trap texts: exhaustive commentaries, for example, on books that do not exist, or stories that join and mix the real with the fictitious. A change in style can also be perceived, a labor of pruning in prose and meter, which become more classical, clearer, simpler.[26]
The final years of this decade were dismal for Borges: first came the death of grandmother Fanny; then that of his father, preceded by a very slow and painful agony.[27] Borges was thrown all at once, and forcefully, into the world of responsible adults. He had to do what everyone else did from a much earlier age: work, support a family. In this he was lucky: with the help of the poet Francisco Luis Bernárdez, in 1938 he obtained a job at the Miguel Cané municipal library in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Boedo. In this little-frequented library he was able to go on doing what he usually did, spending his days among books, reading and writing.[26] Later, Borges himself suffered a serious accident when he struck his head on a window, which brought him to the brink of death from septicemia and which he would reflect, dreamlike, in his story El sur. During his convalescence he wrote the story Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote. Those convalescent dreams served him to write splendid pages, fanciful but woven by his unmistakable mind of always, lucid and penetrating. Borges came out of the ordeal strengthened in the idea he had been mulling over for some time: that empirical reality is as illusory as the world of fictions, but inferior to it, and that only inventions can provide us with reliable cognitive tools.[28]
In 1940 he published Antología de literatura fantástica, in collaboration with Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, who married that same year, with Borges as witness at their wedding. He also wrote the prologue to Bioy Casares's book La invención de Morel.[13][24] In 1941 he published Antología Poética Argentina and brought out the volume of stories El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, a work for which he earned the National Prize for Literature. The following year Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi appeared, a book of stories he wrote in collaboration with Bioy Casares. They signed it with the pseudonym «H. Bustos Domecq», which comes from «Bustos», a great-grandfather of Borges from Córdoba, and «Domecq», a great-grandfather of Bioy Casares. Under the title Poemas (1923-1943) he gathered in 1943 the poetic work of his three books plus the poems published in the newspaper La Nación and in the magazine Sur. Together with Bioy Casares he presented the anthology Los mejores cuentos policiales. By this time, Borges had already won a place in the small circle of the Argentine literary avant-garde. His work Ficciones received the Grand Prize of Honor of the Argentine Society of Writers (SADE). In its pages is Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a startling and unsurpassable metaphor of the world.[24]
At a gathering at the home of Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, in August 1944 Borges met Estela Canto, an attractive, intelligent, cultivated and unconventional young woman, who caught his attention—accustomed as he was to dealing, in literary and social circles, with conventional women of the middle or upper class—and with whom he fell in love without being loved in return. Estela was a vain woman and until her death boasted of having won the love, and later the friendship, of Borges, as well as of having been the recipient of a collection of love letters that showed to what extent the author of Ficciones, who detested sentimentality in literature, could be deeply sentimental in life.[29] In her book of memoirs, Canto wrote:
Borges's attitude moved me. I liked what I was for him, what he saw in me. Sexually he was indifferent to me; he did not even displease me. His clumsy, abrupt kisses, always ill-timed, were condescendingly accepted. I never pretended to feel what I did not feel[30]
The figure of Estela inspired in Borges certain aspects of El Aleph, one of his best stories. He dedicated that story to her and gave her the original manuscript, which Estela put up for auction four decades later at Sotheby's, and it was sold for more than 25,000 dollars[29] to the National Library of Spain.[31]
Defying his mother, for whom Estela was déclassée, Borges proposed marriage to her. That unconsummated love, always agonizing, ended toward the end of 1952.[32]
In collaboration with Silvina Bullrich he published El compadrito in 1945. Together with Bioy Casares he published in 1946 Un modelo para la muerte, using the pseudonym «B. Suárez Lynch», and, as H. Bustos Domecq, Dos fantasías memorables, a volume of crime suspense stories. Borges later clarified that «Suárez» came from his grandfather and that «Lynch» represented the Irish side of Bioy's family. He founded and directed the magazine Los Anales de Buenos Aires (which would end, after 23 issues, in December 1948). In that publication, Borges and Bioy collaborated under a new pseudonym: «B. Lynch Davis». Between 1947 and 1948 he brought out the essay Nueva refutación del tiempo and published his Obras Escogidas. In 1949 his celebrated narrative work El Aleph was published, a book of the fantastic genre which critics almost unanimously regard as his best collection of stories.[33]
In 1946 Juan Domingo Perón was elected president, thus defeating the Democratic Union. Borges, who had supported the latter, spoke out openly against the new government. His reputation as an anti-Peronist accompanied him all his life. Regarding the new government, which Borges considered a dictatorship, he declared:
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servility, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy. Badges that babble imperatives, effigies of caudillos, prearranged cheers and jeers, unanimous ceremonies, mere discipline usurping the place of lucidity... Combating these sad monotonies is one of the many duties of the writer. Need I remind the readers of Martín Fierro and of Don Segundo Sombra that individualism is an old Argentine virtue?
Borges felt obliged to resign from his job as a librarian when he was appointed «Inspector of poultry markets» by the government. His mother and his sister, also anti-Peronists, were detained by the police.[n. 2] This explains his numerous jibes against Peronism: «Peronists are neither good nor bad, they are incorrigible», or «Peronism is something implausible», or «Peronists are people who pass themselves off as Peronists to gain an advantage». According to him, he opposed Peronism because it was «freedom-killing and fascist at its root». Out of necessity Borges had to become an itinerant lecturer in various Argentine and Uruguayan provinces. To do so, he had to overcome his stammer and his shyness with medical help. Necessity also led him to begin teaching, as a professor of English literature at the Instituto Libre de Segunda Enseñanza and, later, at the Catholic University.[33]
Maturity
The dawn of the 1950s marked the beginning of Borges's recognition inside and outside Argentina. The Argentine Society of Writers named him its president in 1950, a post he would resign three years later. He gave lectures at the University of the Republic of Uruguay, where his essay Aspectos de la literatura gauchesca appeared. In Mexico he published Antiguas literaturas germánicas, written in collaboration with Delia Ingenieros. Also in that same year the first French translation of his fiction (Fictions) was published in Paris, and in Buenos Aires the series of stories La muerte y la brújula. In 1952 the essays of Otras inquisiciones appeared, and an essay on Buenos Aires linguistics titled El idioma de los argentinos was reissued, together with El idioma de Buenos Aires by José Edmundo Clemente. The second edition of El Aleph also appeared, with new stories. Some of the stories in this book were translated into French by Roger Caillois and published in Paris in 1953 under the name Labyrinthes. That year Borges published El Martín Fierro, an essay that had a second edition within the year. Under the care of José Edmundo Clemente, the publisher Emecé began to publish his Obras Completas. In 1954 the film director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson directed the film Días de odio, based on Borges's story Emma Zunz.[34]
After a military coup—called the Revolución Libertadora—that overthrew the Peronist government, Borges was appointed in 1955 director of the National Library, a post he would hold for 18 years. In December of that same year he was inducted into the Argentine Academy of Letters. He published Los orilleros, El paraíso de los creyentes, Cuentos breves y extraordinarios, Poesía gauchesca, La hermana Eloísa and Leopoldo Lugones. He was also confirmed in the chair of German Literature and, later, as director of the Institute of German Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires. The magazine Ciudad devoted a critical and bibliographical volume to his work. Ficciones appeared in Italian, under the title La Biblioteca di Babele. After several accidents and some operations, an ophthalmologist forbade him to read and write. Although he could still distinguish light and shadow, this prohibition profoundly changed his literary practice. Borges was going blind as a consequence of the congenital disease that had already affected his father. It did not happen suddenly («It has spread since 1899 without dramatic moments, a slow twilight that lasted more than half a century»),[35] but was rather a process; be that as it may, this did not prevent him from continuing his career as a writer, essayist and lecturer, nor did it mean for him abandoning reading—he had others read to him aloud—or the learning of new languages.[34] Having been appointed director of the National Library and, in the same year, realizing that his blindness was deepening was perceived by Borges as a contradiction of fate. He himself recounted it in a lecture two decades later: «Little by little I came to understand the strange irony of events. I had always imagined Paradise in the form of a library. There I was. I was, in some way, the center of nine hundred thousand volumes in various languages. I found that I could barely decipher the title pages and the spines. Then I wrote the Poema de los dones»:[36]
Let no one reduce to tears or reproach
this declaration of the mastery
of God, who with magnificent irony
gave me at once the books and the night.[37]
In 1956 he taught the course in English literature at the University of Buenos Aires, was appointed full professor at the same university, received an honorary doctorate from the University of Cuyo and was named president of the Association of Argentine Writers. In Montevideo he harshly criticized deposed Peronism and defended the Revolución Libertadora. Because of his support for the new government he was heavily criticized by, among others, Ernesto Sabato and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. Sabato and Borges would remain, although not enemies, «separated» for political reasons until 1973, when, following a chance encounter in a library, Orlando Barone decided to arrange a series of meetings in which both writers discussed literature, philosophy, film, linguistics and other subjects. The result of these meetings was the publication of a book: Diálogos: Borges-Sabato.[34]
Between 1957 and 1960 he published Manual de zoología fantástica and El hacedor, a collection of short texts and poems dedicated to Leopoldo Lugones. He made a new updated edition of Poemas and published the poem Límites in the newspaper La Nación. Under his direction the second era of the magazine La Biblioteca began and, in collaboration with Bioy Casares, he edited the anthology Libro del cielo y del infierno. His works continued to be translated into various languages:[38] in this period in particular Otras inquisiciones was translated into French under the title Enquêtes, El Aleph into German with the title Labyrinthe, and a selection of stories from El Aleph and Ficciones into Italian as L'Aleph. In this period volumes six through nine of the Obras Completas also appeared. By 1960 he had become associated with the Conservative Party.[13][34] In 1961 he shared with Samuel Beckett the International Literature Prize (consisting of 10 thousand dollars), awarded by the International Congress of Publishers in Formentor, Mallorca. This important award promoted him internationally and offered him the possibility of having his works translated into numerous languages (English, French, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Persian, Greek, Slovak and Arabic, among others). His Antología personal appeared, published by Sur. He traveled with his mother to the United States, invited by the University of Texas and by the Tinker Foundation of Austin. There he gave lectures and courses on Argentine literature for six months. In New York an anthology of his stories titled Labyrinths was published, and Historia universal de la infamia was translated into German. In 1962 the film Hombre de la esquina rosada, based on the story of the same name and directed by René Mugica, premiered. He finished a biography of the poet Almafuerte. In the company of his mother, he traveled to Europe in 1963 and gave numerous lectures.[39] Back in Buenos Aires he finished an anthology on Evaristo Carriego.[40]
With the collaboration of María Esther Vázquez he published Introducción a la literatura inglesa in 1965 and Literaturas germánicas medievales in 1966. The following year Introducción a la literatura norteamericana was published, written in collaboration with Esther Zemborain, and Crónicas de Bustos Domecq, with Bioy Casares. His milongas and tangos were also published in the book Para las seis cuerdas, illustrated by Héctor Basaldúa, as was his story La intrusa.[13][40]
On 21 September 1967 Borges, aged 68, married Elsa Astete Millán, a 57-year-old widow, in church. At first the couple lived in his house, sharing their days with Leonor Acevedo. In Elsa's recollection, the writer's mother did not intervene to harm the relationship. However, according to Borges's friends, Doña Leonor's jealousy was terrible. A few months after the wedding, the couple moved to an apartment, where for the first time they had the experience of living together and alone, and there the rivalry between his wife and his mother grew more virulent and the writer had to start visiting Leonor in secret. That experience, moreover, would lead the couple to face reality definitively: living together was intolerable. In an interview published in 1993, Elsa admitted that she was not happy with Borges: «He was introverted, quiet and not very affectionate. He was ethereal, unpredictable. He did not live in a real world».[41] The marriage lasted until October 1970.
Between 1967 and 1968 the writer gave six lectures on poetry at Harvard University; some of his reflections revolved around the Perfect poem.[42] In 1968, with the collaboration of Margarita Guerrero, he published an expanded version of the Manual de zoología fantástica under the title El libro de los seres imaginarios. His Nueva antología personal appeared that year. He traveled to Santiago de Chile to attend the Congress of Anti-Racist Intellectuals, and to Europe and Israel to give some lectures. The director Hugo Santiago directed the film Invasión, with a story by Bioy and Borges. In 1969 he arranged and corrected two books of poems: El otro, el mismo and Elogio de la sombra, the latter of which went through two editions within the year. With illustrations by the painter Antonio Berni, his translation and anthology of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman was published. After some years without publishing stories, he gathered several narratives in El informe de Brodie, a book published in August 1970.[13][40]
His final years
In 1971 Borges published in Buenos Aires the long story titled El congreso. The following year he traveled to the United States, where he received numerous distinctions and gave lectures at various universities. On his return to Buenos Aires he published the book of poems El oro de los tigres and on 24 August, his birthday, he received a singular homage: the private publication of his story El otro. In 1973 he was declared an Illustrious Citizen of the City of Buenos Aires and, at the same time, requested his retirement as director of the national library. In 1973 his Obras Completas were gathered for the first time in one volume, published by Emecé.
Like De Quincey and so many others, I have known, before having written a single line, that my destiny would be literary. My first book dates from 1923; my Complete Works now gather the labor of half a century. I do not know what merit they will have, but it pleases me to see the variety of subjects they cover. The homeland, the vicissitudes of my forebears, the literatures that honor the languages of men, the philosophies I have tried to penetrate, the sunsets, the idle hours, the ragged edges of my city, my strange life whose possible justification lies in these pages, dreams forgotten and recovered, time... Prose coexists with verse; perhaps for the imagination both are the same.
— Borges 1974, "Prologue"
In Milan, Franco Maria Ricci published the story El congreso in a most luxurious edition with gold lettering. The book of poetry La rosa profunda and the collection of stories El libro de arena were published in 1975, together with the compilation Prólogos. The film El muerto, based on the story of the same name and directed by Héctor Olivera, also premiered.
Faced with a new victory of Peronism, Borges insisted on recalling Perón's first government as «the years of opprobrium».
In 1975 his mother died, at the age of ninety-nine. From then on Borges would make his trips with a former student, later his secretary and—finally, in Borges's old age—his second wife, María Kodama.
In 1986, on learning that he was ill with cancer and fearing that his agony would become a national spectacle,[43] he settled in Geneva, a city to which he was bound by a deep love and which Borges had called one of my homelands. On 26 April he married María Kodama—by proxy—according to the Act of that date drawn up in Colonia Rojas Silva, Paraguay. He died on 14 June 1986 at the age of 86, a victim of liver cancer and pulmonary emphysema.[44] According to Adolfo Bioy Casares, his French translator, Jean-Pierre Bernès, was present at his death and relates that «he died saying the Lord's Prayer. He said it in Anglo-Saxon, Old English, English, French and Spanish.»[45]
In obedience to his last wishes, his remains lie in the Plainpalais Cemetery.[n. 3][46][47] The headstone,[48] made by the Argentine sculptor Eduardo Longato, is of a rough white stone. At the top of its front face one reads Jorge Luis Borges and, below, «And ne forhtedon na», together with a circular engraving of seven warriors, a small Welsh cross and the years «1899/1986».[49][50][51] The inscription «And ne forhtedon na», written in Anglo-Saxon, translates as «And that they should not fear».[n. 4] The back face of the headstone contains the phrase Hann tekr sverthit Gram ok leggr í methal theira bert, which corresponds to chapter twenty-seven of the Völsunga saga (a 13th-century Norwegian saga), and is translated as «He took the sword, Gram, and placed it unsheathed between them».[n. 5] Borges also used these same two lines as the epigraph of his story Ulrica, included in El libro de arena, the author's only love story, whose protagonist is named Javier Otálora. Beneath this second inscription appears the engraving of a Viking ship, and beneath that a third inscription: «From Ulrica to Javier Otárola», which allows this last inscription to be interpreted as a dedication from María Kodama to Jorge Luis Borges.[46][53]
In February 2009,[54] a project was presented to move his remains to the Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires. A major controversy arose;[55] his widow María Kodama flatly opposed it and the project was finally discarded.[56]
Borges and Ultraism
On 25 January 1921 the first issue of the Spanish literary magazine Ultra appeared, which—as its very name suggests—was the organ of the Ultraist movement. Among its most notable contributors were Borges himself, Rafael Cansinos-Assens, Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Guillermo de Torre, who would later marry Norah Borges.
Cansinos himself defined it thus: «Ultraism is an abundant will that overflows every scholastic limit. It is an orientation toward continuous and repeated evolutions, a purpose of perennial literary youth, an anticipated acceptance of every new module and every new idea. It represents the commitment to keep advancing with time.»
On this subject, the young Borges wrote in 1921 in the magazine Nosotros:[57]
These words were written in the autumn of 1918. Today, after two years of highly varied lyrical experiments carried out by some thirty poets in the Spanish magazines Cervantes and Grecia—the latter captained by Isaac del Vando-Villar—we can make that broad and cautious declaration of the master more precise and limit it. Schematized, the present attitude of Ultraism can be summed up in the following principles:
- Reduction of lyric poetry to its primordial element: the metaphor.
- Striking out of intermediary phrases, connectives and useless adjectives.
- Abolition of ornamental trinkets, confessionalism, circumstantial detail, preaching and contrived nebulousness.
- Synthesis of two or more images into one, which thereby widens its power of suggestion.
Ultraist poems therefore consist of a series of metaphors, each of which has its own suggestiveness and epitomizes an unprecedented vision of some fragment of life. The root dissimilarity that exists between prevailing poetry and ours is the following: in the former, the lyrical discovery is magnified, enlarged and developed; in the latter, it is noted briefly. And do not think that such a procedure diminishes emotional force!
In that same article, he ended by summarizing:
Lyric poetry has done nothing until now but sway between the hunt for auditory or visual effects and the urge to express the personality of its maker. The first of these endeavors pertains to painting or music, and the second rests on a psychological error, since personality, the self, is only a broad collective name that encompasses the plurality of states of consciousness. Any new state added to the others comes to form an essential part of the self, and to express it: the individual as much as the alien. Any event, any perception, any idea expresses us with equal virtue; that is to say, it can be added to us... Overcoming that useless stubbornness in verbally fixing a wandering self that is transformed at every instant, Ultraism tends toward the primal goal of all poetry, that is, the transmutation of the palpable reality of the world into inner and emotional reality.
A year later Borges published in that same magazine an anthology of Ultraist poems.
Years later, Borges would condemn, and even despise, those beginnings of his work and everything related to Ultraism. His enthusiasm of one period, of a few years—from 1919 to 1922—soon turned into disdain and even aggressiveness. Very soon he came to regard the technique of the Ultraist poem as pure futility: a stringing together of loose perceptions, a rosary of sensual, plastic and showy images. The consequence was that, notwithstanding his having inoculated some young Argentine apprentice poets with the Ultraist virus, very few years later Borges would not hesitate to describe those experiments as arid poems of the mistaken Ultraist sect.[58] In fact, by 1966, Borges judged the 'dogma of metaphor' to be false, since...
...a single non-metaphorical line is enough to prove that metaphor is not an essential element, concluding that the error of Ultraism (...) was that it did not enrich, that it simply prohibited. For example, almost all of us wrote without punctuation marks. It would have been much more interesting to invent new marks, that is, to enrich literature (...) Ultraism was a revolution that consisted in relegating literature to a single figure, the metaphor.[59]
Borges and the short story
Like his contemporary Vladimir Nabokov and the slightly older James Joyce, Borges combined an interest in his native land with much broader interests. He also shared their multilingualism and their taste for playing with language, but unlike Nabokov and Joyce, who over time devoted themselves to creating longer works, Borges never wrote a novel. To those who reproached him for that lack, Borges replied that his preferences lay with the short story, which is an essential genre, and not with the novel, which forces padding.[60] Of the authors who have attempted both genres he generally preferred their short stories. Of Franz Kafka, for example, he maintained that his short narratives were better than El proceso.[61] In the prologue to Ficciones he stated that it was «a laborious and impoverishing extravagance to compose vast books; to set out in 500 pages an idea whose perfect oral exposition fits into a few minutes».Borges 1974, p. 429
Borges and politics
I disbelieve in politics, not in ethics. Politics never intervened in my literary work, although I do not doubt that this kind of belief can enlarge a work. Look, if not, at Whitman, who believed in democracy and was thus able to write Leaves of Grass, or at Neruda, whom communism turned into a great epic poet… I have never belonged to any party, nor am I the representative of any government… I believe in the Individual; I disbelieve in the State. Perhaps I am nothing more than a peaceful and silent anarchist who dreams of the disappearance of governments. The idea of a maximum of Individual and a minimum of State is what I would wish for today…[62]
The philosophical anarchism of liberal Spencerian roots, learned from his father and nourished in his conversations with Macedonio Fernández, would mark Borges fundamentally, leading him to reject every tyranny of a personalist character. During his youth he was an active member of the Radical Civic Union, under the influence of his grandfather Isidoro Acevedo Laprida, a personal friend of Leandro Alem, although he later stated that he had joined the Popular Conservative Party.[63] In 1928 he wrote about Hipólito Yrigoyen:
To reason out this Yrigoyenist conviction is an easy undertaking. It amounts to thinking before others what my heart has already thought. Yrigoyen is Argentine continuity.
He is the gentleman of Buenos Aires who knew the vehemence of Alsinism and the great patriotic uprising of the Park, and who persists in a little house (a place that has the climate of a homeland, even for those of us who are not from it), but he is the one who best remembers our future with prophetic and hopeful memory.
He is the caudillo who, with a caudillo's authority, has decreed the unappealable death of all caudillismo; he is the present that, without forgetting the past and honoring itself with it, becomes the future (...) Yrigoyen, most noble conspirator of the Good, has not needed to offer us any spectacle other than that of his passionate life, devoted with jealous fidelity to the Homeland.
— Letter from Borges to Raúl González Tuñón, around March 1928.[64]
The author's copious store of anecdotes bears witness to his detachment from political utopias. Borges considered his membership in the Conservative Party "a form of skepticism." The following case is widely remembered: "One October morning in 1967, Borges is in front of his English literature class at the faculty. A student comes in and interrupts him to announce the death of Che Guevara and the immediate suspension of classes to pay him homage. Borges answers that the homage can surely wait. Tense atmosphere. The student insists: 'It has to be now and you are leaving.' Borges does not give in and shouts: 'I'm not going anywhere. And if you're so tough, come and pull me away from the desk.' The student threatens to cut off the lights. 'I have taken the precaution,' Borges retorts, 'of being blind, waiting for this moment.'"[65] He showed the same skepticism toward what we today call "political correctness." About an honoris causa doctorate received in the United States in 1972, he told Bioy Casares: "The ceremony was evidently political. Had I known, I would not have gone. They gave the degree to four people: two whites, a redskin and a black man. I believe it was only out of racism, because they take races into account, that they chose us."[66] On the occasion of another honoris causa doctorate, in 1976, in the Chile of Pinochet, he received a call from Stockholm warning him that if he went to receive it he would never win the Nobel.[67] His reply was:
Look, sir; I thank you for your kindness, but after what you have just told me, my duty is to go to Chile. There are two things a man cannot allow: bribing or letting himself be bribed. Thank you very much, good day.
He flatly opposed the coup d'état led by José Félix Uriburu that overthrew Yrigoyen in September 1930. He had an exchange on the matter with the renowned anarchist writer Roberto Arlt, who supported the coup. As Borges himself recounts:
Note that Arlt, at that time, was a supporter of Uriburu; well, a little later. But when the revolution took place, he supported Uriburu and I was a Radical. Yet now Arlt is presented as just the opposite...[68]
Although he always gave priority to his literary development over politics, he maintained relatively active involvement in the Radical resistance. After the failure of the Radical revolution of 1933 in Paso de los Libres, Arturo Jauretche was forced into exile in Montevideo. There he met Borges, who had traveled to Uruguay to visit relatives on his mother's side. Jauretche showed him his poem El Paso de los Libres, in which he vindicated the Radical uprising. Borges liked it so much that he agreed to write the prologue for its first publication.[69][70]
Throughout his life he would try to rescue, highlight and promote individuality over mass movements, particularly those movements which, sheltered under the figure of a charismatic leader, multiplied during the 1930s and 1940s in Argentina and the world. Far from standing outside the events of his time, Borges interpreted and criticized many of them at the very moment they were happening. Thus, in May 1937, he wrote in issue 32 of the magazine Sur against the racism of the textbooks of German schools:
I do not know whether the world can do without German civilization. It is shameful that it is being corrupted with teachings of hatred[71]
In the same magazine, in 1939, he wrote in his Ensayo de imparcialidad (Essay on Impartiality): "It is possible that a German defeat would be the ruin of Germany; it is indisputable that its victory would be the ruin and the degradation of the world. I am not referring to the imaginary danger of a South American colonial adventure; I am thinking of the native imitators, of the homegrown Uebermenschen that inexorable chance would bestow upon us. […] I hope that the years will bring us the fortunate annihilation of Adolf Hitler, atrocious son of Versailles."[72]
The prophetic character of Borges's concern over the multiplication of native Übermenschen should be highlighted. For Borges, that prophecy would be fulfilled in the figure of Perón and his rise to power. When, in 1946, Perón effectively took power, Borges, who worked in a public library, was "promoted" to inspector of chickens and rabbits in the markets. Borges went to the municipality to ask the reason for this appointment. He himself tells the anecdote in his autobiography:
"Look," I said to the clerk, "it seems a little strange to me that out of all the people who work at the library I should have been chosen to fill this post." "Well," the clerk replied, "you were a supporter of the Allies during the war. So what do you expect?" That statement was irrefutable, and the next day I handed in my resignation. My friends supported me and organized a dinner in amends. I prepared a speech for the occasion" ("Borges", 1999, p. 112)
The speech, given Borges's shyness, was read by his friend Pedro Henríquez Ureña on 8 August 1946 and published in issue 142 of the magazine Sur. In it, Borges stated that "dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servility, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy." He added that combating those sad monotonies "is one of the writer's many duties."[73]
"I never denied being anti-Peronist. Besides general reasons, I have particular reasons: my mother was imprisoned. Yes, at the beginning she took part in a demonstration held so that the National Anthem would not be modified. And then they took some people prisoner. My mother was given this house as her prison. (...) And then my sister was imprisoned, in the Buen Pastor. It was a prison for prostitutes. And a group of ladies were sent there, well, to insult them deliberately. And they served their 30 days. Except that they did not know it was going to be 30 days, so for them it was indefinite. (...) On Sundays we went to see them. And it seemed so strange to me to see my sister's face behind the barred window. And we brought her… well, what one brings to prisoners: quince paste, dulce de leche…"
— Account by Borges in an interview during the 1980s[74]
Borges is frequently questioned by certain progressive sectors that accuse him of having endorsed the military dictatorships that prevailed in Latin America during the 1970s.[75] According to Edwin Williamson,[76] already "during his stays in Spain, Borges proclaimed to the four winds his support for the military regimes of Ibero-America, dismissing democracy as a “superstition”." Moreover, "of the Spanish Civil War he declared: “I was on the Republican side, but later I realized, in peacetime, that Franco deserved praise”."
His support for the military uprisings against Peronism (both in 1955 and in 1976) responded to the wish that a democratic normalization be undertaken that would exclude Peronism and communism, but not a dictatorial regime. Proof of this is his later criticism of the Revolución Libertadora and of the National Reorganization Process.
-What opinion, then, does Borges have of what came to be called the Revolución Libertadora?
-We were all deceived; we believed that everything was going to change, that it was a kind of dawn. We were all very enthusiastic about the Revolución Libertadora. (...) Afterward there were mediocre governments, and some accomplices, like that of Frondizi.
-What memory has the government of Arturo Illia left in the writer? -I think it was the best. At least the least bad, yes, certainly. Because military governments are truly an evil of all this South America.
-Of course no one fails to notice that Borges was hopeful about the military coup of 1976…
-Yes, it is true. I was in California with a friend and I remember that when we learned what had happened we embraced. The people passing by, quite rightly, thought we were mad. But then we gradually became disillusioned. The military rose with the support of the country, not excluding the Peronists. Everyone thought it was fine that they removed Isabel Perón and López Rega. Then we have had these 6 or 7 disastrous years.
After the harsh repression (several hundred dead) suffered by university students in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City on 2 October 1968 (known as the Tlatelolco massacre), Borges signed, together with the writers Manuel Peyrou and Adolfo Bioy Casares, a telegram sent from Buenos Aires through which he expressed his backing for the Mexican government.[77][78][79][80][81][82][83] However, there are also sources that reject this accusation.[84]
In 1980 he had signed a Petition for the disappeared in the newspaper Clarín. Borges said about it:
One afternoon the Grandmothers and Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo came to my house to tell me what was happening. Some may have been histrionic, but I felt that many came weeping sincerely, because one senses truthfulness. Poor women, so unhappy. This does not mean that their children were invariably innocent, but that does not matter. Every accused person has the right, at least, to a prosecutor, not to speak of a defense attorney. Every accused person has the right to be tried. When I learned about this whole business of the disappeared I felt terribly bad. I was told that a general had remarked that if, among one hundred kidnapped people, five were guilty, the killing of the remaining ninety-five was justified. He should have offered himself to be kidnapped, tortured and killed to prove that theory, to give validity to his argument!
In another interview conducted in 1983, he spoke in more detail about the military dictatorship and his relationship with it:
-How and where do you suppose the difficult task of getting the country going again should begin?
We still have a very arduous road to travel. Many years of military government must be undone. The first thing is the economic situation; then, for so many years, the dishonor, the corruption, the bribery. Perhaps we are all a little stained. It is very difficult to change it quickly. I do not know whether people expect a miracle overnight. If our hope is impatient, I think that is a grave mistake. Right now, the Argentine peso evaporates once it crosses the borders. When I am offered Argentine money, it is as if they offered me dry leaves... So many years that I let myself be deceived by the military, by the military who rose to power...
-But not only you. Many people thought the same...
-A large part of the Argentine people. What was expected was not that it would be an efficient government, but an honest one, one that would be different from Peronism. But they plundered the country, they despoiled it, they destroyed it. They have committed every possible error and every possible crime. There is even talk of 30,000 disappeared... Disappeared is a euphemism, but it means 30,000 people, perhaps kidnapped, tortured and maybe murdered. They even invented a war.[85]
On the day Borges attended the courtroom where the Argentine Military Juntas were being tried, he wrote a chronicle for the Spanish agency EFE. It was titled Lunes, 22 de julio de 1985 (Monday, 22 July 1985).[86]
The Malvinas War was an armed conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom that took place in the Malvinas Islands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands between 2 April and 14 June 1982 over sovereignty over these southern archipelagos, taken by force in 1833 and ruled since then by the United Kingdom. The final outcome of the war was the reoccupation of the three archipelagos by the United Kingdom and the deaths of 649 Argentine servicemen, 255 British servicemen and 3 civilian islanders. In Argentina, the defeat in the conflict hastened the fall of the military junta that governed the country, which had succeeded other military juntas installed after the coup d'état of 1976, and the restoration of democracy as the form of government. On the other hand, it is held that victory in the confrontation allowed the conservative government of Margaret Thatcher to win reelection in the elections of 1983. In 1982 Borges condemned the Argentine invasion of the Malvinas Islands, and assessed the consequences of the defeat positively:
...if the Malvinas had been reconquered, the military would possibly have perpetuated themselves in power and we would have a regime of anniversaries, of equestrian statues, of total lack of freedom. Besides, I believe the war was waged for that, wasn't it?
In this regard, Julian Barnes said: "During the Malvinas War, (Borges) reminded us that the writer's obligation is to tell the truth beyond popularity. That is what he did with his brilliant and shrewd remark that the war was nothing more than “two bald men fighting over a comb”."[87]
Apart from that remark, Borges managed to sum up the absurdity of nationalisms and wars in his poem Juan López y John Ward.[88]
It fell to their lot to live in a strange time.
The planet had been parceled into different countries,
each one furnished with loyalties,
with cherished memories,
with a past no doubt heroic,
with rights,
with grievances,
with a peculiar mythology,
with founding fathers in bronze,
with anniversaries,
with demagogues and with symbols.
That division, dear to cartographers, fostered wars.
López had been born in the city beside the motionless river;
Ward, on the outskirts of the city where Father Brown walked.
He had studied Spanish in order to read the Quixote.
The other professed the love of Conrad,
which had been revealed to him in a classroom on Viamonte Street.
They would have been friends, but they saw each other face to face only once,
on some islands too famous,
and each of the two was Cain,
and each one, Abel.
They buried them together.
The snow and corruption know them.
The event I relate happened in a time we cannot understand.[88]
Borges and philosophy
Borges maintained a highly original relationship with philosophy. Proof of this are the countless philosophical references present in his essays and literary work, as well as his influence on important contemporary philosophers and thinkers, such as Michel Foucault, Ilya Prigogine, Richard Rorty, Umberto Eco and Fernando Savater. Without being a philosopher in the strict sense, Borges was nonetheless an avid reader of philosophy. One of the original elements of his approach is that in his texts philosophical ideas appear in such a way that they produce in readers the experience of them before their conceptualization. Borges rescues certain ideas and represents them in a literary key, highlighting what is vivid and marvelous in them, appealing to the reader's intuition rather than to conceptual or argumentative grasp. The ideas presented in this way are understood in all their expressive force. To produce this effect, one of his procedures consists of assuming the premises of a given philosophical system and recreating the universe as its adherents perceive it. For example, in his story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,[89] Borges illustrates philosophical idealism by presenting us with a world—Tlön—whose inhabitants conceive the real as a product of the mind. According to Nicolás Zavadivker,[90] Borges does not speak to us in that story about idealism; rather, he directly presents us with a world built according to idealist premises. In this way he generates an understanding of these ideas from within the system itself, from its possibilities and its limits. He slips in, for example, that there are no nouns in the languages of Tlön, for the simple reason that its inhabitants do not believe there are things to which these might refer, as idealism holds. Borges masterfully illustrates the scope of this absence by translating the phrase "the moon rose above the river" into the Tlönian "upward behind the onstreaming it mooned."
This rescue by Borges of the most marvelous consequences of the philosophical perspectives he deals with is linked to his explicit choice of beauty over truth. Thus, Borges states that he finds in his work a consistent tendency to "value religious or philosophical ideas for their aesthetic worth and even for what is singular and marvelous in them."[91] His aestheticism is possibly one of the keys to Borges's apparent adherence to contradictory philosophies, which gave rise to debates about his own philosophical position. On several occasions he also emphasized his skepticism about the possibilities of philosophy: "There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately useless. A philosophical doctrine is at first a plausible description of the universe; the years turn, and it is a mere chapter—if not a paragraph or a name—of the history of philosophy."Borges 1974, vol. 1, p. 449 According to Zavadivker, his aestheticism and his disbelief in the possibilities of philosophy to explain the world led him to accept and even celebrate the plurality of perspectives with which men have interpreted the world, without needing to commit himself to any of them.
Mauthner: Philosophy and language
Fritz Mauthner, philosopher of language and author of the Dictionary of Philosophy (Wörterbuch der Philosophie), exerted great influence on Borges. Borges acknowledged this on numerous occasions throughout his life.[92] As he stated in 1940 in the magazine Sur, that work was one of the five books he most annotated and reread. He cited Mauthner for the first time in 1928 in El idioma de los argentinos to justify the impossibility of ordering ideas by affinity (psychological classification). Later, he referred to him in various magazines and writings of his as one of his favorite authors. In 1962 he mentioned him again to praise his erudition and his fine sense of humor.[93]
The Dictionary of Philosophy supplied Borges with a repertoire of philosophical themes (the soul, consciousness, the world, the spirit, etc.) on which to explore his literary possibilities. Each theme included a historical part setting out the contributions of philosophers such as Plotinus, Schopenhauer, Hume, Spinoza, Berkeley, Russell and others. For Mauthner the first and most fundamental philosophical concern was language: "the reality of philosophy is essentially linguistic."
Borges addressed the theme of language in several of his works, from various angles. The direct influence of Mauthner is revealed in eight stories, as Silvia G. Dapía points out.[94]
Thus, in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, we find the temporal interpretation of language. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius addresses the discrepancy between language and reality. Emma Zunz and Theme of the Traitor and the Hero deal with the superstition of the word, that is, with the belief that the existence of a word would be backed by the existence of an object. In Blue Tigers the Mauthnerian thesis of the logical insufficiency of language is present. The Other vindicates the metaphorical nature of all language. The Immortal raises the power of archetypes over individual mental processes. Finally, in The Congress, one of Borges's most ambitious stories, the arbitrariness of systems of linguistic classification would be proven.
Borges and religion
Throughout his life, Borges professed no religion and declared himself sometimes an agnostic and at other times an atheist.[95] However, at the express request of his mother—a devout Catholic—Borges prayed an Our Father and a Hail Mary before going to sleep,[96] and on his deathbed he received the assistance of a Catholic priest.[97] In 1978, in an interview with the Peruvian journalist César Hildebrandt, Borges states that he is certain God does not exist.[98] Likewise, in his interest in Eastern cultures, Borges ventured into Buddhism, about which he spoke in his lectures, and he wrote ¿Qué es el budismo? (What is Buddhism?), in collaboration with Alicia Jurado.
Borges, science and the internet
With the passing of time it has become increasingly difficult to be a reader of Borges "in the naive sense of the word."[n. 6] Everyone believes they find in every sentence, and even in every word of his stories, the most sophisticated and intricate messages and sub-messages, which are the object of novel interpretations and counter-interpretations. It is interesting to note that among the ideas serving as the foundation for Borges's fantasies, alongside philosophical or pseudo-philosophical doctrines, there are also allusions to certain scientific ideas. These have greatly excited some critics, who have wished to find in them significant scientific anticipations and thus attribute to Borges a deep understanding of the subject. This enthusiasm has been fueled by many references in popular science texts, for which Borges's stories offer good and accessible illustrations of ideas that might otherwise seem extremely abstract and incomprehensible to the non-specialist public.[99][100][101]
Borges's stories are cited in numerous popular science texts.[102] Thus, The Library of Babel[103] is mentioned to illustrate the paradoxes of infinite sets[104] and fractal geometry;[105] there are references to the fantastic taxonomy of Dr. Franz Kuhn, in The Analytical Language of John Wilkins (a favorite of neuroscientists and linguists),[106] invocations of Funes the Memorious to represent numeral systems,[107] and even a quotation from The Book of Sand in an article on the segregation of granular mixtures.[108]
In all these cases, the citations of Borges's stories are no more than metaphorical examples that lend brilliance to the opaque prose of technical explanations. However, a notable exception is The Garden of Forking Paths, in which Borges proposes without knowing it (he could not have known it) a solution to a still-unsolved problem of quantum physics. The Garden, published in 1941, anticipates in a practically literal way the doctoral thesis of Hugh Everett III, published in 1957 under the title Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics[109] and which Bryce DeWitt would popularize as The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.[110] The physicist Alberto Rojo has analyzed this surprising correspondence and concluded that the resemblance between the texts of Borges and Everett III shows in what an extraordinary way Borges's mind was immersed in the cultural fabric of the 20th century, in that highly complex network whose secret components branch out beyond the classificatory limits of each discipline. The structure of reasoned fiction in Borges's stories, which sometimes seem like theorems with fantastic hypotheses, is capable of distilling ideas still in gestation that make a stop in literature before becoming theories. And just as the ideas of Everett and DeWitt can be read as science fiction, in The Garden of Forking Paths fiction can be read as science.[102]
On the other hand, a growing number of contemporary commentators—whether professors of literature or cultural critics such as Umberto Eco—conclude that, however extraordinary and unusual it may seem, Borges prefigured the World Wide Web. In a recent book, Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds, Perla Sassón-Henry explores the relationships between the decentralized Internet of YouTube, blogs and Wikipedia and the stories of Borges, which "make the reader an active participant."[111][112] A group of Borges's stories—among them Funes the Memorious, The Library of Babel and Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius—was published in the United States under the title Labyrinths in the early 1960s. With their infinite libraries and men who do not forget, encyclopedias and virtual worlds conjured from the printed page, as well as portals that encompass the whole planet, these stories (together with some others such as The Aleph) came to constitute, according to many critics, the keys to the intersection between new technology and literature. One example is the idea of a "total library" that appears in 1941 and that would announce the capacity of the Internet. Sassón-Henry, associate professor in the Department of Language Studies at the United States Naval Academy, describes Borges as someone "of the Old World but with a futuristic vision." New Directions, the publisher that issued Labyrinths, reissued the anthology in May 2008 for the first time in more than forty years. As a sign of how times change, the first edition of Labyrinths had a preface by André Maurois, of the French Academy; the current edition, by contrast, includes an introduction by William Gibson, the cyberpunk writer.
From the world created by Borges in his story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius to the configuration of Wikipedia and its functioning in the digital medium there is only one step, full of cross-references. Reading Borges's story from this perspective also makes us reconsider the reality status of the image of the world that Wikipedia creates as an anonymous collaborative work, which is what Borges considers.
Regarding A First Encyclopedia of Tlön, in which the planet Tlön is described, Borges writes:
Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of the entire history of an unknown planet, with its architectures and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy. All of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal purpose or parodic tone.
— Borges 1974, p. 434
Wikipedia is a project born in 2001 whose motto is "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit"; in the words of its cofounder Jimmy Wales, the project constitutes "an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language," in order to achieve "a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge."[113] With respect to authorship, the similarities are also remarkable:
In literary habits, too, the idea of a single subject is all-powerful. It is rare for books to be signed. The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the work of a single author, who is timeless and anonymous.
— Borges 1974, p. 439
Wikipedia, for its part, is essentially a wiki—a website that allows general public authorship and editing of any page. In fact, an essential policy of Wikipedia is that it is open content:
Open-content text and material is licensed by the copyright owner to the general public, allowing everyone to redistribute and alter the text free of charge and guaranteeing that no one can restrict access to modified versions of the content.
A multiple and anonymous author, both in the encyclopedia of Tlön and in Wikipedia, actually constructs knowledge of the world, whether this is an invention or not: in Tlön, following idealist philosophical guidelines; in Wikipedia, following norms of universality of knowledge and democratic respect for ideas, and with original contributions forbidden, it is required to describe knowledge and theories that are supported and popularly accepted.[114]
Now many think that "contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world"Borges 1974, p. 443 and perhaps it is as true as that it has built another, rhizomatic and labyrinthine: Tlön means map in Icelandic, and Tlön is truly an encyclopedic map of a labyrinth originating in Uqbar (meaning straying from the path), a labyrinth that constantly grows and forks, whose ideal objects or hrönir (meaning in Icelandic heaps of matter that change through external action) vary and succeed one another in wiki technology (in Hawaiian, quickly), forming a computerized Tlön, a dynamic repository of collective human memory through the consensus of a number of Wikipedians. As with the Borges of the story, "if our forecasts are not mistaken, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön."Borges 1974, p. 443 Of course, because of its computerized medium, that wait is unnecessary. Wikipedia is already being rewritten, at this very instant, constantly.[114]
Equally enigmatic and prophetic is the reference to Orbis Tertius (Third World, in Latin), a term (World 3) that many years later would be used by the philosopher of science Karl Popper to designate the worlds constructed by the human mind.[115] It should be clarified that what has been cited above in this section is purely speculation, since Borges never made or contributed to a solid, verifiable scientific discovery; his were exclusively literary contributions that do not hold up in the scientific sphere, since he could hardly have understood even the rudiments of the scientific fields in which he was supposedly a precursor.
Contemporary disciples
Although Borges has had no direct "disciples"—since that would imply a predictable aesthetic and school, which he himself disbelieved in—there are contemporary authors who, according to their critics, have received his influence directly. The fact of having known Borges personally and having read his work in Spanish may have influenced the works of Ricardo Piglia,[116] César Aira, Roberto Bolaño, Carlos Fuentes, Orhan Pamuk, Paul Auster, Salman Rushdie and Umberto Eco, not to mention some of the obvious ones (who have, moreover, acknowledged it): Ernesto Sabato, Julio Cortázar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, among others. Also notable is the influence that Borges's work had on various contemporary thinkers from other latitudes, as is the case of Gilles Deleuze or Michel Foucault.
Borges's friendships
Borges had two close friends for most of his life: the writers Adolfo Bioy Casares and Manuel Peyrou. He met Bioy Casares at the house of Victoria Ocampo, and Peyrou was introduced to him in a German bar on Corrientes Street near Pueyrredón, in the 1920s. His friendship with each of them was profoundly different. With Bioy it was a friendship "in the English manner," which excluded confidences; the one he maintained with the second, by contrast, included the most intimate and personal confessions. When Borges needed the help of a psychiatrist—as Estela Canto revealed—it was Peyrou who recommended one to him. After his friend's death in 1974, Borges wrote a poem titled Manuel Peyrou, which he later published in Historia de la noche:
His was the generous exercise
of genial friendship. He was the brother
to whom we can, in the adverse hour,
confide everything or, without telling him anything,
let him guess what pride
does not wish to confess (...)
He also cultivated the friendship of the Mexican Alfonso Reyes, whom he met through Pedro Henríquez Ureña. During the period when Reyes was ambassador in Buenos Aires (from 1927 to 1930) they saw each other frequently, first at Victoria Ocampo's villa and later at the gatherings that Reyes himself organized on Sundays at the embassy. Borges "was above all captivated by the refined and seductive literary style of the Mexican writer,"[117] to the point of considering him "the best prose writer in the Spanish language of any age."[118] In his memory he wrote the poem In memoriam.[119] For some critics, his story Funes the Memorious suggests a "veiled acknowledgment and homage of the now mature pupil to his evoked mentor."[117]
Apart from these very close friends—and Silvina Ocampo, writer, sister of Victoria and wife of Bioy—who remained so from the early 1930s to the end, others who moved in the orbit of that group—at different times and for varying periods—were Carlos Mastronardi, Emma Risso Platero, Francisco Luis Bernárdez, Xul Solar, Ernesto Sabato, Enrique Amorim, Ricardo Güiraldes, Oliverio Girondo, Norah Lange, Elvira de Alvear, Ulises Petit de Murat, Santiago Dabove, Alicia Jurado, Julio César Dabove, Gloria Alcorta, Estela Canto, María Esther Vázquez, Néstor Ibarra and Héctor Germán Oesterheld. Macedonio Fernández was not strictly a friend but a sort of mentor to Borges, and only for a few years, until they grew apart for political reasons. Curiously, Fernández graduated as a lawyer from the University of Buenos Aires in 1897, together with the fathers of Borges and Peyrou.[120]
Maurice Abramowicz is a lawyer, writer and poet of Polish-Jewish origin. Borges met him in Geneva in 1914, while he was studying at the Collège Calvin. Two years younger than Borges, he introduced him to reading Rimbaud and corresponded with him on literary subjects. In some stories Borges attributes remarks to him or dedicates pages to him. José Bianco (1908-1986) was an Argentine writer and translator. He published, among other works, La pequeña Gyaros (stories, 1932), Sombras suele vestir (1941) and Las ratas (novel, 1941). He produced excellent translations, such as The Turn of the Screw, The Lesson of the Master, The Death of the Lion and Hermosas imágenes. Borges was his personal friend, wrote prologues for various works of his, and published, in 1944, a review of the novel Las ratas in the prestigious magazine Sur. Susana Bombal was an Argentine writer. Her friend Borges wrote the prologue to her book Tres Domingos (1957), in which he states that "The narrative method is that of Virginia Woolf; we do not receive the facts directly but their reflection in a consciousness, and the passion or the thought along with the sensory data." In 1969 she won the Municipal Prize for Read Theater (Green wings, an earlier version of this work, written in English, had been published by the publisher Losange in 1959). El cuadro de Anneke Loos (stories, 1963) was awarded the Faja de Honor by the Argentine Society of Writers. In 1971 Borges published El arte de Susana Bombal, an essay on her work that appeared in the newspaper La Nación.
Women and sex in the life and work of Borges
The role of women in Borges's life and work has always been a subject of study. With respect to his mother, for example, the Scottish Hispanist Edwin Williamson attributes fundamental importance to her in his biography of Borges.[121][122] That quality of "oppressive mother" was denied by Borges himself, who always acknowledged the authority of his father, who, unlike "his mother's ignorant family" (as he himself stated), left him as an inheritance an "intellectually more complex world," that is, the English language and his library, the most important fact of his life according to Borges. For Emir Rodríguez Monegal, for example, the role of "Mother" in Borges's life was minor. "The part Mother plays in Borges's personal myth: she is always there, always mentioned with courtesy, but always kept (in a very subtle way) in a subordinate position."
There are the details of his stay in Geneva and Spain during the writer's adolescence, where he not only had his first—and, according to all his biographers, traumatic—sexual experience, but also met his first love, Emilie, and found a new literature and new friends with whom to share it. The surprising "evidence" of Borges's great first love—whose identity has always been a matter of speculation—is the apparently so tangential Norah Lange. To her, for example, according to Williamson, would be dedicated the Two English Poems and, of course, A Universal History of Infamy. There is the deep mark her rejection would have left on him, plus the supposed rivalry with the fellow writer Oliverio Girondo for Norah's favors. Thus, several women have gravitated in Borges's life, such as: Emilie, Concepción Guerrero, Norah Lange, Estela Canto, Elsa Astete, María Kodama, to whom could be added those who rejected Borges.
Sex and women are two problematic components in Borges's fiction: these two elements are mainly absent from his work.[123] For example, scenes of sexual acts are almost entirely absent from Borges's writings (the sexual encounter of the story Emma Zunz with an anonymous sailor is the most notable exception), and even the most veiled suggestion of erotic activities is limited to a few stories. As scarce as the above in Borges's work are female characters who have a central role in the narrative or who possess an independent personality; in general their absence prevails, or theirs is a merely decorative presence.[124] The fictional world created by Borges is a place where women, if they appear at all, seem to exist as secondary objects for the purpose of providing men with an opportunity for sex. Sex and women are used mainly as bargaining chips in the relationship between men, never for procreation or pleasure.[123][125][126]
Awards, distinctions and tributes
He received important awards and distinctions from various universities and governments of various countries. In 1961 he shared with Samuel Beckett the Formentor Prize awarded by the International Congress of Publishers, which was the beginning of his reputation throughout the Western world. He would later receive the title of Commendatore from the Italian government, that of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government, the Insignia of Knight of the Order of the British Empire and the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, among other awards and titles. His work was translated into more than twenty-five languages and adapted for film and television.[14]
In 1999 the Argentine government issued a series of commemorative coins for the centenary of Borges's birth. The government of the City of Buenos Aires organizes free guided tours of places in the city connected with Borges,[127] and a stretch of Calle Serrano, in the Palermo neighborhood, was renamed Jorge Luis Borges in honor of the writer. Similarly, a bench in the Buenos Aires zoo commemorates the writer with a panel, which states that it was on that bench that Borges sat to watch the tigers, which fascinated him. The following is a chronological list of the various awards, distinctions and tributes received by Borges during his lifetime.
- 1929. He brings out his third book of poems, Cuaderno San Martín, with which he wins the second Municipal Poetry Prize of Buenos Aires.
- 1944. His work Ficciones receives the Grand Prize of Honor from the Argentine Society of Writers (SADE).
- 1955. Borges is elected a member of the Argentine Academy of Letters.
- 1956. He is appointed full professor at the University of Buenos Aires and receives an honoris causa doctorate from the University of Cuyo.
- 1957. On 23 October, while serving as director of the National Library in Buenos Aires, he gives a lecture at the Public Library of the National University of La Plata on the subject "Los castillos en el primer círculo" (The castles in the first circle).[128][129]
- 1961. He shares with Samuel Beckett the International Literature Prize (10,000 dollars), awarded by the International Congress of Publishers in Formentor, Majorca. He is decorated by the President of Italy, Giovanni Gronchi, with the Order of Commendatore.
- 1962. He receives in Buenos Aires the Grand Prize of the National Fund for the Arts. He receives the insignia of Commandeur de l'Ordre des Lettres et des Arts from the government of France.
- 1963. In December he is named doctor honoris causa by the University of the Andes, in Colombia.
- 1964. The Peruvian government awards him the Order of the Sun in the rank of Commander. The French magazine L'Herne devotes a special monographic tribute issue to him, with numerous national and foreign contributions.
- 1965. He receives in Great Britain the insignia of Knight of the Order of the British Empire, where he is granted the title of Sir. He receives the gold medal of the 9th Poetry Prize of the City of Florence.
- 1966. The commune of Milan presents him with the Madonnina International Prize. The Ingram Merril Foundation of New York grants him its literary prize (5,000 dollars).
- 1968. He is named a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He receives from the government of Italy the insignia of Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.
- 1970. The São Paulo Biennial Foundation (Brazil) awards him the 'Matarazzo Sobrinho' Inter-American Literature Prize (25,000 dollars), the most important in the country, during the First Seminar on Literature of the Americas. He is named a member of 'The Hispanic Society of America', New York.
- 1971. He travels to the United States to receive appointments from the American Academy of Art and Letter of New York and from the Institute of Arts and Letters of the United States (INAL) as an honorary member of both institutions. In Israel he receives the Jerusalem Prize (2,000 dollars). He is named doctor honoris causa by Columbia University, New York. In April he travels to London, invited by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, which incorporates him as a member of its teaching staff. The University of Oxford confers on him the title of doctor honoris causa as Doctor of Letters.
- 1972. He travels to the United States to receive the honoris causa doctorate in Humanities from Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan. In September he is named a member of the Jewish Museum of Buenos Aires.
- 1973. The Municipality of Buenos Aires declares him an illustrious citizen. He travels with Claude Hornos de Acevedo to Spain and Mexico, where he receives the Alfonso Reyes International Prize.
- 1974. In Milan, Franco María Ricci publishes the story El congreso in a most luxurious edition with gold lettering.
- 1976. He receives the title of doctor honoris causa from the University of Cincinnati. In Chile, he receives the title of doctor honoris causa from the University of Chile, and the military dictatorship decorates him with the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit Bernardo O'Higgins.
- 1977. He receives the title of doctor honoris causa from the University of the Sorbonne. The University of Tucumán grants him the same title.
- 1978. He is declared a meritorious citizen of Bogotá.
- 1979. The French Academy honors him with a gold medal. He receives the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Icelandic Order of the Falcon in the rank of Commander with Star. A national tribute is paid to him at the Teatro Cervantes on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.
- 1980. He receives the Grand Prize of the Royal Spanish Academy, the Cervantes Prize (5 million pesetas), awarded by the Ministry of Culture of Spain. He shares it with the Spanish poet Gerardo Diego. He receives in Paris the Cino Del Duca World Prize (200,000 francs). Sandro Pertini, President of Italy, presents him with the Balzan Prize (140,000 dollars).
- 1981. He travels to the United States, Puerto Rico and Mexico, where he receives the Ollin Yoliztli prize (70,000 dollars).
- 1983. On his last visit to Spain, he receives the Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise. In Paris, President Mitterrand presents him with the Legion of Honor. He collects in the United States the prize of the Ingersoll Foundation (15,000 dollars).
- 1984. In Sicily he receives a golden rose as a tribute and symbol of wisdom. He returns to the United States, where the Italian publisher Ricci gives him 84 gold pounds sterling, one for each year of his life. He returns to Italy and receives from President Pertini the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit. He goes to Morocco and to Lisbon, where he is decorated.
- 1984. He won the Diamond Konex Award for the most important figure in the history of Letters in Argentina, awarded by the Konex Foundation.
Despite his enormous intellectual prestige and the universal recognition his work has earned, he was not honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature, despite having been nominated for many consecutive years. It is speculated that he was excluded from the possibility of obtaining it for having accepted an award granted by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.[130][131]
Eponymy
- Three species of spermatophytes new to science honor him with their eponym.
- (Araceae) Philodendron borgesii G.S.Bunting[133]
- (Poaceae) Catapodium borgesii H.Scholz[134]
Keys to his literature
Although poetry was one of the foundations of Borges's literary activity, the essay and narrative were the genres that brought him universal recognition. Endowed with a vast culture, he produced a work of great intellectual solidity on the scaffolding of a precise and austere prose, through which he expressed an ironic detachment from things and his delicate lyricism. His narrative structures alter the conventional forms of time and space to create alternative worlds of great symbolic content, built from reflections, inversions and parallelisms. Borges's stories take the form of riddles or of powerful metaphors with a metaphysical background.
Borges also wrote film scripts and a considerable amount of literary criticism and prologues. He edited numerous anthologies and was a prominent translator from English, French and German (he also translated works from Anglo-Saxon[135] and Old Norse).[136]
His blindness influenced his later writing. Among his intellectual interests, the following stand out: mythology, mathematics (see also Borges and mathematics), theology, philosophy and, as an integration of these, the Borgesian sense of literature as re-creation—all these subjects are treated sometimes as play and at other times with the utmost seriousness. A contemporary of most of the 20th century, Borges lived through the modernista period of culture and literature, especially symbolism. His fiction is deeply erudite and always concise.[137]
From a more historical perspective, his work can be divided into periods. A first, avant-garde initial stage, bounded between 1923 and 1930. This period is characterized by the fundamental importance of the poem, free verse and metaphorical proliferation (above all that deriving from Lugones), recourse to a neo-baroque of Spanish roots (Quevedo, first and foremost) and a certain literary nationalism, which goes so far as to proclaim the linguistic independence of Argentina, in texts later repudiated by the author himself. To this period belong the poetry collections Fervor de Buenos Aires, Luna de enfrente and Cuaderno San Martín, as well as the essays of Inquisiciones, El tamaño de mi esperanza, El idioma de los argentinos and Evaristo Carriego. From 1930 onward, for about thirty years, Borges's work would lean toward prose, and a twofold strand of his activity would emerge: the short essay, usually on literary readings, and the so-called "fiction," which is not strictly a short story, although its procedure is narrative and its reading convention is fictional. In it there often appear apocryphal writers and books, such as Pierre Ménard and his Quixote, or Herbert Quain. Resorting to deliberately erroneous quotations in his meditations on literary tradition, Borges defined the writer's task as essentially one of falsification and blurred every claim to originality and creation. Literature was, in his conception, the infinite reading of texts that arise from other texts and refer back to an original text, lost, nonexistent or crossed out. In another sense, Borges's fictional work leaned toward recurring themes, such as the ghostliness of life, single combat as recognition of the other in the act of killing him, the mirror as a cipher of worldly appearances, the remoteness and unhappiness linked with the love relationship, or the search for the name of names, the forbidden name of God, in which the fantasies of perfect correspondence between words and things would be fulfilled. Aesthetically, in this second period of his work, Borges carried out a radical critique of his avant-garde years. He withdrew toward an aesthetic attitude of neoclassical appearance, although the topics of the infinite and the ineffable, gathered in his youthful frequentation of Schopenhauer and the German Romantic poets, survived in him. The eagerness for smoothness of expression, the rereading of the classics and his constant quotation of them, the concision demanded by the short genres, are all gestures of his neoclassicism, in which reason attempts to order, rank and clarify up to the admissible limits of its power over language, always slippery, deceptive and ambiguous. In this stage Borges returns to some costumbrista episodes set in rural or suburban surroundings, which he had treated in his youth, such as the knife duel, to revisit them in a context of universal mythology. Thus, his gauchos and compadritos of the outskirts mingle with Homeric heroes, medieval theologians and the pirates of the China Sea. They are no longer the motive of a particularist exaltation, nor are they approached as emblems of a pure and closed cultural universe; instead they are relativized within a framework of eclectic and cosmopolitan ambitions. To this period, leaving aside anthologies and reworkings, belong the essays of Discusión (1932), Historia de la eternidad (1936) and Otras Inquisiciones (1952); the stories of Historia universal de la infamia (1935), Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949), and a good number of works in collaboration with Bioy Casares (Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi, 1942; Dos fantasías memorables, 1946; Un modelo para la muerte, 1946, and the film scripts Los Orilleros and El paraíso de los creyentes, 1955), with Delia Ingenieros (Antiguas literaturas germánicas, 1951), with Betina Edelberg (Leopoldo Lugones, 1955) and with Margarita Guerrero (El Martín Fierro, 1953 and Manual de zoología fantástica, 1957).[138]
Most of his most popular stories dwell on the nature of time, infinity, mirrors, labyrinths, reality and identity, while others center on fantastic themes. Borges himself tells more or less real stories of South American life; stories of popular heroes, soldiers, gauchos, detectives and historical figures, mixing reality with fantasy and fact with fiction.[138]
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With an unusual handling of words, Borges's work drove a renewal of narrative language, highlighting the fictitious nature of the text and amalgamating sources and cultures of diverse kinds (European and Eastern, avant-garde and classical) through parody and irony. His texts arise from other previous texts and presuppose a close familiarity with them. Plots are superimposed on other plots; each paragraph is the variation of another previous writing or reading. It is difficult not to discover some of his keys; it is almost impossible to decipher them all. His writing rescues ideas and questions that run through Western thought from its remote origins and reformulates them, bequeathing them to posterity. He does not seriously attempt to resolve contradictions; he prefers to highlight them, rearranging them into paradoxes, which he wraps again and again in different garb.[138]
In his most characteristic pages, he proposes a playful context and challenges the reader to solve an enigma. As in a good detective labyrinth, he displays all the clues needed to deduce the answers; among those clues his own classified and annotated library stands out. There is an obvious solution that satisfies the bungling detective, but the true key is reserved for the hero. What the enigma is and who that hero really is are also part of the mystery. He abounds in nonexistent references concealed among a jumble of erudite quotations. There are sentences mischievously copied from others' works, winks to the initiated, to his friends and to himself. His best stories accumulate multiple meanings, arranged in layers that become alternately transparent or opaque depending on the point of view. The reader glimpses a reflection here and another there, according to his experience and circumstances; complete understanding, however, is denied to us. The only privileged one is the stagehand, the one who visualizes the ciphered universe, the one who wove the plot, located at the center of the labyrinth, reflected and multiplied in his own words: Jorge Luis Borges himself.[142]
As Octavio Paz stated, Borges offered sacrificial gifts to two normally opposed deities: simplicity and the extraordinary. In many texts Borges achieved a marvelous balance between the two: the natural that seems strange to us and the strange that is familiar to us. Such a feat determined Borges's exceptional place in literature.[143] In the same vein, Fritz Rufolf Fries maintained that Borges managed to form his own identity in the mirror of the authors he questioned, showing us the unusual in what is already known.[144]
Works
Poetry
- Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923)
- Luna de enfrente (1925)
- Cuaderno San Martín (1929)
- El hacedor (1960). Verse and prose.
- El otro, el mismo (1964)
- Para las seis cuerdas (1965)
- Elogio de la sombra (1969). Verse and prose.
- El oro de los tigres (1972). Verse and prose.
- La rosa profunda (1975)
- La moneda de hierro (1976)
- Historia de la noche (1977)
- La cifra (1981)
- Los conjurados (1985)
Essays
- Inquisiciones (1925)
- El tamaño de mi esperanza (1926)
- El idioma de los argentinos (1928)
- Evaristo Carriego (1930)
- Discusión (1932)
- Historia de la eternidad (1936)
- Otras inquisiciones (1952)
- Nueve ensayos dantescos (1982)
Short stories
- Historia universal de la infamia (1935)
- Ficciones (1944)
- El Aleph (1949)
- El informe de Brodie (1970)
- El libro de arena (1975)
- La memoria de Shakespeare (1983)
Prologues
- Prólogos con un prólogo de prólogos (1975)
- Biblioteca personal (1988)
- Prólogos de la biblioteca de Babel (2000)
- El círculo secreto (2003)
Lectures
- Borges oral (1979)
- Siete noches (1980)
- Arte poética (2000)
- Borges profesor (2000). Course on English literature at the University of Buenos Aires.
- El aprendizaje del escritor (2014). Transcription of the seminar on writing that he taught at Columbia in 1971.
- El tango (2016). Four lectures.
Travel book
Miscellanies
- Textos cautivos (1986). Reviews, profiles and essays published in El Hogar.
- Borges en Revista Multicolor. Obras, reseñas y traducciones inéditas de Jorge Luis Borges (1995).
- Textos recobrados 1919-1929 (1997). Poetry, prose poetry, stories, articles, translations, reviews, speeches, film notes, interviews, translations, prologues.
- Borges en Sur (1999). Essays, reviews, translations, poems, and literary and film notes published in Sur and not collected in other books.
- Borges en El Hogar (2000). Reviews, profiles, essays and translations published in El Hogar.
- Textos recobrados 1931-1955 (2001). Poetry, prose poetry, stories...
- Textos recobrados 1956-1986 (2003). Poetry, prose poetry, stories...
- Miscelánea (2011). Includes the books Prólogos, con un prólogo de prólogos, Borges oral, Biblioteca personal, Borges en Sur and Textos cautivos/Borges en El Hogar.
Memoirs
- Autobiografía or Un ensayo autobiográfico (it appeared as a book in 1999; first published in English, in 1970, by The New Yorker; it was also the prologue to The Aleph and Others Stories, 1970; other appearances: in La Gaceta, of Mexico, in 1971 (in a translation by José Emilio Pacheco), and in La Opinión, of Buenos Aires, in 1974).
Collaborative works
Short stories
- Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi (1942), with Adolfo Bioy Casares. As H. Bustos Domecq.
- Dos fantasías memorables (1946), with Adolfo Bioy Casares. As H. Bustos Domecq.
- Un modelo para la muerte (1946), with Adolfo Bioy Casares. As B. Suárez Lynch.
- La hermana de Eloísa (1955), with Luisa Mercedes Levinson
- Crónicas de Bustos Domecq (1967), with Adolfo Bioy Casares. Under their own names.
- Nuevos cuentos de Bustos Domecq (1977), with Adolfo Bioy Casares. Under their own names.
Essays
- Antiguas literaturas germánicas (Mexico, 1951), with Delia Ingenieros. Revised and corrected as Literaturas germánicas medievales (1966), with María Esther Vázquez.
- El Martín Fierro (1953), with Margarita Guerrero
- Leopoldo Lugones (1965), with Betina Edelberg
- Introducción a la literatura inglesa (1965), with María Esther Vázquez
- Introducción a la literatura norteamericana (1967), with Estela Zemborain de Torres
- Qué es el budismo (1976), with Alicia Jurado
Screenplays
- Los orilleros (1939), with Adolfo Bioy Casares. Published as a book together with El paraíso de los creyentes in 1955.
- El paraíso de los creyentes (1940), in collaboration with Adolfo Bioy Casares. Published as a book together with Los orilleros in 1955.
- Invasión (1969), with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Hugo Santiago.
- Les autres (1972), with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Hugo Santiago.
Miscellany
- Museo. Textos inéditos (2003), with Adolfo Bioy Casares. Advertising pamphlet, literary fragments, translations and other scattered texts.
Interviews and dialogues
- Entrevistas con Jorge Luis Borges (1970), with Jean de Milleret.
- Siete conversaciones con Jorge Luis Borges (1974), with Fernando Sorrentino.
- Diálogos Borges-Sábato (1977).
- Reportaje a Borges (1977), with M. P. Montecchia.
- Borges, sus días y su tiempo (1984), with María Esther Vásquez.
- En voz de Borges (1986), with Waldemar Verdugo Fuentes.
- Diálogos (1992), with Osvaldo Ferrari.
Anthologies
Of his own work
- Antología personal (1961)
- Nueva antología personal (1968)
- Prosa (1975). Introduction by Mauricio Wacquez.
- Poesía y prosa (1979)
- Páginas de Jorge Luis Borges seleccionadas por el autor (1982)
- Páginas escogidas (1985)
- Jorge Luis Borges. Ficcionario. Una antología de sus textos (1985). Compiled by Emir Rodríguez Monegal.
- Borges esencial (2017). Commemorative edition by the Real Academia Española and the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language.
Of other authors
- Índice de la nueva poesía americana (1926), with Vicente Huidobro and Alberto Hidalgo
- Antología clásica de la literatura argentina (1937), with Pedro Henríquez Ureña
- Antología de la literatura fantástica (1940), with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo
- Antología poética argentina (1941), with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo
- Los mejores cuentos policiales (1943 and 1956), with Adolfo Bioy Casares
- El compadrito (1945), anthology of texts by Argentine authors, in collaboration with Silvina Bullrich
- El lenguaje de Buenos Aires (1952), with José Edmundo Clemente. Borges contributes three previously published essays to the book: "El idioma de los argentinos", from the book of the same name; "Las alarmas del doctor Américo Castro", from Otras inquisiciones; and "Las inscripciones de los carros", titled "Las inscripciones de carro" in Evaristo Carriego.
- Poesía gauchesca (1955), with Bioy Casares
- Cuentos breves y extraordinarios (1955), with Adolfo Bioy Casares
- Manual de zoología fantástica (Mexico, 1957), with Margarita Guerrero. Updated and reissued in 1967 as El libro de los seres imaginarios
- Libro del cielo y del infierno (1960), with Adolfo Bioy Casares
- Libro de sueños (1976), with Roy Bartholomew.
- Breve antología anglosajona (1978), with María Kodama
Translations
At the age of 11, he translated Oscar Wilde.[145] Borges believed that a translation could surpass the original and that the alternative and potentially contradictory revision of the original could be equally valid; moreover, that the original or the literal translation did not have to be faithful to the translation. Throughout his life, he translated, subtly modifying it, the work of, among others, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Hermann Hesse, Rudyard Kipling, Herman Melville, André Gide, William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Henri Michaux, Jack London, Gustav Meyrink, Novalis, Marcel Schwob, George Bernard Shaw, May Sinclair, Jonathan Swift, H. G. Wells and G. K. Chesterton.[16]
Books about Borges
Biographies
- Genio y figura de Jorge Luis Borges (1966), by Alicia Jurado. Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires.
- Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography (1978), by Emir Rodríguez Monegal. E. P. Dutton. Translated as Jorge Luis Borges. Una biografía literaria (1987). Fondo de Cultura Económica.
- Borges. Biografía verbal (1988), by Roberto Alifano. Plaza y Janés.
- Borges. Una biografía (1994), by Horacio Salas. Planeta.
- Borges. Biografía total (1995), by M. R. Barnatán. Temas de Hoy.
- Borges. Esplendor y derrota (1996), by María Esther Vásquez. Tusquets.
- The Man in the Mirror of the Book. A Life of Jorge Luis Borges (1996), by James Woodall. Hodder & Stoughton Ltd. Translated as La vida de Jorge Luis Borges. El hombre en el espejo del libro (1998). Gedisa.
- Los dos Borges. Vida, sueños, enigmas (1996), by Volodia Teiltelboim. Sudamericana.
- Borges. A Life (2004), by Edwin Williamson. Viking. Translated as Borges. Una vida (2007). Seix Barral.
- Borges. Vida y literatura (2006), by Alejandro Vaccaro. Edhasa.
Testimonies
- Borges a contraluz (1989), by Estela Canto. Espasa Calpe.
- El señor Borges (2004). Epifanía Uveda de Robledo and Alejandro Vaccaro. Edhasa.
- Borges (2006), by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Destino.
Essays
- Borges y la nueva generación (1954). Adolfo Prieto.
- Jorge Luis Borges (1955). José Luis Ríos Patrón.
- Borges, enigma y clave (1955). Marcial Tamayo and Adolfo Ruiz Díaz.
- Borgès par lui-même (1970). Éditions du Seuil. Translated as Borges por él mismo (1980). Monte Ávila Editores.
- Contra Borges (1978), by Juan Flo (compiler). Galerna.
- Borges en/y/sobre cine (1981), by Edgardo Cozarinzki. Fundamentos.
- La filosofía de Borges (1986), by Juan Niño. Fondo de Cultura Económica.
- Borges, un escritor en las orillas (1995), by Beatriz Sarlo. Ariel.
- Jorge Luis Borges. Una invitación a su lectura (1999), by José Emilio Pacheco. Ediciones Era. Reissued as Jorge Luis Borges (2019) by the same publisher.
- Jorge Luis Borges. La ironía metafísica (2000), by Fernando Savater. Ediciones Omega.
- Un demi-siècle avec Borges (2004), by Mario Vargas Llosa. L'Herne. Published in Spanish, with some changes, as Medio siglo con Borges (2020). Alfaguara.
- Borges crítico (2007), by Sergio Pastormelo. Fondo de Cultura Económica.
- Jorge Luis Borges (2010), by Christopher Domínguez Michael. Nostra Ediciones.
Others
- Borges. Bibliografía completa (1997). Supervised by Élida Lois. Fondo de Cultura Económica.
- Borges. Una biografía en imágenes (2005), by Alejandro Vaccaro. Ediciones B.
- Borges, libros y lecturas (2010), by Laura Rosato and Germán Álvarez. Catalog of the Jorge Luis Borges collection at the National Library of Argentina.
- La biblioteca de Borges (2018), by Fernando Flores Maio. With a prologue by Mario Kodama. Paripé Books.
Filmography about Borges
- Borges para millones (1978), by Ricardo Wullicher.
- Borges y yo (1982), by David Wheatley. BBC.
- Jorge Luis Borges, el hombre espejo (1999). People + Arts, Artear Argentina, Café Producciones and France 3.
- Jorge Luis Borges (2006), by Román Lejtman. Serie Documenta.
- Borges. Memoria iluminada (2015), by Ernesto Ardito and Dirna Molina. Canal Encuentro.
Ancestors
| Generation | Ancestors |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1. Jorge Luis Borges |
| 2 | 2. Jorge Guillermo Borges 3. Leonor Acevedo |
| 3 | 4. Francisco Isidro Borges 5. Frances Anne Haslam 6. Isidoro Acevedo 7. Leonor Suárez |
| 4 | 8. Francisco de Borges 9. María del Carmen Lafinur 10. Edward Young Haslam 11. Jane Arnett 12. Judas Tadeo Acevedo 13. Hermenegilda Laprida 14. Manuel Isidoro Suárez 15. Jacinta Martínez de Haedo |
| 5 | 16. Manuel Antonio Cardoso de Borges 17. Maria Antonia 18. Luis de Lafinur 19. María Viviana de Pinedo 20. William Hasleham 21. Ann Buckley 22. George Arnett 23. Mary Anne Corker 24. Miguel de Acevedo 25. Catalina Martínez de Santa Cruz 26. Francisco Narciso de Laprida 27. María de la Cruz Olivero 28. Nicolás Suárez 29. María Leonor de Merlo 30. Francisco Ramón Martínez de Haedo 31. María Irene Soler |
See also
- Chronological list of the works of Jorge Luis Borges
- Sur magazine
- Victoria Ocampo
- José Bianco
- Adolfo Bioy Casares
- Silvina Ocampo
- Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge
- Instantes (text wrongly attributed to Borges)
Notes
- ↑ As Borges himself recounts, not without irony: "Her teaching was deleterious or useless, because when I entered the fourth grade of primary school in 1909, I discovered with dread that I could not understand my classmates. I lacked the most common vocabulary: biaba, biaba caldosa, otario, piña, muy de la garganta, ganchudo, faso, meneguina, batir. Nor were the obscenities of first necessity missing. I studied them and soon cured myself of the opposite pedantic error of using them too often.[15]
- ↑ His sister Norah Borges and his mother were detained, accused of causing a public disturbance. Norah Borges (and her friend Adela Grondona) were taken for a few days to the Buen Pastor prison (a women's prison), and in the case of Leonor Acevedo house arrest was ordered on grounds of age.[33]
- ↑ More precisely: in grave 735, location D-6 of the Plainpalais Cemetery, to the right of a cypress.[46]
- ↑ This phrase refers to "The Ballad of Maldon", a 10th-century epic poem that describes the battle that took place on 10 or 11 August 991 on the River Blackwater (Essex, England).[52] One of its passages says: "Then Byrhtnoth began to harangue the men / Riding, he counseled them, taught his warriors / How they should stand and defend their places / He ordered them to hold their shields well / with their firm fists and that they should not fear. / Then when his hosts were well arrayed / Byrhtnoth rested among his men where he most liked to be / Among those warriors whom he knew to be most loyal". The epitaph on the front of Borges's headstone belongs to the second part of the fifth line transcribed. [46] The engraving of the seven warriors is a copy of the engraving on another headstone—possibly the headstone erected in the 9th century at the monastery of Lindisfarne, in the north of England, which commemorates the Viking attack suffered by the monastery in the year 793—that Borges related to "The Ballad of Maldon"; he himself tells us about it: "A headstone in the north of England depicts, in clumsy execution, a group of Northumbrian warriors. One brandishes a broken sword; all have thrown down their shields; their lord has died in the defeat and they advance to get themselves killed, because honor obliges them to accompany him". The statements Borges made during his life about death are contradictory; sometimes he said he did not fear it, but rather longed for it as the only way of saving himself from himself; at other times he said he did not commit suicide out of cowardice. The heroic Saxon warriors of his headstone seem to want to instill courage in him before his last act in the world... and that he should not fear.[46]
- ↑ The original sense of the second inscription refers to the story of the hero Sigurd, who, when he shares a bed with Brynhild, the woman courted by his wife's brother, places a sword called Gram between them so as not to touch her. Years later, in a fit of jealousy, Brynhild has Sigurd killed; when she understands that she cannot survive his death she stabs herself, and asks to lie on the same pyre as her beloved, and that the naked sword be once again between the two of them, as in those days when they went up together to the same bed.[46]
- ↑ The quotation marks allude to a 1930 essay by Borges, titled La supersticiosa ética del lector (The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader), in which he complained that "there are no longer any readers left, in the naive sense of the word, but all are potential critics." Borges 1974, p. 122
References
- ↑ Las influencias de Onetti según Vargas Llosa Archived 2014-10-25 at the Wayback Machine, Revista Ñ (Clarín), 26 September 2012. Accessed 10 August 2014.
- ↑ "Borges". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary; accessed 1 April 2016.
- ↑ David Wheatley (1983). "Profile of a Writer: Borges and I (Feature Documentary)".
- ↑ 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. 191–208.
- ↑ Ferriera, Eliane Fernanda C. (1996). ""O (In) visível imaginado em Borges"". In Pedro Pires Bessa (ed.). Riqueza Cultural Ibero-Americana (in português). Campus de Divinópolis-UEMG. p. 313–14.
- ↑ "Jorge Luis Borges. Premios". Instituto Cervantes (in español). Retrieved 8 June 2016.
- ↑ "Apoya Borges en el 68 régimen de Díaz Ordaz". Rreforma (in español). México. 1 April 2004. pp. Sección cultural.
'Se puede ser un genio literario y un idiota político', afirma el escritor Carlos Fuentes...
- ↑ Británico gana el Premio Nobel de Literatura (en inglés) James M. Markham. The New York Times, 7 October 1983. Accessed 15-08-2010
- ↑ Feldman, Burton (2000) El Premio Nobel: una historia de genio, controversia y prestigio. Editorial Arcade; p. 81 (in English)
- ↑ Ministerio de Educación de la Nación. Subsecretaría de Coordinación Administrativa. "Efemérides Culturales Argentinas. Jorge Luis Borges: familia" (in español). Retrieved 4 April 2010.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Borges, Jorge Luis (2014). Rolando Costa Picazo e Irma Zangara (ed.). Obras Completas I (in español). Colombia: Emecé. p. 58. ISBN 978-950-04-3193-4.
- ↑ Vlady Kociancich. 2001. Jorge Luis Borges. Published in Antroposmoderno on 2001-10-23. [1]
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6 Allen B. Ruch (September 2004). "Jorge Luis Borges Biography". Archived from the original on 9 May 2008. Retrieved 25 September 2008.
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4 Fundación Konex (1984). "Premios Konex, Jorge Luis Borges, Currículum vítae" (in español). Archived from the original on 24 February 2008. Retrieved 25 March 2008.
- ↑ Borges, J.L. 1931. Recuerda Usted quién le enseñó las primeras letras?. Newspaper La Razón, Buenos Aires, 31 August. Published in: Jorge Luis Borges, Textos Recobrados (1931-1955). Emecé. ISBN 950-04-2326-X
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 Biblioteca de Traducciones Hispanoamericanas
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 17.3 17.4 Ministerio de Educación de la Nación. Subsecretaría de Coordinación Administrativa. "Efemérides Culturales Argentinas. Jorge Luis Borges: primeros días (1899-1913)" (in español). Retrieved 21 December 2007.
- ↑ Pascual, A.M. 2000. Jorge Luis Borges. Editorial Océano, S.L., Barcelona. ISBN 84-494-1810-0, p. 21.
- ↑ de la Piedra Walter, Mario Enrique (1 August 2017). "Diagnóstico etiológico de la ceguera de Jorge Luis Borges basado en su obra literaria" (html). ScienceDirect, Revista Mexicana de Oftalmología, volumen 91, ejemplar 4 (in español). Retrieved 22 July 2018.
De los 6 diagnósticos diferenciales más importantes de la ceguera crónica (maculopatía senil, retinopatía diabética, glaucoma, cataratas, retinosis pigmentaria y miopía degenerativa), se estableció que la miopía degenerativa es la etiología más probable de la ceguera de Jorge Luis Borges según la compatibilidad de cada entidad con la obra poética.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link) doi:10.1016/j.mexoft.2016.06.001 - ↑ Pascual, A.M. 2000. Jorge Luis Borges. Editorial Océano, S.L., Barcelona. ISBN 84-494-1810-0, p. 24.
- ↑ 21.0 21.1 The complete version of the poem is found in Textos recobrados between pages 24 and 26, but it was first published in Grecia, Revista Quincenal de Literatura, Seville, Year 2, No. 37, 31 December 1919
- ↑ 22.0 22.1 Sololiteratura (1984). "Semblanza de Jorge Luis Borges" (in español). Retrieved 6 January 2008.
- ↑ Ministerio de Educación de la Nación. Subsecretaría de Coordinación Administrativa (June 1984). "Efemérides Culturales Argentinas. Jorge Luis Borges: 1924-1930" (in español). Retrieved 21 December 2008.
- ↑ 24.0 24.1 24.2 Ministerio de Educación de la Nación. Subsecretaría de Coordinación Administrativa (1984). "Efemérides Culturales Argentinas. Jorge Luis Borges: 1931-1940" (in español). Retrieved 21 December 2008.
- ↑ The first version of this story was first published in 1927 with the title Hombres que pelearon. Efemérides Culturales Argentinas. Jorge Luis Borges: 1924-1930. Ministerio de Educación de la Nación. Subsecretaría de Coordinación Administrativa. Page accessed on 5-1-08. [2]
- ↑ 26.0 26.1 Pascual, A.M. 2000. Jorge Luis Borges. Editorial Océano, S.L., Barcelona. ISBN 84-494-1810-0, pp. 33–34
- ↑ «During the last months—blind and with a heart condition—he had remained staring into the void in the silence of the family home. His death (in February 1938) was in a certain way a liberation, but Borges took a long time to get over the loss of that man whom he adored and who had initiated him into the world of books» Pascual, A.M. 2000. Op. Cit., p. 36.
- ↑ Noya, M. 2006. Jorge Luis Borges, ... los libros y la noche. Archived 2010-05-29 at the Wayback Machine La Ilustración Liberal, Madrid, No. 27.
- ↑ 29.0 29.1 Beccacece, H. Un personaje de película La Nación, Tuesday 5 September 2000.
- ↑ Canto, E. 1989. Borges a contraluz. Espasa Calpe, España. ISBN 84-239-1893-9
- ↑ / Biblioteca Nacional de España. Accessed: 30-03-2011
- ↑ Página 12. 2005. Borges nene de mamá. A guide to the biographies of Borges written in Argentina.
- ↑ 33.0 33.1 33.2 Ministerio de Educación de la Nación. Subsecretaría de Coordinación Administrativa (1984). "Efemérides Culturales Argentinas. Jorge Luis Borges: 1941-1950" (in español). Retrieved 8 January 2008.
- ↑ 34.0 34.1 34.2 34.3 Ministerio de Educación de la Nación. Subsecretaría de Coordinación Administrativa (1984). "Efemérides Culturales Argentinas. Jorge Luis Borges: 1951-1960" (in español). Retrieved 20 January 2008.
- ↑ Borges, Jorge Luis. 1980. La ceguera. In: Siete noches (Lectures delivered by Borges in 1977), Fondo de Cultura Económica, Ediciones Nuevo País, Buenos Aires, pp. 144-160. ISBN 950-557-018-4
- ↑ Borges, Jorge Luis. 1980. La ceguera. In: Siete noches (Lectures delivered by Borges in 1977), Fondo de Cultura Económica, Ediciones Nuevo País, Buenos Aires, pp. 144-160. ISBN 950-557-018-4
- ↑ Jorge Luis Borges. Poema de los Dones. Archived 2018-11-07 at the Wayback Machine
- ↑ In 1976 Jorge Luis Borges appeared on Joaquín Soler Serrano's interview program. In the interview Borges commented on the impact that languages had throughout his life. Educated in Castilian and English, he devoted himself to studying English, French, German and Scandinavian [3]
- ↑ Sosa Vivanco, Walter (21 June 2016). "El joven Mario Vargas Llosa entrevista a Borges" (in español). Lima: Crónica Viva. Retrieved 25 May 2018.
- ↑ 40.0 40.1 40.2 Ministerio de Educación de la Nación. Subsecretaría de Coordinación Administrativa (1984). "Efemérides Culturales Argentinas. Jorge Luis Borges: 1961-1970" (in español). Retrieved 20 January 2008.
- ↑ Camarasa, C. 2007. Esa extraña mujer de Borges. La voz del interior. Temas supplement. Accessed 1 April 2010.
- ↑ Borges, Jorge Luis (27 May 2001). "Textos inéditos de Borges en La Nación" (in español). Retrieved 22 September 2018.
- ↑ Borges se agranda después de Borges. El País, 11/06/2001. Accessed 11/06/2011
- ↑ Sorela, Pedro (15 June 1986). "Jorge Luis Borges murió ayer en Ginebra" (in español). Madrid: newspaper El País. Retrieved 20 March 2011.
{{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - ↑ Bioy Casares, Adolfo (2006). Borges (in español). Barcelona: Destino. ISBN 978-84-233-3873-3.
- ↑ 46.0 46.1 46.2 46.3 46.4 46.5 Muñoz Rengel, J.J. (1999): El último artificio de Borges. A Parte Rei, Revista de Filosofía. No. 5, September. article
- ↑ Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges. Biografía. [4] Page accessed on 5-8-08.
- ↑ Video of the headstone from both sides
- ↑ Diario La República (Uruguay). La tumba que guarda sus restos tiene una pequeña cruz de Gales. Accessed 3 July 2011.
- ↑ Swiss information and services portal. No habían flores amarillas para la tumba de Borges. Accessed 3 July 2011.
- ↑ Elisabetta Piqué. 1999. Borges, sin flores en Ginebra. Diario La Nación (Argentina). Accessed 3 July 2011.
- ↑ "La balada de Maldon" is translated and explained in the book "Literaturas germánicas medievales" by Jorge Luis Borges and María Esther Vázquez.
- ↑ Tras la lápida de Borges (Juan Jacinto Muñoz Rengel) El País 24/02/2009
- ↑ Proyecto para repatriar los restos de Borges [dead link]
- ↑ El cementerio donde Borges quería descansar
- ↑ "Borges seguirá en Ginebra" (in español). Retrieved 24 February 2009.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link) - ↑ Jorge Luis Borges. 1921. Ultraísmo. Nosotros, 151. Buenos Aires, December. Original text
- ↑ de Torre, G. 1964. Para la prehistoria ultraísta de Borges. Hispania, Vol. 47 (3):457-463. doi:10.2307/336161
- ↑ "Jorge Luis Borges, temas de pertenencia: el movimiento ultraísta". Ministerio de Educación, Ciencia y Tecnología, Argentina (in español). Retrieved 18 November 2007.
- ↑ Carlos Cortinez. Hacia el éxtasis: El congreso de Borges. 1986. Hispanic Review, Vol. 54, No. 3, pp. 313-322 (web page accessed on 18 November 2007). [5]
- ↑ Borges, J.L. 1935. Las pesadillas y Kafka. La Prensa, 6 February.
- ↑ Woodall, J. (1999): La vida de Jorge Luis Borges. El hombre en el espejo del libro, Barcelona, Gedisa.
- ↑ http://www.magicasruinas.com.ar/revistero/argentina/dialogo-saer-borges.htm
- ↑ [Hipólito Yrigoyen http://www.ucrbuenosaires.org.ar/node/13050 Archived 31 May 2012 at the Wayback Machine]
- ↑ "12 anécdotas imperdibles de Jorge Luis Borges" (in español).
- ↑ Bioy Casares, Adolfo (2006). Borges (in español). Destino.
- ↑ Carlos Rodríguez Braun. "Borges y el congreso" (in español).
- ↑ Borges y Sábato Archived 21 June 2012 at the Wayback Machine Revista Gente, no. 499, p. 9.
- ↑ "Jauretche y Borges". www.colonbuenosaires.com.ar (in español). Retrieved 20 February 2017.
- ↑ ">Del prólogo a El Paso de los Libres por Jorge Luis Borges « HISTORIA…". archive.is (in español). 2 December 2012. Retrieved 20 February 2017.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link) - ↑ Woodall, J. 1999. La vida de Jorge Luis Borges. El hombre en el espejo del libro, Barcelona, Gedisa.
- ↑ Cited in Fernández, Teodosio (comp., 1998), Álbum biográfico de Jorge Luis Borges, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, p. 40.
- ↑ Woodall, J. (1999): La vida de Jorge Luis Borges. El hombre en el espejo del libro, Barcelona, Gedisa, p.222.
- ↑ 74.0 74.1 "Dichos políticos de Borges". Criterio (in español). February 2006. Retrieved 19 November 2012.
- ↑ Martínez, H.L. 2006. Notas para una biografía política de Borges. Metapolítica 47:29-31. [6] [dead link]
- ↑ ""Borges apoyó con entusiasmo a Videla y Pinochet para combatir a Perón y al comunismo"" (in español).
- ↑ Juan Veledíaz (5 October 2003). "Borges y su "espaldarazo" a Díaz Ordaz" (PDF). Proceso (in español). México. p. 30.
Rogamos haga llegar nuestra adhesión al gobierno de México
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) - ↑ Ema Cibotti (27 July 2017). "El telegrama de Borges y la matanza de Tlatelolco". La Cocina de la Historia. Los editores (in español). México.
- ↑ Aguayo Quezada, Sergio (2011). La transición en México: Historia documental, 1910-2010 (in español). México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. ISBN 9786071606648.
- ↑ Paula Mónaco Felipe (1 April 2012). "Carlos Fuentes: libros y convicciones". La Jornada Semanal (in español). No. 891. México.
(...) ha dicho que "sin él la literatura latinoamericana prácticamente no existiría", pero también que fue "un idiota político".
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) - ↑ Fabrizio Mejía Madrid (16 June 2019). "El comisario no tiene quien le escriba". Proceso (in español). No. 2223. México.
En octubre de 2003 cuando Proceso descubrió en los archivos recién abiertos del 68 la carta que Jorge Luis Borges y Adolfo Bioy Casares habían enviado a Díaz Ordaz y a Echeverría "adhiriéndose" a la decisión de asesinar a los estudiantes en la Plaza de Tlatelolco, Carlos Fuentes fue presionado para dar una respuesta, un botepronto. Con soltura dijo: "Se puede ser un genio de la literatura y, al mismo tiempo, un imbécil en política".
- ↑ Benítez, Luis. Borges, la tiniebla y la gloria (in español). Ediciones LEA. ISBN 9876346423, 9789876346429.
{{cite book}}: Check|isbn=value: invalid character (help) - ↑ "Borges, genio literario, pero imbécil político: Carlos Fuentes" (in español). México. Notimex. 2 April 2004.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) - ↑ "Descalifican una polémica acusación contra Borges". La Nación (in español). Argentina. 30 March 2004.
- ↑ "Entrevista en elhistoriador.com.ar" (in español). Archived from the original on 14 July 2015. Retrieved 7 July 2015.
- ↑ Originally published in Clarín, 31 July 1985. Also available on pages 314-316 of the book by Jorge Luis Borges published by Emecé-Planeta, Textos recobrados III. The fragment transcribed here can be found in La Insignia of 20 December 2004. [7]
- ↑ Barnes, J. 1996. La vida, una maldita cosa detrás de la otra. Clarín. Special supplement devoted to Jorge Luis Borges. [8]".
- ↑ 88.0 88.1 Borges, J.L. 1985. Los Conjurados. Emecé, Buenos Aires.
- ↑ Included in Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones, Alianza, Barcelona, 1998.
- ↑ Nicolás Zavadivker, Borges y la metafísica, online journal A parte Rei, No. 58, Madrid, 2008.
- ↑ Borges, Jorge Luis. Otras inquisiciones, Emecé, Buenos Aires, 1986, p. 247.
- ↑ Báez, Fernando “Mauthner en Borges” -no. 19 Espéculo (UCM): [9]
- ↑ Interview with Borges published in the Revista de la Universidad de México, vol. 16, no. 10, Mexico, June 1962, p. 9
- ↑ Dapía, Silvia G. Die rezeption der Sprachkritik Fritz Mauthner im Werk von Jorge Luis Borges , Böhlau, 1993.
- ↑ Planells, A. 1989. «Cristo en la cruz» o la última tentación de Borges Archived 2 August 2018 at the Wayback Machine Anales de literatura hispanoamericana 18: 135-152.
- ↑ Caruso, P. Jorge Luis Borges. Retrieved 5 April 2010.
- ↑ Sorela, P. 1986. Borges, 'forjador de sueños', fue enterrado en Ginebra. El País. Retrieved 5 April 2010.
- ↑ [HILDEBRANT, Cambio de palabras, 2nd edition, 2008 p. 148 ]
- ↑ Corry, Leo (2003). "Algunas Ideas Científicas en la Obra de Borges y su Contexto Histórico". In Fine, Myrna; Solotorevsky, Ruth (eds.). Borges en Jerusalén (in español). Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert/Iberoamericanai. pp. 49–74.
- ↑ Anderson Imbert, E. (1992). El Realismo Mágico y otros ensayos (in español) (2nd ed.). Caracas: Monte Ávila.
- ↑ Balderston, D. (1986). The Literary Universe of Jorge Luis Borges. An Index to References and Allusions to Persons, Titles, and Places in His Writings. Wesport: Greenwood Press.
- ↑ 102.0 102.1 Rojo, A. (26 December 2007). El jardín de los mundos que se ramifican: Borges y la mecánica cuántica (in español). Notas para un ensayo Borgiano. University of Michigan.
- ↑ Fresan, J. (2007). "De la Biblioteca de Babel a los números normales". TK (in español) (19): 133–139.
- ↑ Rucker, R. (1982). Infinity and the mind. Boston: Birkhäuser.
- ↑ Merrell, F. (1991.). Unthinking Thinking, Jorge Luis Borges. Mathematics, and the New Physics. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press.
{{cite book}}: Check date values in:|year=(help)CS1 maint: year (link) - ↑ Pinker, S. (1997). How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton.
- ↑ Morrison, Ph (February 1996). "The Physics of Binary Numbers". Scientific American: 130.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) - ↑ Makse, H.H. (1998). "Dynamics of granular stratification". 3357. 58.
- ↑ Everett III, H. (1957). "Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics". Reviews of Modern Physics. 29: 454.
- ↑ DeWitt, B.S.; Graham, N. (1973). The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. New Yersey: Princeton University Press.
- ↑ Cohen, N. (8 January 2008). "¿Borges fue precursor de Internet?". Clarín (in español). Argentina.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) - ↑ Sassón-Henry, P. (2007). Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds. Latin America Interdisciplinary Studies. Peter Lang Publ. ISBN 978-0-8204-9714-3.
- ↑ "Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds". Slashdot. 2004. Retrieved 10 January 2008.
- ↑ 114.0 114.1 Llosa Sanz, Álvaro (2006). "De Tlön a Hispanopedia: Borges, la World Wide Web, el libro-orbe y el conocimiento contenido del universo" (PDF) (in español). Divergencias 4.2 (2006): 13-20. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 August 2010.
- ↑ Ciencias en la literatura argentina (in español). Retrieved 28 June 2011.
{{cite encyclopedia}}:|work=ignored (help) - ↑ Mateo Palmer, Margarita. Casa de la Américas (ed.). "Las pistas de un enigma: la poética de Ricardo Piglia" (PDF) (in español). Retrieved 27 March 2009.
El interés de Piglia por crear un espacio de lectura para sus propios textos, fundando una tradición a través del diálogo que establece con sus antecesores, es uno de los hilos principales de la trama desarrollada por Fornet. Las observaciones de Jorge Luis Borges acerca de que «cada escritor crea a sus precursores» y «su labor modifica nuestra concepción del pasado, como ha de modificar el futuro», son desarrolladas en el análisis literario de Respiración artificial, La ciudad ausente y los relatos «Nombre falso» y «Prisión perpetua», textos seleccionados para llevar a cabo la indagación.
- ↑ 117.0 117.1 Braulio Hornedo, Reyes el memorioso.
- ↑ Seventh lecture of the series Siete noches, titled «La ceguera», held on 3 August 1977 at the Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires.
- ↑ Included in El hacedor.
- ↑ Óscar Peyrou. Borges y Argentina. Los amigos de Borges. Centro Virtual Cervantes. Borges 100 años. URL accessed 26-12-07. [10]
- ↑ Williamson, E. 2004. Borges, a life. Viking, Penguin Group, 492 pp.
- ↑ Williamson, E. 2007. Borges, una vida. Seix Barral. 640 pp. ISBN 950-731-488-1
- ↑ 123.0 123.1 Brant, Herbert J. The Queer Use of Communal Women in Borges' El muerto and La intrusa. Indiana University. [11]
- ↑ According to Herbert Brant, Ion T. Agheana's work Reasoned Thematic Dictionary of the Prose of Jorge Luis Borges (Hanover [NH], Ediciones del Norte, 1990) corroborates this point, since there is no entry for "sex" or "sexuality" and the entry for "woman" is less than a page long. Moreover, Agheana identifies only eleven stories in which women are important to the organization of the narrative: La viuda Ching, pirata, Historia del guerrero y de la cautiva, Emma Zunz, Delia Elena San Marco, La intrusa, Juan Muraña, La señora mayor, El duelo, El evangelio según Marcos, La noche de los dones, and Los espejos vedados. To this group, H. Brant adds Hombre de la esquina rosada, El congreso, and Ulrica.
- ↑ Altamiranda, Daniel. Borges, Jorge Luis (Argentina; 1899-1986). Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Ed. David William Foster. Westport: Greenwood P, 1994. 72-83.
- ↑ Magnarelli, Sharon. Literature and Desire: Women in the Fiction of Jorge Luis Borges. Revista/Review Interamericana 13.1-4 (1983): 138-149.
- ↑ Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Recorridos biográficos. Jorge Luis Borges. URL accessed 6-1-08 [12] Archived 14 February 2007 at the Wayback Machine
- ↑ Borges disertó en la Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Diario El Día. Saturday 26 October 1957.
- ↑ Jorge Luis Borges habla hoy en la Biblioteca Central. Diario El Argentino. Saturday 26 October 1957.
- ↑ Volodia Teitelboim. 1996. Los Dos Borges, vida, sueños, enigmas. Editorial Sudamericana. Selected text on this particular subject Archived 15 June 2008 at the Wayback Machine
- ↑ Emir Rodríguez Monegal, in Borges, una biografía literaria (Fondo de Cultura Económica. Mexico, 475 pp., 1993), explains: "... he had already been chosen, jointly with Vicente Aleixandre, the Spanish surrealist poet, for the Nobel Prize, when an untimely visit to Santiago de Chile, to accept a medal from the hands of the dictator Pinochet, decided the Academy to carefully erase his name...". When Borges was asked whether he knew he was putting the Nobel Prize at stake with this, he replied: "-But note that I knew I was putting the Nobel Prize at stake when I went to Chile and the president, what's his name? -Pinochet. -Yes, Pinochet gave me the decoration. I love Chile very much and I understood that it was the Chilean nation, my Chilean readers, who were decorating me."
- ↑ Trop. Woods 77: 42 1944 (GCI)
- ↑ Phytologia 60(5): 310 1986 (IK)
- ↑ Bot. Chron. (Patras) 13: 102. 2000 (IK)
- ↑ Borges, J.L. and Kodama, M. 1978. Breve Antología Anglosajona. Santiago, Chile, Ediciones la Ciudad.
- ↑ Borges, Jorge Luis. 1990. La Alucinación de Gylfi (Translation of fragments of the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson). Buenos Aires, Alianza Editorial (2nd ed.), 104pp. ISBN 978-84-206-0010-9
- ↑ Borges, Jorge Luis. 1921. Ultraísmo. Nosotros, 151. Buenos Aires, December. Original text
- ↑ 138.0 138.1 138.2 Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina. Galería de Directores. "Jorge Luis Borges" (in español). Archived from the original on 16 April 2008. Retrieved 21 October 2007.
- ↑ Club de Libros de Noruega. "Les 100 meilleurs livres de tous les temps". Le Figaro (in français). Retrieved 19 July 2015.
- ↑ "The top 100 books of all time". The Guardian. 8 May 2002. Retrieved 19 July 2015.
- ↑ Savigneau, Josyane (15 October 1999). "Écrivains et choix sentimentaux". Le Monde (in français). Retrieved 19 July 2015.
- ↑ Dadon Benseñor, J.R. 2003. Borges, Los espacios geográficos y los espacios literarios. Scripta Nova. Revista electrónica de geografía y ciencias sociales. Vol. VII, no. 145
- ↑ Octavio Paz. 1986. El arquero, la flecha y el blanco. In: VUELTA (Mexico), No. 117, August 1986.
- ↑ Fries, F.R. 1991. Die aufgehobene Zeit oder der Leser als Autor (Preserved Time, or the Reader as Author). In: Borges lesen (Reading Borges), Frankfurt, Fischer, p. 83.
- ↑ The translation was published in the newspaper El País of Buenos Aires on June 25, 1910. Culture supplement of the newspaper Clarín of Buenos Aires, September 1, 2000.[13]
External links
- Works by Borges in Spanish
- José Guillermo Carrillo International Foundation
- Borges, 100 años at the Centro Virtual Cervantes
- Borges Center at the University of Pittsburgh (in English)
- Borges in 1976, on the La 2 (TVE) program Encuentros con las artes y las letras, with Paloma Chamorro, José Luis Jover and Marcos Ricardo Barnatán.
- Borges in the September 21, 1976 edition of the La 2 program A fondo, with Joaquín Soler Serrano.
- Introduction to the 1976 interview, by Soler Serrano himself, in 2001.
- Borges in 1978, on Encuentros con las letras, with José Luis Jover.
- On A fondo, in 1980: 1; 2; 3; 4.
- Introduction to the 1980 interview, by Soler Serrano himself, in 2001.
- Lecture by Borges on poetry.
- José Romera Castillo, author and presenter of the program J. L. Borges y España, broadcast on TVE-2 (TV Educativa of the UNED) and TVE's Canal Internacional, 15 min., with Teodosio Fernández and Antonio Lorente Medina (November 20): https://canal.uned.es/video/5a6f696ab1111f5c3e8b47b0.
