Jorge Luis Borges 1899-1986

(Also wrote under the pseudonym F. Bustos, and, with Adolfo Bioy
Casares, under the joint pseudonyms H[onorio]. Bustos Domecq, B.
Lynch Davis, and B. Suarez Lynch.) Argentine poet, short-story writer,
essayist, critic, translator, biographer, and screenwriter.

For more information on the work of Borges, see PC, Vol. 22.

INTRODUCTION

During his lifetime, Borges was highly regarded as a writer of baroque

and labyrinthine short fictions often written in the form of metaphysical
detective stories. Characteristically, they blur the distinction between
reality and the perception of reality, between the possible and the
fantastic, between matter and spirit, between past, present, and future,
and between the self and the other. They are usually situated in the
nebulous confines of allegorical locations, whether identified as bizarre
dimensions of the universe, Arabian cities, English gardens, the
Argentine pampa, amazing libraries, or the neighborhoods of Buenos
Aires. Since his death, Borges has attained the status of one of the major
literary figures of the twentieth century, a master poet and essayist, as
well as an architect of the short story. His work has influenced not only
how Latin American and non-Latin American writers write, but also the
way readers read. Associated with the avant-garde Spanish Ultrastas in
the 1920s, Borges rejected the Spanish poetry of the nineteenth century,
and wrote a baroque verse free of rhyme, surrealistic, even brutal, in
imagery and metaphor, dedicated to the incorporation of Argentinean
locations, locutions and themes, and establishing the poet as the soul of
his subject. By the end of the thirties, however, Borges repudiated his
early verse, abandoning local color, nationalism, and the desire to shock.
Thereafter, until his death, he worked with traditional devices: rhyme,
meter, elucidation, and time-honored metaphors in traditional forms
such as the sonnet and haiku. He strove for simplicity of expression
through the use of common language and colloquial word order, and
projected a tone of tranquil irony, and a wisdom concerned with, but
tempered by, an indifference to, time, desire, and mortality.

Biographical Information
Borges was born August 24, 1899, into an old, Argentinean family of
soldiers, patriots, and scholars, in Buenos Aires, where he spent most of
his childhood. His father was an intellectual, a university professor of
psychology and modern languages, a lawyer, and a writer. He possessed
an extensive library, which was the boy's delight. Borges, whose paternal
grandmother was English, was raised bilingual and read English before
Spanish. His first encounter with Cervantes, for example, was in English,
and when he was seven, his Spanish translation of Oscar Wilde's The
Happy Prince appeared in a Uruguayan newspaper. A visit to
Switzerland in 1914 became an extended stay when the outbreak of the
first World War made it impossible for the family to return to Argentina.
Borges enrolled in the College de Geneve, where he studied Latin, French
and German, as well as the European philosophers. he was especially
taken with Schopenhauer and Bishop Berkley, whose dark pessimist and
anti-materialist world view was reflected in Borges's literary work. After
receiving his degree in 1918, Borges traveled to Spain where he joined
with the avant-garde Ultrastas, who combined elements of Dadaism,
Imagism, and German Expressionism in their reviews, essays, and highly
metaphorical poetry. Borges returned to Buenos Aires in 1921, and, with
the publication of his first books of poetry, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923),
Luna de Enfrente (1925), and Cuaderno San Martn (1929), was
recognized as a leading literary figure in Argentina. During these years,
too, Borges helped establish several literary journals, and published
essays on metaphysics and language. In 1938, the same year his father
died, Borges himself nearly died from blood poisoning, after the wound
he received from knocking his head against the casement of an open
window while running up a flight of steps was poorly treated. Fearful that
his ability to write might have been impaired by his illness, Borges took
up short fiction rather than poetry, intending to attribute possible failure
to inexperience in the genre rather than diminished literary skill. The
result was Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, a story highly acclaimed
both as a fiction and as a precursor to deconstructionist textual analysis.
In the period following this publication, Borges wrote many of the works
now considered to be among his masterpieces. Though he spoke of his
disdain for politics, Borges was always politically outspoken. He opposed
European fascism and anti-Semitism, and the dictatorship of Juan Pern
in Argentina. In 1946, Pern removed Borges from his post as an
assistant at the National Library of Argentina, due to his opposition to
the regime; in 1955, however, following the overthrow of Pern, Borges,
now almost totally blind from a condition he inherited from his father,
was made director of the National Library. In 1957, he was appointed
professor of English literature at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1961,
he was a co-recipient, with Samuel Beckett, of the Prix Formentor, the
prestigious International Publishers Prize. Borges did not oppose the
Argentinean military coup or the terrorism of the Videla junta in the
seventies until 1980, when, apologetically, he signed a plea for those
whom the regime had caused to disappear. Similarly, he supported the
Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, calling the general a gentleman, and
commending his imposition of order in the face of communism. It was
for these failings, rather than for any failure as an artist, many believe,
that Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize. The catalog of his awards
and honors, nevertheless, is long and distinguished. He spent his last
years as a literary celebrity, traveling and lecturing. Totally blind, he
continued to write by dictation: to his mother, who died, in 1975, at the
age of ninety-nine, and to his student and companion, Mara Kodama,
whom he married shortly before his death. His enduring love of
languages was marked by his late study of Icelandic. Borges died of
cancer of the liver in 1986, and was buried in Geneva.

Major Works

Borges's literary output spanned seven decades, from the 1920s1980s,

during which he published more than fifty volumes of short stories,
poetry, and essays. In his first collection of poetry, Fervor de Buenos Aires
(Passion for Buenos Aires), published in 1923, Borges, an early adherent
to the Ultrasta literary movement, took his native city as his subject
matter. Subsequent collections of poetry published in the 1920s include
Luna de enfrente (1925; Moon Across the Way), and Cuaderno San Martn
(1929; San Martn Copybook). Turning to the works of short fiction that
eventually won him international praise, Borges virtually ceased to
publish poetry throughout most of the 1930s and 40s. His best-known
short-story collections include El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan
(1941; The Garden of Forking Paths), Ficciones (1944), and El Aleph
(1949), although the first English language translations of his work did
not appear until 1962, with two collections, titled Labyrinths and
Ficciones. Borges began publishing poetry again in the 1950s, when, as
Edward Hirsch describes it: The fabulist returned to poetry with a
more direct and straightforward style, a beguiling and deceptive
simplicity. Jay Parini asserts that, his finest poems appeared between
1955 and 1965, while Martin S. Stabbs observes, By the mid-1960s
Borges seems to have regained considerable momentum as a poet. Both
thematically and technically his work displays a richness not seen since
the 1920s. In these later poems, a notion that recurs almost obsessively
in his poetry as well as in his prose is the idea of the world as a
complex enigma, expressed at times in the form of a labyrinth, or as the
dream-made-real of a capricious creator. Borges's poetry volumes of the
1960s include El hacedor (1960; Dreamtigers), Obra potica (1964), and
El otro, el mismo (1969; The Other, the Same), among others. This period
of prolific poetic output continued into the 1970s, with the collections,
The Gold of Tigers (1972), In Praise of Darkness (1974), and Historia de la
noche (1977), among others. Borges's second-to-last volume of poetry, La
cifra, was published in 1981. His last collection, Los conjurados (1985;
The Conspirators), includes a combination of short prose pieces and
poetry, often blurring the distinction between the two. Of this volume
Stabbs states, The very fact that Borges, then eighty-five, was still
exploring that fascinating no-man's-land between prose and poetry, was
still writing fine sonnets, and was continuing to rework the rich metal of
earlier texts suggests that even though death was close, he remained a
poet of substantial talent and considerable vigor. A volume of new
translations, Selected Poems: Jorge Luis Borges, was released in 1999.

Critical Reception

Borges was not well known outside of literary circles in Buenos Aires
until 1961, when he was awarded the prestigious Formentor Prize,
earning him international recognition and leading to his current status
as one of the foremost short fiction writers of the twentieth century.
Borges met members of the Ultrasta literary movement while in Spain in
1919, and, as a young writer in the 1920s, is sometimes credited with
having introduced ulrism to Argentina. Jay Parini, writing in 1999,
notes that, With Pablo Neruda and Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges
set in motion the wave of astonishing writing that has given Latin
American literature its high place in our time, adding, Yet Borges
stands alone, a planet unto himself, resisting categorization. Marcelo
Abadi refers to Borges as, one of the most prominent writers in any
tongue, observing, in his poems, stories and essays our century can
detect a voice that stirs the dormant wonder which, according to the
Greeks, lies at the source of the love of knowledge and wisdom. Edward
Hirsch opines that Borges, was a rapturous writer, a literary alchemist
who emerged as an explorer of labyrinths, an adventurer in the fantastic,
a poet of mysterious intimacies who probed the infinite postponements
and cycles of time, the shimmering mirrors of fiction and reality, the
symbols of unreality, the illusions of identity, the disintegration of the
self into the universe, into the realm of the Archetypes and the
Splendors. However, critics frequently note that, to this day, Borges's
accomplishments as a poet are largely overshadowed by his reputation as
a master of short fiction. Beret E. Strong describes the international
literary community's portrait of Borges as that of a great short story
writer and mediocre poet of conservative political and traditional literary
values, adding that critics have agreed with Borges's own assessment of
his early poetry and essays as less valuable than the later fiction, and
have, therefore, opted not to write about them much. Mark Couture,
writing in 1999, states the case more strongly: Borges, like Cervantes,
has the reputation in some circles of being a bad poet, but adds, I
don't think this label is quite fair. Couture points out that Borges's
poems have a quiet, metaphysical intensity and a thematic complexity
that can be overlooked in superficial readings. Parini, observing that,
while One tends to think of Borges as the writer of a dozen or so classic
stories Yet Borges was a well-known poet long before he tried his hand
at fiction. Stabbs, acknowledging that, Today he is usually thought of
first as the creator of fictional labyrinths, then as the writer of erudite
essays and only last as a poet, defends Borges's poetry in adding:
he began as a poet and has worked more or less continuously in this
genre. Most important, he reveals more of himself in his verse than in
any other kind of writing.
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