Writer, born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He studied there and at Geneva and Cambridge. From 1918 he was in Spain, where he was a member of the avant-garde Ultraist literary group, returning to Argentina in 1921. His first book of poems, Fervor de Buenos Aires, was published in 1923, and in 1941 appeared the first collection of the intricate and fantasy-woven short stories for which he is famous. Later collections include Ficciónes (1944, 1946, Fictions), El Aleph (1949), and El Hacedor (1960, trans Dreamtigers).
| Jorge Luis Borges | |
|---|---|
| Borges in Paris, 1969 | |
| Born |
August 24, 1899 Buenos Aires, Argentina |
| Died |
June 14, 1986 Geneva, Switzerland |
Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899 – June 14, 1986), was an Argentine writer who is considered one of the foremost literary figures of the 20th century. Best-known in the English speaking world for his short stories and fictive essays, Borges was also a poet, critic, translator and man of letters.
Life
Youth
Borges was born in Buenos Aires. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was a lawyer and psychology teacher, who also had literary aspirations ("he tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt", Borges once said. Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from an old Uruguayan family. At his home, both Spanish and English were spoken and from earliest childhood Borges was effectively bilingual.
Borges's full name was Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo but, following Argentine custom, he never used the entire name.
Jorge Guillermo Borges was forced into early retirement from the legal profession owing to the same failing eyesight that would eventually afflict his son, and in 1914, the family moved to Geneva, where Borges senior was treated by a Geneva eye specialist while Borges and his sister Norah (1901-1998) attended school. There Borges learned French, which he apparently had initial difficulties with, and taught himself German, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève 1918.
After World War I ended, the Borges family spent three years variously in Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid. In Spain, Borges became a member of the avant-garde Ultraist literary movement.
Early writing career
In 1921, Borges returned with his family to Buenos Aires where he imported the doctrine of Ultraism and launched his career as a writer by publishing poems and essays in literary journals. Borges's first collection of poetry was Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923). Ocampo herself introduced Borges to Adolfo Bioy Casares, who was to become Borges's frequent collaborator and Ocampo's brother-in-law, and another well-known figure of Argentine literature.
In 1933 Borges was appointed editor of the literary supplement of the newspaper Crítica, and it was there that the pieces later published in Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy) appeared. These pieces lay somewhere between non-fictional essays and fictional short stories, using fictional techniques to tell essentially true stories, and literary forgeries, which typically claimed to be translations of passages from famous but seldom read works.
Starting in 1937, friends of Borges found him work at the Miguel Cané branch of the Buenos Aires Municipal Library as a first assistant. The other employees immediately forbade Borges from cataloging more than 100 books each day, a task which would take him about one hour. When Juan Perón came to power in 1946, Borges was effectively fired;
Borges's father died in 1938, a great blow because the two were very close. On Christmas Eve 1938, Borges suffered a severe head wound in an accident; (He based his 1944 short story "The South" on this event.) While recovering from the accident, he began writing in a style he became famous for, and his first collection of short stories, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths) appeared in 1941. The book included El sur, a piece that incorporated some autobiographical elements, notably the accident, and which Borges later called "perhaps my best story."
Maturity
Left without a job, his vision beginning to fade due to glaucoma, and unable to fully support himself as a writer, Borges began a new career as a public lecturer. Around this time, Borges also began writing screenplays. By that time, he had become fully blind, like one of his best known predecessors, Paul Groussac (for whom Borges wrote an obituary). Neither coincidence nor the irony escaped Borges and he commented on them in his work:
Let neither tear or reproach besmirch this declaration of the mastery of God who, with magnificent irony, granted me both the gift of books and the night. From 1956 to 1970, Borges also held a position as a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires, while frequently holding temporary appointments at other universities.Being unable to read and write (he never learned the Braille system), he relied on his mother, with whom he had always been personally close, and who began to work with him as his personal secretary.
International recognition
His international fame dates from the early 1960s. As Beckett was well-known and respected in the English-speaking world, while Borges at this time remained unknown and untranslated, English-speakers became curious about who the person was who shared the prize.
In 1967, Borges began a five-year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, thanks to whom he became better known in the English-speaking world.
Though a contender since at least the late 1960s, Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Especially in the late 1980s, when Borges was clearly growing old and infirm, the failure to grant him the prize became a glaring omission. It was speculated that Borges was considered unfit to receive the award because of his tacit support of, or unwillingness to condemn, the military dictatorships that were being installed in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and elsewhere. Although this political stance stemmed from his self-described "Anarcho-Pacifism," it forced Borges to join the distinguished company of Nobel Prize in Literature non-winners, a group including, among others, Graham Greene, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy and Alfonso Reyes (Borges said of Reyes: "the best prose-writer in the Spanish language of any time").
Later personal life
When Perón returned from exile and was re-elected president in 1973, Borges immediately resigned as director of the National Library.
Borges was forced to marry, first in 1967 by his mother, who at over 90 years old and anticipating her own death, wanted to find someone to care for her blind son. Thus she and his sister Norah arranged for Borges to marry the recently widowed Elsa Astete Millán. It is said that Borges never consummated the marriage. After the legal separation, Borges moved back in with his mother, with whom he lived until her death at 99 (see the book The Lessons of the Master by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni).
After 1975, the year his mother died, Borges commenced a series of extensive visits to countries all over the world, that continued until the time of his death.
Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer in Geneva and is buried in the Cimetière des Rois (Plainpalais), where to the dismay of his close lifelong friends, such as Adolfo Bioy Casares, he was married in extremis to Maria Kodama. Kodama was denounced by the prestigious French editor Gallimard and by intellectuals of renown, such as Beatriz Sarlo, as the obstacle to the serious reading of Borges works (see articles in Le Nouvel Observateur, diario El País and diario La Nación among others international media).
Work
In addition to his short stories for which he is most famous, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, several screenplays, and a considerable volume of literary criticism, prologues, and reviews, edited numerous anthologies, and was a prominent translator of English-, French- and German-language literature into Spanish (and of Old English and Norse works as well). Paramount among his intellectual interests are elements of mythology, mathematics, theology, and, as a personal integration of these, Borges's sense of literature as recreation — all of these disciplines are sometimes treated as a writer's playthings and at other times treated very seriously.
Borges lived through most of the twentieth century, and so was rooted in the Modernist period of culture and literature, especially Symbolism. He also shared their multilingualism and their playfulness with language, but while Nabokov and Joyce tended, as their lives went on, toward progressively larger works, Borges remained a miniaturist. Also in contrast to Joyce and Nabokov, Borges's work progressed away from what he referred to as "the baroque," while theirs moved towards it: Borges's later writing style is far more transparent and naturalistic than his early style.
Many of his most popular stories concern the nature of time, infinity, mirrors, labyrinths, reality, philosophy, and identity. The same Borges told more and less realistic stories of South American life, stories of folk heroes, streetfighters, soldiers, gauchos, detectives, historical figures.
Borges's abundant nonfiction includes astute film and book reviews, short biographies, and longer philosophical musings on topics such as the nature of dialogue, language, and thought, and the relationships between them. In this respect, and regarding Borges's personal pantheon, he considered the Mexican essayist of similar topics Alfonso Reyes "the best prose-writer in the Spanish language of any time" (In: Siete Noches, p. His interest in fantasy, philosophy, and the art of translation are evident in articles such as "The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights", while The Book of Imaginary Beings is a thoroughly and obscurely researched bestiary of mythical creatures, in the preface of which Borges wrote, "There is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition." Borges's interest in fantasy was shared by Adolfo Bioy Casares, with whom Borges coauthored several collections of tales between 1942 and 1967, sometimes under different pseudonyms (see main article: H.
Borges composed poetry throughout his life. As his eyesight waned (it came and went, with a struggle between advancing age and advances in eye surgery), Borges increasingly focused on writing poetry, because he could memorize an entire work in progress.
As well as his own original work, Borges was notable as a translator into Spanish. Borges also translated (whilst simultaneously subtly transforming) the works of, among others, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Rudyard Kipling, Herman Melville, André Gide, William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Sir Thomas Browne, and G. In a number of essays and lectures, Borges assessed the art of translation and articulated his own view of translation. Borges held the view that a translation may improve upon an original, and that alternative and potentially contradictory renderings of the same work can be equally valid, and further that an original or literal translation can be unfaithful to the original work.
Borges also employed two very unusual literary forms: the literary forgery and the review of an imaginary work.
Borges's best-known set of literary forgeries date from his early work as a translator and literary critic with a regular column in the Argentine magazine El Hogar. Along with publishing numerous legitimate translations, he also published original works after the style of the likes of Emanuel Swedenborg or The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, originally passing them off as translations of things he had come upon in his reading.
At times, confronted with an idea for a work that bordered on the conceptual, Borges chose — instead of following through with the idea in the obvious way, by writing a piece that fulfilled the concept — to write a review of a nonexistent work, writing as though the work had already been created by some other person. The most famous example of this is "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", which imagines a twentieth-century Frenchman who so immerses himself in the world of sixteenth-century Spain that he can sit down and create a large portion of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote verbatim, not by having memorized Cervantes's work, but as an "original" work of his own mind. Borges's "review" of the work of the fictional Menard effectively discusses the resonances that Don Quixote has picked up over the centuries since it was written, by way of overtly discussing how much richer Menard's work is than Cervantes's (verbatim identical) work.
While Borges was certainly the great popularizer of the review of an imaginary work, it was not his own invention. 104), records Borges as saying that in 1916 in Geneva he "discovered — and was overwhelmed by — Thomas Carlyle. In the introduction to his first published volume of fiction, The Garden of Forking Paths, Borges remarks, "It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. [Collected Fictions, p.67]
Borges as Argentine and as world citizen
Borges's work maintained a universal perspective that reflected a multi-ethnic Argentina, exposure from an early age to his father's substantial collection of world literature, and lifelong travel experience: As a young man, he visited the frontier pampas where the boundaries of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil blurred, and lived and studied in Switzerland and Spain; Drawing on influences of many times and places, Borges's work belittled nationalism and racism.
Borges grew acquainted with the literature from Argentine, Spanish, North American, English, French, German, Italian, and Northern European/Icelandic sources, including those of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. That government's meddling with Borges's job fueled his skepticism of government (he labeled himself a Spencerian anarchist in the blurb of Atlas). When extreme Argentine nationalists sympathetic to the Nazis asserted Borges was Jewish — the implication being that his Argentine identity was inadequate — Borges responded in "Yo Judío" ("I, a Jew"), where he indicated he would be proud to be a Jew, but presented his actual Christian genealogy (along with a backhanded reminder that any "pure Castilian" just might likely have a Jew in their ancestry a millennium back).
Multicultural influences on Borges's writing
Borges's Argentina is a multi-ethnic country, and Buenos Aires, the capital, a cosmopolitan city. This was even truer during the relatively prosperous era of Borges's childhood and youth than in the present. Borges's writing is also steeped by influences and informed by scholarship of Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, and Jewish faiths — including mainline religious figures, heretics, and mystics. For more examples, see the sections below on International themes in Borges and Religious themes in Borges.
Borges as specialist in the history, culture, and literature of Argentina
If Borges often focused on universal themes, he no less composed a substantial body of literature on themes from Argentine folklore, history, and current concerns. Borges's first book, the poetry collection Fervor de Buenos Aires (Passion for Buenos Aires), appeared in 1923. Considering Borges's thorough attention to all things Argentine — ranging from Argentine culture ("History of the Tango";
Borges's interest in Argentine themes reflects in part the inspiration of his family tree. Borges had an English paternal grandmother who, around 1870, married the criollo Francisco Borges, a man with a military command and a historic role in the civil wars in what is now Argentina and Uruguay. Spurred by pride in his family's heritage, Borges often used those civil wars as settings in fiction and quasi-fiction (e.g. Borges's maternal great-grandfather was another military hero, whom Borges immortalized in the poem "A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suarez, Victor at Junín."
Borges, Martín Fierro, and tradition
Borges contributed to a few avant garde publications in the early 1920s, including one called Martín Fierro, named after the major work of nineteenth-century Argentine literature, Martín Fierro, a gauchesque poem by José Hernández, published in two parts, in 1872 and 1880. Initially, along with other young writers of his generation, Borges rallied around the fictional Martín Fierro as the symbol of a characteristic Argentine sensibility, not tied to European values. As Borges matured, he came to a more nuanced attitude toward the poem. Borges's 1953 book of essays on the poem, El "Martín Fierro", separates his great admiration for the aesthetic virtues of the work from his rather mixed opinion of the moral virtues of its protagonist.
In "The Argentine Writer and Tradition", Borges celebrates how Hernández expresses that character in the crucial scene in which Martín Fierro and El Moreno compete by improvising songs about universal themes such as time, night, and the sea. Borges points out that therefore, Hernández evidently knew the difference between actual gaucho tradition of composing poetry on universal themes, versus the "gauchesque" fashion among Buenos Aires literati. Borges goes on to deny the possibility that Argentine literature could distinguish itself by making reference to "local color", nor does it need to remain true to the heritage of the literature of Spain, nor to define itself as a rejection of the literature of its colonial founders, nor follow in the footsteps of European literature. He asserts that Argentine writers need to be free to define Argentine literature anew, writing about Argentina and the world from the point of view of someone who has inherited the whole of world literature.
Borges uses Martín Fierro and El Moreno's competition as a theme once again in "El Fin" ("The End"), a story that first appeared in his short story collection Artificios (1944). In his prologue to Artificios, Borges says of "El Fin," "Everything in the story is implicit in a famous book [Martín Fierro] and I have been the first to decipher it, or at least, to declare it."
Limits to universalism
To exaggerate Borges's universalism might be as much a mistake as the nationalists' questioning the validity of his Argentine identity.
Few references to Africans or African-Americans appear in his work;
In contrast to his scholarship in Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist sources, Borges's view of Hinduism and Hindus seems to have been formed by peering through the sympathetic lens of the works of Rudyard Kipling, as in Borges's "The Approach to Al Mutasim".
Sexuality and sexual orientation
There has been much discussion of Borges' attitudes to sex and women. Brant, in his essay The Queer Use of Communal Women in Borges’ "El muerto" and "La intrusa" , has argued that Borges employed women as intermediaries of male affection, allowing men to engage each other romantically without resorting to direct homosexuality. For instance, the plot of La Intrusa was based on a true story of two friends, but Borges made their fictional counterparts brothers, thus excluding (in his mind) the possibility of a homosexual relationship. Borges had always dismissed these suggestions, though they were common even among his friends. Estela Canto, who had known Borges since 1944, asserted in Borges a contraluz (1989) that Borges' attitude to sex was one of "panicked terror". The trauma of this encounter, in which the young Borges failed to perform "as a man", may have planted persistent doubts in his mind concerning his sexual orientation.
Not every instance of a woman in Borges is either as an object or as a part of what Daniel Balderston has called "the fecal dialectic." Finally, to quote the narrator of Borges's "Pierre Menard" concerning intellectual debate, "There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless." The key to understanding Borges's sexuality then, according to his own writings, would be to not look for it in his writings.
James Woodall and Edwin Williamson have both written biographies of Borges, both of which are titled Borges, a Life. Their investigations of his actual relationships and his personal correspondence elaborate on the debate surrounding Borges's sexuality.
Citation from Andrew Hurley Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions.
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