Jorge Luis Borges

Borges redirects here. For other uses, see Borges

(disambiguation).
For other people of the same name, see Borges (surname).

1960s, aided by his works being available in English, by

the Latin American Boom and by the success of Garca
Mrquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.[7] Writer and
essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: He, more than anyone, renovated the language of ction and thus opened
the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American
novelists..[8]

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges KBE (/brhs/;[1]

Spanish: [xorxe lwis borxes] audio ) (24 August 1899
14 June 1986), was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key gure in Spanish
language literature. His work embraces the character 1
of unreality in all literature.[2] His best-known books,
Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published 1.1
in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths,
libraries, mirrors, ctional writers, philosophy, and religion.

Life and career

Early life and education

Borgess works have contributed to philosophical literature and also to the fantasy genre. Critic ngel Flores, the
rst to use the term magical realism to dene a genre that
reacted against the dominant realism and naturalism of
the 19th century,[3] considers the beginning of the movement to be the release of Borgess A Universal History of
Infamy (Historia universal de la infamia).[3][4] However,
some critics would consider Borges to be a predecessor
and not actually a magical realist. His late poems dialogue with such cultural gures as Spinoza, Cames, and
Virgil.
In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collge de Genve. The family travelled widely
in Europe, including stays in Spain. On his return to
Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems
and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked
as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos
Aires. He became completely blind at the age of 55;
as he never learned braille, he became unable to read.
Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness
helped him to create innovative literary symbols through
imagination.[5] In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the rst Formentor prize (Prix International), which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In
1971 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in
Europe. Borges himself was uent in several languages.
He dedicated his nal work, The Conspirators, to the city
of Geneva, Switzerland.[6]

Jorge Luis Borges in 1921

Jorge Luis Borges was born into an educated middle-class

family on 24 August 1899. They were in comfortable circumstances but not wealthy enough to live in downtown
Buenos Aires. They resided in Palermo, then a poorer
suburb. Borgess mother, Leonor Acevedo Surez, came
from a traditional Uruguayan family of criollo (Spanish)
origin. Her family had been much involved in the EuroHis international reputation was consolidated in the pean settling of South America and the Argentine War
of Independence, and she spoke often of their heroic
1

2
actions.[9] Borgess 1929 book Cuaderno San Martn includes the poem Isidoro Acevedo, commemorating his
grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier of
the Buenos Aires Army. A descendant of the Argentine lawyer and politician Francisco Narciso de Laprida,
Acevedo fought in the battles of Cepeda in 1859, Pavn
in 1861, and Los Corrales in 1880. Isidoro de Acevedo
Laprida died of pulmonary congestion in the house where
his grandson Jorge Luis Borges was born. Borges grew
up hearing about the faded family glory. Borgess father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was part Spanish, part Portuguese, and half English, also the son of
a colonel. Borges Haslam, whose mother was English,
grew up speaking English at home and took his own family frequently to Europe. England and English pervaded
the family home.[9]
At nine, Jorge Luis Borges translated Oscar Wilde's The
Happy Prince into Spanish. It was published in a local
journal, but his friends thought the real author was his
father.[10] Borges Haslam was a lawyer and psychology
teacher who harboured literary aspirations. Borges said
his father tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt. He wrote, as most of my people had been soldiers and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite
early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of
action.[9]
Borges was taught at home until the age of 11, was bilingual in Spanish and English, reading Shakespeare in the
latter at the age of twelve.[9] The family lived in a large
house with an English library of over one thousand volumes; Borges would later remark that if I were asked
to name the chief event in my life, I should say my fathers library.[11] His father gave up practicing law due
to the failing eyesight that would eventually aict his
son. In 1914, the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland,
and spent the next decade in Europe.[9] Borges Haslam
was treated by a Geneva eye specialist, while his son
and daughter Norah attended school, where Borges junior learned French. He read Thomas Carlyle in English,
and he began to read philosophy in German. In 1917,
when he was eighteen, he met Maurice Abramowicz and
began a literary friendship that would last for the rest of
his life.[9] He received his baccalaurat from the Collge
de Genve in 1918.[12][Notes 1] The Borges family decided
that, due to political unrest in Argentina, they would remain in Switzerland during the war, staying until 1921.
After World War I, the family spent three years living in
various cities: Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and
Madrid.[9]
At that time, Borges discovered the writings of Arthur
Schopenhauer and Gustav Meyrink's The Golem (1915)
which became inuential to his work. In Spain, Borges
fell in with and became a member of the avant-garde,
anti-Modernist Ultraist literary movement, inspired by
Guillaume Apollinaire and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,
close to the Imagists. His rst poem, Hymn to the Sea,
written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published in the

LIFE AND CAREER

magazine Grecia.[13] While in Spain, he met noted Spanish writers, including Rafael Cansinos Assens and Ramn
Gmez de la Serna.

1.2 Early writing career

In 1921, Borges returned with his family to Buenos Aires.
He had little formal education, no qualications and few
friends. He wrote to a friend that Buenos Aires was
now overrun by arrivistes, by correct youths lacking any
mental equipment, and decorative young ladies.[9] He
brought with him the doctrine of Ultraism and launched
his career, publishing surreal poems and essays in literary journals. Borges published his rst published collection of poetry, Fervor de Buenos Aires, in 1923 and contributed to the avant-garde review Martn Fierro. Borges
co-founded the journals Prisma, a broadsheet distributed
largely by pasting copies to walls in Buenos Aires, and
Proa. Later in life, Borges regretted some of these early
publications, attempting to purchase all known copies to
ensure their destruction.[14]

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Victoria Ocampo and Borges in 1935

By the mid-1930s, he began to explore existential questions and ction. He worked in a style that Argentinian
critic Ana Mara Barrenechea has called Irreality. Many
other Latin American writers, such as Juan Rulfo, Juan
Jos Arreola, and Alejo Carpentier, were also investigating these themes, inuenced by the phenomenology
of Husserl and Heidegger and the existentialism of
Jean-Paul Sartre. In this vein, his biographer Edwin Williamson underlines the danger in inferring an
autobiographically-inspired basis for the content or tone
of certain of his works: books, philosophy and imagination were as much a source of real inspiration to him as
his own lived experience, if not more so.[9] From the rst
issue, Borges was a regular contributor to Sur, founded
in 1931 by Victoria Ocampo. It was then Argentinas

1.3

Later career

most important literary journal and helped Borges nd

his fame.[15] Ocampo introduced Borges to Adolfo Bioy
Casares, another well-known gure of Argentine literature, who was to become a frequent collaborator and close
friend. Together they wrote a number of works, some
under the nom de plume H. Bustos Domecq, including a
parody detective series and fantasy stories. During these
years, a family friend Macedonio Fernndez became a
major inuence on Borges. The two would preside over
discussions in cafs, country retreats, or Fernandezs tiny
apartment in the Balvanera district. He appears by name
in Borgess "Dialogue about a Dialogue",[16] in which the
two discuss the immortality of the soul.
In 1933, Borges gained an editorial appointment at the literary supplement of the newspaper Crtica, where he rst
published the pieces collected as Historia universal de la
infamia (A Universal History of Infamy) in 1935.[9] The
book includes two types of writing: the rst lies somewhere between non-ctional essays and short stories, using ctional techniques to tell essentially true stories. The
second consists of literary forgeries, which Borges initially passed o as translations of passages from famous
but seldom-read works. In the following years, he served
as a literary adviser for the publishing house Emec Editores and from 1936 to 1939 wrote weekly columns for
El Hogar. In 1938, Borges found work as rst assistant at
the Miguel Can Municipal Library. It was in a working
class area[17] and there were so few books that cataloguing more than one hundred books per day, he was told,
would leave little to do for the other sta and so look bad.
The task took him about an hour each day and the rest of
his time he spent in the basement of the library, writing
and translating.[9]

1.3

Later career

tragedy for the writer as the two were very close. On

Christmas Eve that year, Borges suered a severe head
injury; during treatment, he nearly died of septicemia.
While recovering from the accident, Borges began playing with a new style of writing for which he would become
famous. His rst story written after his accident, "Pierre
Menard, Author of The Quixote" came out in May 1939.
One of his most famous works, Menard examines the
nature of authorship, as well as the relationship between
an author and his historical context. His rst collection of
short stories, El jardn de senderos que se bifurcan (The
Garden of Forking Paths), appeared in 1941, composed
mostly of works previously published in Sur.[9] The title
story concerns a Chinese professor in England, Dr. Yu
Tsun, who spies for Germany during World War I, in an
attempt to prove to the authorities that an Asian person
is able to obtain the information that they seek. A combination of book and maze, it can be read in many ways.
Through it, Borges arguably invented the hypertext novel
and went on to describe a theory of the universe based
upon the structure of such a novel.[18][19] Eight stories
taking up over sixty pages, the book was generally well
received, but El jardn de senderos que se bifurcan failed
to garner for him the literary prizes many in his circle
expected.[20][21] Victoria Ocampo dedicated a large portion of the July 1941 issue of Sur to a Reparation for
Borges. Numerous leading writers and critics from Argentina and throughout the Spanish-speaking world contributed writings to the reparation project.
With his vision beginning to fade in his early thirties and
unable to support himself as a writer, Borges began a new
career as a public lecturer.[Notes 2][22][23] He became an increasingly public gure, obtaining appointments as President of the Argentine Society of Writers and as Professor of English and American Literature at the Argentine
Association of English Culture. His short story "Emma
Zunz" was made into a lm (under the name of Das de
odio, Days of Hate, directed in 1954 by Leopoldo Torre
Nilsson).[24] Around this time, Borges also began writing
screenplays.
In 1955, he was nominated to the directorship of the National Library. By the late 1950s, he had become completely blind. Neither the coincidence nor the irony of his
blindness as a writer escaped Borges:[9]
The following year the University of Cuyo awarded
Borges the rst of many honorary doctorates and in 1957
he received the National Prize for Literature .[26] From
1956 to 1970, Borges also held a position as a professor
of literature at the University of Buenos Aires and other
temporary appointments at other universities.[26] In the
fall of 1967 and spring of 1968, he delivered the Charles
Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University.[27]
As his eyesight deteriorated, Borges relied increasingly
on his mothers help.[26] When he was not able to read
and write anymore (he never learned to read Braille), his
mother, to whom he had always been close, became his

Jorge Luis Borges in the 1940s

Borgess father died in 1938.

This was a particular

LIFE AND CAREER

personal secretary.[26] When Pern returned from exile Linguistics and literary Criticism) and the Prix mondial
and was re-elected president in 1973, Borges immediately Cino Del Duca and the Cervantes Prize (all 1980), as well
resigned as director of the National Library.
as the French Legion of Honour (1983).

1.4

International renown

In 1967, Borges began a ve-year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di
Giovanni, through whom he became better known in
the English-speaking world. He also continued to publish books, among them El libro de los seres imaginarios
(Book of Imaginary Beings, (1967, co-written with Margarita Guerrero), El informe de Brodie (Dr. Brodies Report, 1970), and El libro de arena (The Book of Sand,
1975). He also lectured prolically. Many of these lectures were anthologized in volumes such as Siete noches
(Seven Nights) and Nueve ensayos dantescos (Nine Dantesque Essays). His presence, also in 1967, on campus at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA)
inuenced a group of students among whom was Jared
Loewenstein, who would later become founder and curator of the Jorge Luis Borges Collection at UVA,[32] one
of the largest repositories of documents and manuscripts
pertaining to the early works of JLB.[33]

1.5 Later personal life

Borges at L'Htel, Paris, 1969

Eight of Borgess poems appear in the 1943 anthology of

Spanish American Poets by H.R. Hays.[28][Notes 3] The
Garden of Forking Paths, one of the rst Borges stories
to be translated into English, appeared in the August 1948
issue of Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine, translated by
Anthony Boucher.[29] Though several other Borges translations appeared in literary magazines and anthologies
during the 1950s, his international fame dates from the
early 1960s.[30]
In 1961, Borges received the rst Prix International,
which he shared with Samuel Beckett. While Beckett had
garnered a distinguished reputation in Europe and America, Borges had been largely unknown and untranslated in
the English-speaking world and the prize stirred great interest in his work. The Italian government named Borges
Commendatore and the University of Texas at Austin appointed him for one year to the Tinker Chair. This led
to his rst lecture tour in the United States. In 1962, two
major anthologies of Borgess writings were published in
English by New York presses: Ficciones and Labyrinths.
In that year, Borges began lecture tours of Europe. Numerous honors were to accumulate over the years such as
a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for distinguished contribution to the mystery genre (1976),[31] the Balzan Prize (for Philology,

Mara Kodama at the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair

In 1967, Borges married the recently widowed Elsa

Astete Milln. Friends believed that his mother, who
was 90 and anticipating her own death, wanted to nd
someone to care for her blind son. The marriage lasted
less than three years. After a legal separation, Borges
moved back in with his mother, with whom he lived un-

2.2

Anti-fascism

til her death at age 99.[34] Thereafter, he lived alone in

the small at he had shared with her, cared for by Fanny,
their housekeeper of many decades.[35] From 1975 until
the time of his death, Borges traveled internationally. He
was often accompanied in these travels by his personal assistant Mara Kodama, an Argentine woman of Japanese
and German ancestry. In April 1986, a few months before his death, he married her via an attorney in Paraguay,
in what was then a common practice among Argentines
wishing to circumvent the Argentine laws of the time regarding divorce.
On his religious views, Borges declared himself as an agnostic, clarifying: Being an agnostic means all things
are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This
world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not
happen.[36]
Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer in 1986 in Geneva
and was buried there in the Cimetire des Rois. Kodama,
his widow and heir on the basis of the marriage and two
wills, gained control over his works. Her assertive administration of his estate resulted in a bitter dispute with the
French publisher Gallimard regarding the republication
of the complete works of Borges in French, with Pierre
Assouline in Le Nouvel Observateur (August 2006) calling her an obstacle to the dissemination of the works
of Borges. Kodama took legal action against Assouline,
considering the remark unjustied and defamatory, asking for a symbolic compensation of one euro.[37][38][39]
Kodama also rescinded all publishing rights for existing
collections of his work in English, including the translations by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in which Borges
himself collaborated, and from which di Giovanni would
have received an unusually high fty percent of the royalties. Kodama commissioned new translations by Andrew
Hurley, which have become the standard translations in
English.[40]

2
2.1

Political opinions
Anti-communism

In an interview with Richard Burgin during the late

1960s, Borges described himself as an adherent of
classical liberalism. He further recalled that his opposition to Marxism and communism was absorbed in his
childhood. Well, I have been brought up to think that the
individual should be strong and the State should be weak.
I couldn't be enthusiastic about theories where the State
is more important than the individual.[41] After the overthrow via coup d'etat of President Juan Domingo Pern
in 1955, Borges supported eorts to purge Argentinas
Government of Peronists and dismantle the former Presidents welfare state. He was enraged that the Communist
Party of Argentina opposed these measures and sharply
criticized them in lectures and in print. Borgess opposition to the Party in this matter ultimately led to a perma-

Borges and the Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato.

nent rift with his longtime lover, Argentine Communist

Estela Canto.[42]
In a 1956 interview given to El Hogar, "[Communists] are
in favor of totalitarian regimes and systematically combat
freedom of thought, oblivious of the fact that the principal victims of dictatorships are, precisely, intelligence
and culture.[43]
He elaborated, Many people are in favor of dictatorships
because they allow them to avoid thinking for themselves.
Everything is presented to them ready-made. There are
even agencies of the State that supply them with opinions,
passwords, slogans, and even idols to exalt or cast down
according to the prevailing wind or in keeping with the
directives of the thinking heads of the single party.[44]
In later years, Borges frequently expressed contempt for
Marxists and Communists within the Latin American intelligentsia. In an interview with Burgin, Borges referred
to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda as a very ne poet but a
very mean man for unconditionally supporting the Soviet Union and demonizing the United States.[45]

2.2 Anti-fascism
In 1934, Argentine ultra-nationalists, sympathetic to
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, asserted Borges was secretly Jewish, and by implication, not a true Argentine. Borges responded with the essay Yo, Judo (I,
a Jew), a reference to the old Yo, Argentino (I, an

2 POLITICAL OPINIONS

Argentine), a defensive phrase used during pogroms of 2.3

Argentine Jews to make it clear to attackers that an intended victim was not Jewish.[46] In the essay he says that
he would be proud to be a Jew, with a backhanded reminder that any pure Castilian might be likely to have
Jewish ancestry from a millennium ago.[46]

Anti-Peronism

Both before and during the Second World War, Borges

regularly published essays attacking the Nazi police state
and its racist ideology. His outrage was fueled by his deep
love for German literature. In an essay published in 1937,
Borges attacked the Nazi Partys use of childrens books
in order to iname antisemitism. He wrote, I don't know
if the world can do without German civilization, but I do
know that its corruption by the teachings of hatred is a
crime.[47]
In a 1938 essay, Borges reviewed an anthology which
rewrote German authors of the past to t the Nazi party
line. He was disgusted by what he described as Germanys chaotic descent into darkness and the attendant
rewriting of history. He argues that such books sacrice culture, history and honesty in the name of defending
German honour. Such practices, he writes, perfect the
criminal arts of barbarians.[48] In a 1944 essay, Borges President Juan Domingo Pern at his 1946 inaugural parade.
postulated,
Nazism suers from unreality, like
Erigena's hell. It is uninhabitable; men can
only die for it, lie for it, wound and kill for
it. No one, in the intimate depths of his
being, can wish it to triumph. I shall risk this
conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler
is blindly collaborating with the inevitable
armies that will annihilate him, as the metal
vultures and the dragon (which must have
known that they were monsters) collaborated,
mysteriously, with Hercules.[49]

In 1946, Argentine President Juan Pern began transforming Argentina into a single party state with the assistance of his wife Evita. Almost immediately, the spoils
system was the rule of the day, as ideological critics of
the ruling Partido Justicialista were red from government jobs. During this period, Borges was informed that
he was being promoted from his position at the Miguel
Can Library to a post as inspector of poultry and rabbits at the Buenos Aires municipal market. Upon demanding to know the reason, Borges was told, Well, you
were on the side of the Allies, what do you expect?"[51] In
response, Borges resigned from Government service the
following day.

In 1946, Borges published the short story "Deutsches Requiem", which masquerades as the last testament of Otto
Dietrich zur Linde, a condemned Nazi war criminal. In a
1967 interview with Burgin, Borges recalled how his interactions with Argentinas Nazi sympathisers led him to
create the story.

Perns treatment of Borges became a cause clbre for

the Argentine intelligentsia. The Argentine Society of
Writers (SADE) held a formal dinner in his honour. At
the dinner, a speech was read which Borges had written
for the occasion. It said,

And then I realized that those people that

were on the side of Germany, that they never
thought of German victories or the German
glory. What they really liked was the idea of
the Blitzkrieg, of London being on re, of the
country being destroyed. As to the German
ghters, they took no stock in them. Then
I thought, well now Germany has lost, now
America has saved us from this nightmare, but
since nobody can doubt on which side I stood,
I'll see what can be done from a literary point of
view in favor of the Nazis. And then I created
the ideal Nazi.[50]

Dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships breed servility, dictatorships breed cruelty; more loathsome still is the fact that they
breed idiocy. Bellboys babbling orders, portraits of caudillos, prearranged cheers or insults, walls covered with names, unanimous
ceremonies, mere discipline usurping the place
of clear thinking... Fighting these sad monotonies is one of the duties of a writer. Need
I remind readers of Martn Fierro or Don Segundo that individualism is an old Argentine
virtue.[52]
In the aftermath, Borges found himself much in demand

2.3

Anti-Peronism

7
be permanently closed down. Like much of the Argentine opposition to Pern, SADE had become marginalized due to persecution by the State, and very few active
members remained.
According to Edwin Williamson,

Borges in 1976.

as a lecturer and one of the intellectual leaders of the Argentine opposition. In 1951 he was asked by anti-Peronist
friends to run for president of SADE. Borges, then suffering from depression caused by a failed romance, reluctantly accepted. He later recalled that he would awake every morning and remember that Pern was President and
feel deeply depressed and ashamed.[53] Perns government had seized control of the Argentine mass media and
regarded SADE with indierence. Borges later recalled,
however, Many distinguished men of letters did not dare
set foot inside its doors.[54] Meanwhile, SADE became
an increasing refuge for critics of the regime. SADE ofcial Luisa Mercedes Levinson noted, We would gather
every week to tell the latest jokes about the ruling couple
and even dared to sing the songs of the French Resistance,
as well as 'La Marseillaise'.[54]
After Evitas death on July 26, 1952, Borges received a
visit from two policemen, who ordered him to put up
two portraits of the ruling couple on the premises of
SADE. Borges indignantly refused, calling it a ridiculous
demand. The policemen icily retorted that he would soon
face the consequences.[55] The Justicialist Party placed
Borges under 24-hour surveillance and sent policemen to
sit in on his lectures; in September they ordered SADE to

Borges had agreed to stand for the presidency of the SADE in order [to] ght for intellectual freedom, but he also wanted to avenge
the humiliation he believed he had suered
in 1946, when the Peronists had proposed to
make him an inspector of chickens. In his letter of 1950 to Attilio Rossi, he claimed that his
infamous promotion had been a clever way the
Peronists had found of damaging him and diminishing his reputation. The closure of the
SADE meant that the Peronists had damaged
him a second time, as was borne out by the visit
of the Spanish writer Julin Maras, who arrived in Buenos Aires shortly after the closure
of the SADE. It was impossible for Borges, as
president, to hold the usual reception for the
distinguished visitor; instead, one of Borges
friends brought a lamb from his ranch, and
they had it roasted at a tavern across the road
from the SADE building on Calle Mexico. After dinner, a friendly janitor let them into the
premises, and they showed Maras around by
candlelight. That tiny group of writers leading
a foreign guest through a dark building by the
light of guttering candles was vivid proof of the
extent to which the SADE had been diminished
under the rule of Juan Pern.[56]
On September 16, 1955, General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu's Revolucin Libertadora toppled the ruling party
and forced Pern to ee into exile. Borges was overjoyed
and joined demonstrators marching through the streets of
Buenos Aires. According to Williamson, Borges shouted,
Viva la Patria, until his voice grew hoarse. Due to the
inuence of Borges mother and his own role on the opposition to Peron, the provisional government appointed
Borges as the Director of the National Library.[57]
In his essay L'Illusion Comique, Borges wrote that there
were two histories of Peronism in Argentina. The rst he
described as the criminal one, composed of the police
state tactics used against both real and imagined antiPeronists. The second history was, according to Borges,
the theatrical one composed of tales and fables made
for consumption by dolts. He argued that, despite their
claims to detest Capitalism, Juan and Eva Pern copied
its methods, dictating names and slogans to the people
in the same way that multi-national corporations impose
their razor blades, cigarettes, and washing machines.[58]
Borges then listed the numerous conspiracy theories the
ruling couple dictated to their followers and how those
theories were accepted without question.[59]

3 WORKS

Borges concluded:

It is useless to list the examples; one can

only denounce the duplicity of the ctions of
the former regime, which can't be believed and
were believed. It will be said that the publics lack of sophistication is enough to explain the contradiction; I believe that the cause
is more profound. Coleridge spoke of the
willing suspension of disbelief, that is, poetic faith; Samuel Johnson said, in defense of
Shakespeare, that the spectators at a tragedy do
not believe they are in Alexandria in the rst
act and Rome in the second but submit to the
pleasure of a ction. Similarly, the lies of a dictatorship are neither believed nor disbelieved;
they pertain to an intermediate plane, and their
purpose is to conceal or justify sordid or atrocious realities. They pertain to the pathetic or
the clumsily sentimental. Happily, for the enlightenment and security of the Argentines, the
current regime has understood that the function
of government is not to inspire pathos.[60]

In a 1967 interview, Borges said, Pern was a humbug,

and he knew it, and everybody knew it. But Pern could
be very cruel. I mean, he had people tortured, killed. And
his wife was a common prostitute.[61]
When Pern returned from exile in 1973 and regained the
Presidency, Borges was enraged. In a 1975 interview for
National Geographic, he said Damn, the snobs are back
in the saddle. If their posters and slogans again dele the
city, I'll be glad I've lost my sight. Well, they can't humiliate me as they did before my books sold well.[62] After being accused of being unforgiving, Borges quipped,
I resented Perns making Argentina look ridiculous to
the world... as in 1951, when he announced control over
thermonuclear fusion, which still hasn't happened anywhere but in the sun and the stars. For a time, Argentinians hesitated to wear band aids for fear friends would
ask, 'Did the atomic bomb go o in your hand?' A shame,
because Argentina really has world-class scientists.[62]
After Borges death in 1986, the Peronist Partido Justicialista declined to send a delegate to the writers memorial service in Buenos Aires. A spokesman for the Party
said that this was in reaction to certain declarations he
had made about the country.[63] Later, at the City Council of Buenos Aires, Peronist politicians refused to honor
Borges as an Argentine, commenting that he chose to
die abroad. When infuriated politicians from the other
parties demanded to know the real reason, the Peronists
nally explained that Borges had made statements about
Evita Pern which they called unacceptable.[63]

2.4 Military junta

During the 1970s, Borges at rst expressed support for
Argentinas military junta, but was scandalized by the
juntas actions during the Dirty War. In protest against
their support of the regime, Borges ceased publishing in
the newspaper La Nacin.[64]
In 1985 he wrote a short poem about the Falklands War
called Juan Lpez y John Ward, about two ctional soldiers (one from each side), who died in the Falklands, in
which he refers to islands that were too famous. He
also said about the war: The Falklands thing was a ght
between two bald men over a comb.[65]

3 Works
Main article: Jorge Luis Borges bibliography
Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort argue that Borges may have
been the most important gure in Spanish-language literature since Cervantes. He was clearly of tremendous inuence, writing intricate poems, short stories, and essays
that instantiated concepts of dizzying power.[66]
In addition to short stories for which he is most noted,
Borges also wrote poetry, essays, screenplays, literary criticism, and edited numerous anthologies. His
longest work of ction is a fourteen-page story, The
Congress, rst published in 1971.[9] His late-onset blindness strongly inuenced his later writing. Borges wrote:
When I think of what I've lost, I ask, 'Who know themselves better than the blind?' for every thought becomes
a tool.[67] Paramount among his intellectual interests are
elements of mythology, mathematics, theology, integrating these through literature, sometimes playfully, sometimes with great seriousness.[68]
Borges composed poetry throughout his life. As his eyesight waned (it came and went, with a struggle between
advancing age and advances in eye surgery), he increasingly focused on writing poetry, since he could memorize an entire work in progress.[69] His poems embrace
the same wide range of interests as his ction, along with
issues that emerge in his critical works and translations,
and from more personal musings. For example, his interest in idealism runs through his work, reected in the
ctional world of Tln in "Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
and in his essay "A New Refutation of Time".[70] It also
appears as a theme in "On Exactitude in Science" and in
his poems Things and "El Golem" (The Golem) and
his story "The Circular Ruins".
Borges was a notable translator. He translated works
of literature in English, French, German, Old English,
and Old Norse into Spanish. His rst publication, for
a Buenos Aires newspaper, was a translation of Oscar
Wilde's story "The Happy Prince" into Spanish when
he was nine.[71] At the end of his life he produced a

3.2

Criticism of Borges work

Spanish-language version of a part of Snorri Sturluson's

Prose Edda. He also translated (while simultaneously
subtly transforming) the works of, among others, William
Faulkner, Andr Gide, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka,
Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and
Virginia Woolf.[Notes 4] Borges wrote and lectured extensively on the art of translation, holding that a translation
may improve upon the original, may even be unfaithful to it, and that alternative and potentially contradictory renderings of the same work can be equally valid.[72]
Borges also employed the devices of literary forgery and
the review of an imaginary work, both forms of modern
pseudo-epigrapha.

3.1

Hoaxes and forgeries

9
misses the method as too easy, instead trying to reach Don
Quixote through his own experiences. He nally manages to (re)create the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of
the rst part of Don Quixote and a fragment of chapter
twenty-two. Borgess review of the work of the ctional Menard uses tongue-in-cheek comparisons to explore the resonances that Don Quixote has picked up over
the centuries since it was written. He discusses how much
richer Menards work is than that of Cervantess, even
though the actual text is exactly the same.
While Borges was the great popularizer of the review
of an imaginary work, he had developed the idea from
Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a book-length review
of a non-existent German transcendentalist work, and the
biography of its equally non-existent author. In This Craft
of Verse, Borges says that in 1916 in Geneva "[I] discovered, and was overwhelmed by, Thomas Carlyle. I read
Sartor Resartus, and I can recall many of its pages; I know
them by heart.[73] In the introduction to his rst published volume of ction, The Garden of Forking Paths,
Borges remarks, It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books,
setting out in ve hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in ve minutes. The better way to
go about it is to pretend that those books already exist,
and oer a summary, a commentary on them. He then
cites both Sartor Resartus and Samuel Butler's The Fair
Haven, remarking, however, that those works suer under the imperfection that they themselves are books, and
not a whit less tautological than the others. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to
write notes on imaginary books.[74]
On the other hand, Borges was wrongly attributed some
works, like the poem Instantes.[75][76]

Tomb of Jorge Luis Borges, Cimetire des Rois, Plainpalais.

Borgess best-known set of literary forgeries date from

his early work as a translator and literary critic with
a regular column in the Argentine magazine El Hogar.
Along with publishing numerous legitimate translations,
he also published original works, for example, in the
style of Emanuel Swedenborg[Notes 5] or One Thousand
and One Nights, originally claiming them to be translations of works he had chanced upon. In another case, he
added three short, falsely attributed pieces into his otherwise legitimate and carefully researched anthology El matrero.[Notes 5] Several of these are gathered in the A Universal History of Infamy.
At times he wrote reviews of nonexistent writings by
some other person. The key example of this is "Pierre
Menard, Author of the Quixote", which imagines a
twentieth-century Frenchman who tries to write Miguel
de Cervantes's Don Quixote verbatim, not by having
memorized Cervantess work but as an original narrative of his own invention. Initially the Frenchman tries to
immerse himself in sixteenth-century Spain, but he dis-

3.2 Criticism of Borges work

Borgess change in style from regionalist criollismo to
a more cosmopolitan style brought him much criticism
from journals such as Contorno, a left-of-centre, Sartreinuenced Argentine publication founded by David Vias
and his brother, along with other intellectuals such as No
Jitrik and Adolfo Prieto. In the post-Peronist Argentina
of the early 1960s, Contorno met with wide approval from
the youth who challenged the authenticity of older writers such as Borges and questioned their legacy of experimentation. Magic realism and exploration of universal
truths, they argued, had come at the cost of responsibility and seriousness in the face of societys problems.[77]
The Contorno writers acknowledged Borges and Eduardo
Mallea for being doctors of technique but argued that
their work lacked substance due to their lack of interaction with the reality that they inhabited, an existentialist
critique of their refusal to embrace existence and reality
in their artwork.[77]

10

4 FACT, FANTASY AND NON-LINEARITY

Some observers speculated that Borges did not receive the
award in his later life because of his conservative political
views, or more specically, because he had accepted an
honour from Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.[86][87]

4 Fact, fantasy and non-linearity

Jorge Luis Borges Monument in Santiago de Chile

3.3

Sexuality

Borges allegedly never had coitus throughout his life. The

story "The Sect of the Phoenix" is famously interpreted
to allude to the ubiquity of sexual intercourse among humans [78] - a concept whose essential qualities the narrator of the story is not able to relate to. With a few notable
exceptions, women are almost entirely absent from the
majority of Borgess ctional output.[79] However, there
are some instances in Borgess later writings of romantic
love, for example the story "Ulrikke" from The Book of
Sand. The protagonist of the story El muerto also lusts
after the splendid, contemptuous, red-haired woman of
Azevedo Bandeira[80] and later sleeps with the woman
with shining hair.[81] Although they do not appear in the
stories, women are signicantly discussed as objects of
unrequited love in his short stories The Zahir and The
Aleph.[82] The plot of La Intrusa was based on a true
story of two friends. Borges turned their ctional counterparts into brothers, excluding the possibility of a homosexual relationship.[83]

3.4

Nobel Prize omission

Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature,

something which continually distressed the writer.[9] He
was one of several distinguished authors who never received the honour.[84] Borges commented, Not granting
me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition;
since I was born they have not been granting it to me.[85]

Jorge Luis Borges Monument in Lisbon

Many of Borgess best-known stories deal with the nature

of time ("The Secret Miracle"), innity ("The Aleph"),
mirrors ("Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius") and labyrinths
("The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths", "The House
of Asterion", "The Immortal", The Garden of Forking Paths). Williamson writes, His basic contention
was that ction did not depend on the illusion of reality; what mattered ultimately was an authors ability to
generate 'poetic faith' in his reader.[9] His stories often
have fantastical themes, such as a library containing every
possible 410-page text ("The Library of Babel"), a man
who forgets nothing he experiences ("Funes, the Memorious"), an artifact through which the user can see everything in the universe (The Aleph), and a year of
still time given to a man standing before a ring squad
(The Secret Miracle). Borges also told realistic stories of South American life, of folk heroes, streetghters,
soldiers, gauchos, detectives, and historical gures. He
mixed the real and the fantastic, fact with ction. His interest in compounding fantasy, philosophy, and the art of
translation are evident in articles such as The Translators of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights". In
the Book of Imaginary Beings, a thoroughly researched

5.1

Martn Fierro and Argentine tradition

11

bestiary of mythical creatures, Borges wrote, There is 5.1 Martn Fierro and Argentine tradition
a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way
erudition.[88] Borgess interest in fantasy was shared by Main article: Borges on Martn Fierro
Bioy Casares, with whom he coauthored several collec- Along with other young Argentine writers of his generations of tales between 1942 and 1967.
Often, especially early in his career, the mixture of fact
and fantasy crossed the line into the realm of hoax or literary forgery.[Notes 5]
The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) presents the idea
of forking paths through networks of time, none of which
is the same, all of which are equal. Borges uses the recurring image of a labyrinth that folds back upon itself in
innite regression so we become aware of all the possible choices we might make.[89] The forking paths have
branches to represent these choices that ultimately lead to
dierent endings. Borges saw mans search for meaning
in a seemingly innite universe as fruitless and instead
uses the maze as a riddle for time, not space.[89] Borges
also examined the themes of universal randomness and
madness ("The Lottery in Babylon") and ("The Zahir").
Due to the success of the Forking Paths story, the term
Borgesian came to reect a quality of narrative nonBorges in 1976
linearity.[Notes 6]

4.1

Borgesian conundrum

The philosophical term Borgesian conundrum is named

after him and has been dened as the ontological question of whether the writer writes the story, or it writes
him.[90] The original concept put forward by Borges is
in Kafka and His Precursorsafter reviewing works that
were written before Kafkas, Borges wrote:
If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous
pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if
I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble
each other. The second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we nd Kafkas
idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but
if Kafka had never written a line, we would
not perceive this quality; in other words, it
would not exist. The poem Fears and Scruples by Browning foretells Kafkas work, but
our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and
deects our reading of the poem. Browning
did not read it as we do now. In the critics
vocabulary, the word 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work
modies our conception of the past, as it will
modify the future.[91]

Culture and Argentine literature

tion, Borges initially rallied around the ctional character

of Martn Fierro. Martn Fierro, a poem by Jos Hernndez, was a dominant work of 19th century Argentine literature. Its eponymous hero became a symbol of Argentine sensibility, untied from European values a gaucho,
free, poor, pampas-dwelling.[92] The character Fierro is
illegally drafted to serve at a border fort to defend it
against the indigenous population but ultimately deserts
to become a gaucho matrero, the Argentine equivalent of
a North American western outlaw. Borges contributed
keenly to the avant garde Martn Fierro magazine in the
early 1920s.
As Borges matured, he came to a more nuanced attitude
toward the Hernndez poem. In his book of essays on the
poem, Borges separates his admiration for the aesthetic
virtues of the work from his mixed opinion of the moral
virtues of its protagonist.[93] In his essay The Argentine Writer and Tradition (1951), Borges celebrates how
Hernndez expresses the Argentine character. In a key
scene in the poem, Martn Fierro and El Moreno compete
by improvising songs on universal themes such as time,
night, and the sea, reecting the real-world gaucho tradition of payadas, improvised musical dialogues on philosophical themes.[92][94] Borges points out that Hernndez
evidently knew the dierence between actual gaucho tradition of composing poetry versus the gauchesque fashion among Buenos Aires literati.
In his works he refutes the arch-nationalist interpreters of
the poem and disdains others, such as critic Eleuterio Tiscornia, for their Europeanising approach. Borges denies
that Argentine literature should distinguish itself by limiting itself to local colour, which he equates with cultural
nationalism.[94] Racine and Shakespeare's work, he says,

12

5 CULTURE AND ARGENTINE LITERATURE

looked beyond their countries borders. Neither, he argues, need the literature be bound to the heritage of old
world Spanish or European tradition. Nor should it dene
itself by the conscious rejection of its colonial past. He
asserts that Argentine writers need to be free to dene
Argentine literature anew, writing about Argentina and
the world from the point of view of those who have inherited the whole of world literature.[94] Williamson says
Borgess main argument is that the very fact of writing
from the margins provides Argentine writers with a special opportunity to innovate without being bound to the
canons of the centre, [...] at once a part of and apart from
the centre, which gives them much potential freedom.[92]

5.2

Argentine culture

Borges focused on universal themes, but also composed

a substantial body of literature on themes from Argentine
folklore and history. His rst book, the poetry collection
Fervor de Buenos Aires (Passion for Buenos Aires), appeared in 1923. Borgess writings on things Argentine,
include Argentine culture (History of the Tango"; Inscriptions on Horse Wagons), folklore (Juan Muraa,
Night of the Gifts), literature (The Argentine Writer
and Tradition, Almafuerte"; "Evaristo Carriego"), and
national concerns (Celebration of the Monster, Hurry,
Hurry, The Mountebank, Pedro Salvadores). Ultranationalists, however, continued to question his Argentine identity.[95]
Borgess interest in Argentine themes reects, in part,
the inspiration of his family tree. Borges had an English paternal grandmother who, around 1870, married
the criollo Francisco Borges, a man with a military command and a historic role in the Argentine Civil Wars in
what is now Argentina and Uruguay. Spurred by pride in
his familys heritage, Borges often used those civil wars
as settings in ction and quasi-ction (for example, The
Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz, The Dead Man, Avelino
Arredondo) as well as poetry (General Quiroga Rides
to His Death in a Carriage). Borgess maternal greatgrandfather, Manuel Isidoro Surez, was another military
hero, whom Borges immortalized in the poem A Page to
Commemorate Colonel Surez, Victor at Junn. The city
of Coronel Surez in the south of Buenos Aires Province
is named after him.
His non-ction explores many of the themes found in his
ction. Essays such as The History of the Tango" or his
writings on the epic poem "Martn Fierro" explore Argentine themes, such as the identity of the Argentine people
and of various Argentine subcultures. The varying genealogies of characters, settings, and themes in his stories,
such as La muerte y la brjula, used Argentine models
without pandering to his readers or framing Argentine
culture as exotic.[95] In fact, contrary to what is usually supposed, the geographies found in his ctions often
do not correspond to those of real-world Argentina.[96]
In his essay El escritor argentino y la tradicin, Borges

notes that the very absence of camels in the Qur'an was

proof enough that it was an Arabian work. He suggested
that only someone trying to write an Arab work would
purposefully include a camel.[95] He uses this example to
illustrate how his dialogue with universal existential concerns was just as Argentine as writing about gauchos and
tangos.

5.3 Multicultural inuences

At the time of the Argentine Declaration of Independence in 1816, the population was predominantly criollo
(of Spanish ancestry). From the mid-1850s on waves of
immigration from Europe, especially Italy and Spain, arrived in the country, and in the following decades the Argentine national identity diversied.[9][97] Borges therefore was writing in a strongly European literary context, immersed in Spanish, English, French, German,
Italian, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature. He also
read translations of Near Eastern and Far Eastern works.
Borgess writing is also informed by scholarship of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, including prominent religious gures, heretics, and mystics.[98] Religion
and heresy are explored in such stories as "Averroess
Search", "The Writing of the God", "The Theologians",
and "Three Versions of Judas". The curious inversion of
mainstream Christian concepts of redemption in the latter story is characteristic of Borgess approach to theology
in his literature.
In describing himself, he said, I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the
people that I have met, all the women that I have loved;
all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.[85] As a
young man, he visited the frontier pampas which extend
beyond Argentina into Uruguay and Brazil. Borges said
that his father wished him to become a citizen of the
world, a great cosmopolitan, in the way of Henry and
William James.[99] Borges lived and studied in Switzerland and Spain as a young student. As Borges matured,
he traveled through Argentina as a lecturer and, internationally, as a visiting professor; he continued to tour the
world as he grew older, nally settling in Geneva where
he had spent some of his youth. Drawing on the inuence of many times and places, Borgess work belittled
nationalism and racism.[95] Portraits of diverse coexisting
cultures characteristic of Argentina are especially pronounced in the book Six Problems for don Isidoro Parodi
(co-authored with Bioy Casares) and the story "Death and
the Compass", which may or may not be set in Buenos
Aires. Borges wrote that he considered Mexican essayist Alfonso Reyes the best prose-writer in the Spanish
language of any time.[100]
Borges was also an admirer of some Oriental culture, e.g.
the ancient Chinese board game of Go, about which he
penned some verses,[101] while The Garden of Forking
Paths had a strong oriental theme.

6.3

Mathematics

Inuences

6.1

Modernism

13

6.3 Mathematics
Main article: Borges and mathematics
The essay collection Borges y la Matemtica (Borges and
Mathematics, 2003) by Argentine mathematician and
writer Guillermo Martnez, outlines how Borges used
concepts from mathematics in his work. Martnez states
that Borges had, for example, at least a supercial knowledge of set theory, which he handles with elegance in stories such as "The Book of Sand".[107] Other books such as
The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges Library of Babel by William Goldbloom Bloch (2008) and Unthinking
Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New
Physics by Floyd Merrell (1991) also explore this relationship.

Plaque Jorge Luis Borges at 13 rue des Beaux-Arts in Paris

6.4 Philosophy
Borges was rooted in the Modernism predominant in its
early years and was inuenced by Symbolism.[102] Like
Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce, he combined an
interest in his native culture with broader perspectives,
also sharing their multilingualism and inventiveness with
language. However, while Nabokov and Joyce tended
toward progressively larger works, Borges remained a
miniaturist. His work progressed away from what he referred to as the baroque": his later style is far more transparent and naturalistic than his earlier works. Borges represented the humanist view of media that stressed the social aspect of art driven by emotion. If art represented
the tool, then Borges was more interested in how the tool
could be used to relate to people.[66]

Fritz Mauthner, philosopher of language had an important inuence in Borges, the author of lsofo del
lenguaje y autor (Wrterbuch der Philosophie) Phylosphies Dictionnary. Borges has always recognized the inuence of this German philosopher.[108] According to the
literary review Sur, the book was one of the ve books
more noted and read by the Argentinian writer.
The rst time that Bores mentioned Mauthner was in
1928 in his book The Argentinians language El idioma
de los argentinos. Mauthner was cited several times and
in 1962 where he talked about him, talking about his great
sense of humor and his knowledge and erudition.[109]

The Philosophys Dictionary provided Borges with a great

Existentialism saw its apogee during the years of Borgess number of philosophical subjects such as the soul, congreatest artistic production. It has been argued that his sciousness, the world, and the spirit, each of them with a
choice of topics largely ignored existentialisms central deep area to explore.
tenets. Critic Paul de Man notes, Whatever Borgess
existential anxieties may be, they have little in common
with Sartres robustly prosaic view of literature, with the
earnestness of Camus moralism, or with the weighty pro- 7 Ancestry
fundity of German existential thought. Rather, they are
the consistent expansion of a purely poetic consciousness
8 Notes
to its furthest limits.[103]

6.2

Political inuences

As a political conservative, Borges was repulsed by

Marxism in theory and practice. Abhorring sentimentality, he rejected the politics and poetics of cultural identity that held sway in Latin America for so long.[104] As a
universalist, his interest in world literature reected an attitude that was also incongruent with the Peronist Populist
nationalism. That governments conscation of Borgess
job at the Miguel Can Library fueled his skepticism of
government. He labeled himself a Spencerian anarchist,
following his father.[105][106]

[1] Edwin Williamson suggests in Borges (Viking, 2004) that

Borges did not nish his baccalaurat (pp. 79-80): he
cannot have been too bothered about his baccalaurat, not
least because he loathed and feared examination. (He was
never to nish his high school education, in fact).
[2] His was a particular kind of blindness, grown on him
gradually since the age of thirty and settled in for good
after his fty-eighth birthday. From Manguel, Alberto
(2006) With Borges. London: Telegram Books pp. 15
16.
[3] The Borges poems in H. R. Hays, ed. (1943) 12 Spanish
American Poets are A Patio, Butcher Shop, Benares,
The Recoleta, A Days Run, General Quiroga Rides

14

REFERENCES

to Death in a Carriage, July Avenue, and Natural Flow

of Memory.

[11] Borges, Jorge Luis, Autobiographical Notes, The New

Yorker, 19 September 1970.

[4] Notable translations also include work by Melville,

Faulkner, Sir Thomas Browne, and G. K. Chesterton.

[12] Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art
(1999) Gene H. Bell-Villada, University of Texas Press,
p. 16 ISBN 9780292708785

[5] His imitations of Swedenborg and others were originally

passed o as translations, in his literary column in Crtica.
El telogo was originally published with the note Lo anterior ... es obra de Manuel Swedenborg, eminente ingeniero y hombre de ciencia, que durante 27 aos estuvo en
comercio lcido y familiar con el otro mundo. (The preceding [...] is the work of Emanuel Swedenborg, eminent
engineer and man of science, who during 27 years was in
lucid and familiar commerce with the other world.) See
Borges y Revista multicolor de los sbados: confabulados en una escritura de la infamia by Raquel Atena Green
in Wor(l)ds of Change: Latin American and Iberian Literature Volume 32 2010 Peter Lang publishers, ISBN 9780-8204-3467-4
[6] Non-linearity was key to the development of digital media.
See Murray, Janet H. Inventing the Medium The New
Media Reader. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003

References

[1] Borges. Random House Websters Unabridged Dictionary.

[2] Jozef, Bella. Borges: linguagem e metalinguagem. In:
O espao reconquistado. Petrpolis, RJ: Vozes, 1974,
p.43.
[3] Theo L. D'Haen (1995) Magical Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centers, in: Louis P.
Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Magical Realism: Theory,
History and Community. Duhan and London, Duke University Press pp. 191208.
[4] On his conference Magical Realism in Spanish American (Nova York, MLA, 1954), published later in Hispania, 38 (2), 1955.
[5] In short, Borgess blindness led him to favour poetry and
shorter narratives over novels. Ferriera, Eliane Fernanda
C. O (In) visvel imaginado em Borges. In: Pedro Pires
Bessa (ed.). Riqueza Cultural Ibero-Americana. Campus
de Divinpolis-UEMG, 1996, pp. 313314.

[13] Wilson, Jason (2006). Jorge Luis Borges. Reaktion Books.

p. 37. ISBN 1-86189-286-1.
[14] Borges: Other Inquisitions 19371952. Full introduction
by James Irby. University of Texas ISBN 978-0-29276002-8 Accessed 2010-08-16
[15] Ivonne Bordelois, The Sur Magazine Villa Ocampo
Website. Villaocampo.org. Retrieved 2011-08-24.
[16] Borges, Jorge Luis. Trans. Mildred Boyer and Harold
Morland. Dreamtigers. University of Texas Press, 1985,
p. 25.
[17] Boldy (2009) p. 32
[18] Bolter, Jay David; Joyce, Michael (1987). Hypertext and
Creative Writing. Hypertext '87 Papers. ACM. pp. 41
50.
[19] Moulthrop, Stuart (1991). Reading From the Map:
Metonymy and Metaphor in the Fiction of 'Forking
Paths". In Delany, Paul; Landow, George P. Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Cambridge, Massachusetts and
London, England: The MIT Press.
[20] Borges, Jorge Luis (Vol.32)". enotes. Retrieved 200812-03.
[21] Wardrip-Fruin, Noah & Montfort, Nick (2003). The New
Media Reader. MIT Press.
[22] , Alberto Manguel (2006) With Borges, London:Telegram
Books pp. 1516.
[23] Woodall, J: The Man in Mirror of the Book, A Life of Luis
Borges, (1996) Hodder and Stoughton pxxx.
[24] Days of Hate. Imdb. Retrieved 2008-12-04.
[25] Jorge Luis Borges (1984) Seven Nights, A New Directions
Book pp 109-110.
[26] Burgin (1988) p xvii
[27] The Craft of Verse: The Norton Lectures, 1967-68.
UbuWeb: Sound. Retrieved 1 January 2014.

[6] Borges on Life and Death Interview by Amelia Barili

[28] H. R. Hays, ed. (1943) 12 Spanish American Poets. New

Haven: Yale University Press p118-139.

[7] (Portuguese) Masina, Lea. (2001) Murilo Rubio, o

mgico do conto. In: O pirotcnico Zacarias e outros contos escolhidos. Porto Alegre: L & PM, p5.

[29] Jerey Alan Marks (2008) Anthony Boucher: A

Biobibliography McFarland publishers, p77 ISBN
9780786433209

[8] Coetzee, J.M. Borgess Dark Mirror, New York Review

of Books, Volume 45, Number 16. October 22, 1998

[30] Borges, Jorge Luis (1998) Collected Fictions Viking Penguin. Translation and notes by Andrew Hurley. Editorial
note p 517.

[9] Dont abandon me Tibn, Colm London Review of

Books 2006-05-11. Retrieved 2009-04-19
[10] Harold Bloom (2004) Jorge Luis Borges (Blooms biocritiques) Infobase Publishing ISBN 0-7910-7872-8

[31] Edgar Awards

[32] UVA, Special Collections Library.
virginia.edu/small/collections/borges/

http://www2.lib.

15

[33] Montes-Bradley, Eduardo. Cada pieza es de un valor

incalculable Cover Article. Revista , Diario Clarin.
Buenos Aires, September 5th, 2011.

[61] Burgin (1969), p 121

[34] Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, The Lessons of the Master

[63] Williamson (2004) p. 491

[35] Fanny, El Seor Borges

[64] Willis Barnstone, With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in

Buenos Aires, University of Illinois Press, 1993. pp. 3031.

[36] Israel Shenker (April 6, 1971). Borges, a Blind Writer

With Insight. New York Times. Retrieved 30 April 2013.
...Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more
tolerant.
[37] Mara Kodama demanda a un periodista francs por
difamacin y reclama nada ms que 1 euro
[38] Se suspendi un juicio por obras de Borges: reaccin de
Kodama
[39] (Spanish) Octavi Mart, Kodama frente a Borges, El Pas
(Madrid), Edicin Impresa, 16 August 2006. Abstract online; full text accessible online by subscription only.
[40] Richard Flanagan, Writing with Borges, The Age (Australia), 12 July 2003. Accessed 2010-08-16
[41] Burgin (1968). p. 104.

[62] National Geographic, March 1975. p. 303.

[65] Falkland Islands: Imperial pride

[66] Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Nick Montfort, ed. (2003).
The New Media Reader. Cambridge: The MIT Press, p.
29. ISBN 0-262-23227-8
[67] Borges, Jorge Luis. (1994) Siete Noches. Obras Completas, vol. III. Buenos Aires: Emec
[68] Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics,
and the New Physics (1991) Floyd Merrell, Purdue University Press pxii ISBN 9781557530110
[69] New York Times May 7, 1972 The Other Borges Than the
Central One
[70] Reading Borges After Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and
the Writing of History (2008) Kate Jenckes, SUNY Press,
p136, p117, p101, p136 ISBN 9780791469903

[42] Edwin Williamson, Borges: A Life, pp. 332333.

[43] Williamson (2004), page 334.
[44] Williamson (2004), pages 334-335.
[45] Burgin (1968) pp. 956
[46] De Costa, Ren (2000) Humor in Borges (Humor in Life
& Letters). Wayne State University Press p. 49 ISBN 08143-2888-1
[47] Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Nonctions, p 200.
[48] Selected Nonctions, page 201.
[49] Borges, Selected Nonctions, page 211.
[50] Burgin (1968), pp 31-332.
[51] Williamson (2004) p. 292
[52] Williamson (2004) p. 295
[53] Williamson (2004) p. 312
[54] Williamson (2004) p. 313
[55] Williamson (2004) p. 320.
[56] Williamson (2004) pp. 320-321.
[57] (Spanish) Jorge Luis Borges. Galera de Directores, Biblioteca Nacional (Argentina) at the Wayback Machine
(archived April 16, 2008). (archived from the original,
on 16 April 2008.)
[58] Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Nonctions, page 409.
[59] Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Nonctions, pages 409-410.
[60] Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Nonctions, p. 410.

[71] Kristal, Efran (2002). Invisible Work. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. p. 37. ISBN 0-8265-1408-1.
[72] Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse, Harvard University
Press, 2000. pp. 5776. Word Music and Translation,
Lecture, Delivered February 28, 1968.
[73] Borges This Craft of Verse (p104)
[74] Borges Collected Fictions, p67
[75] University of Pittsburgh, Borges Center Jorge Luis Borges,
autor del poema Instantes, by Ivn Almeida. Retrieved
January 10, 2011
[76] Internetaleph, Martin Hadis site on The Life & Works of
Jorge Luis Borges. Retrieved January 10, 2011
[77] Katra, William H. (1988) Contorno: Literary Engagement
in Post-Pernist Argentina. Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, pp. 5657
[78] Williamson, Edwin (2004). Borges, a Life. ISBN 978-0670-88579-4. years later Borges would tell Ronald Christ
that he meant the Secret to refer to sexual intercourse
[79] The Queer Use of Communal Women in Borgess El
muerto and La intrusa, paper presented at XIX Latin
American Studies Association (LASA) Congress held in
Washington DC in September 1995.
[80] Hurley, Andrew (1988) Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin p197.
[81] Hurley, Andrew (1988) Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin p200
[82] Hurley, Andrew 1988) Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin

16

10 FURTHER READING

[83] Keller, Gary; Karen S. Van Hooft (1976). Jorge Luis [103] de Man, Paul. A Modern Master, Jorge Luis Borges, Ed.
Borgess `La intrusa:' The Awakening of Love and ConHarold Bloom, New York: Chelsea House Pub, 1986. p.
sciousness/The Sacrice of Love and Consciousness.. In
22.
Eds. Lisa E. Davis and Isabel C. Tarn. The Analysis of
Hispanic Texts: Current Trends in Methodology. Bilingual [104] New york Times Article. Paid Subscription only
P. pp. 300319.
[105] Yudin, Florence (1997). Nightglow: Borges Poetics of
Blindness. City: Universidad Ponticia de Salamanca. p.
[84] Feldman, Burton (2000) The Nobel Prize: a History of
31. ISBN 84-7299-385-X.
Genius, Controversy and Prestige, Arcade Publishing p57
[85] Guardian prole. Jorge Luis Borges 22 July 2008. Accessed 2010-08-15

[106] Bell-Villada, Gene (1981). Borges and His Fiction.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. p. 13.
ISBN 0-8078-1458-X.

[86] Briton Wins the Nobel Literature Prize. James M.

[107] Martinez, Guillermo (2003) Borges y la Matemtica
Markham. The New York Times 7 October 1983. Ac(Spanish Edition) Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires.
cessed 2010-08-15
ISBN 950-23-1296-1
[87] Feldman, Burton (2000) The Nobel Prize: a History of
[108] Bez, Fernando Mauthner en Borges -n 19 Espculo
Genius, Controversy and Prestige, Arcade Publishing p81
(UCM):
[88] Borges, Luis Borges (1979) Book of Imaginary Beings
[109] Entrevista con Borges publicada en la Revista de la UniPenguin Books Australia p. 11 ISBN 0-525-47538-9
versidad de Mxico, vol. 16, nro. 10, Mxico, junio de
1962, pg. 9
[89] Murray, Janet H. Inventing the Medium The New Media
Reader. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.
[110] Boldy, Steven. A Companion to Jorge Luis Borges. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2009. pp. 914. ISBN 9781855661899
[90] Ella Taylor (July 18, 2010). Book review: The Thieves
of Manhattan by Adam Langer. Los Angeles Times.
[91] Jorge Luis Borges (February 1988). Labyrinths: Selected
Stories & Other Writings. New Direction Books. p. 201.

10 Further reading

[92] Gabriel Waisman, Sergio (2005) Borges and Translation:

The Irreverence of the Periphery Bucknell University Press
pp. 1269 ISBN 0-8387-5592-5

Agheana, Ion (1988). The Meaning of Experience in

the Prose of Jorge Luis Borges. Frankfurt Am Main:
P. Lang. ISBN 0-8204-0595-7.

[93] Borges and Guerrero (1953) El Martn Fierro ISBN 84206-1933-7

Agheana, Ion (1984). The Prose of Jorge Luis

Borges. Frankfurt Am Main: P. Lang. ISBN 08204-0130-7.

[94] Borges, Jorge Luis and Lanuza, Eduardo Gonzlez (1961)

The Argentine writer and tradition Latin American and
European Literary Society
[95] Takolander, Maria (2007) Catching butteries: bringing
magical realism to ground Peter Lang Pub Inc pp. 5560.
ISBN 3-03911-193-0
[96] David Borucho (1985), In Pursuit of the Detective
Genre: La muerte y la brjula of Jorge Luis Borges, Inti:
Revista de Literatura Hispnica no. 21, pp. 13-26.
[97] Velez, Wanda (1990) ''South American Immigration:
Argentina''. Yale University, New Haven Teachers Institute. Yale.edu. Retrieved 2011-08-24.
[98] Bell-Villada, Gene Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His
Mind and Art University of Texas Press ISBN 978-0-29270878-5
[99] Williamson, Edwin (2004). Borges: a life. Viking. p. 53.
ISBN 0-670-88579-7.

Aizenberg, Edna (1984). The Aleph Weaver: Biblical, Kabbalistic and Judaic Elements in Borges. Potomac: Scripta Humanistica. ISBN 0-916379-12-4.
Aizenberg, Edna (1990). Borges and His Successors.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press. ISBN 08262-0712-X.
Alazraki, Jaime (1988). Borges and the Kabbalah.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521-30684-1.
Alazraki, Jaime (1987). Critical Essays on Jorge
Luis Borges. Boston: G.K. Hall. ISBN 0-81618829-7.
Balderston, Daniel (1993). Out of Context. Durham:
Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-1316-2.

[101] El Go. GoBase. Retrieved 26 August 2011.

Barnstone, Willis (1993). With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-01888-5.

[102] Britton, R (July 1979). History, Myth, and Archetype in

Borgess View of Argentina. The Modern Language Review (Modern Humanities Research Association) 74 (3):
607616. doi:10.2307/3726707. JSTOR 3726707.

Barrenechea, Ana Mara (1965 LC 65-10764).

Borges the Labyrinth Maker. Edited and Translated
by Robert Lima. New York City: New York University Press. Check date values in: |date= (help)

[100] Borges Siete Noches, p156

17
Bell-Villada, Gene (1981). Borges and His Fiction.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
ISBN 0-8078-1458-X.
Bioy Casares, Adolfo (2006). Borges. City: Destino
Ediciones. ISBN 978-950-732-085-9.
Bloom, Harold (1986). Jorge Luis Borges. New
York: Chelsea House Publishers. ISBN 0-87754721-1.
Bulacio, Cristina; Grima, Donato (1998). Dos Miradas sobre Borges. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de
Arte Gaglianone. ISBN 950-554-266-6. Illustrated
by Donato Grima.
Burgin, Richard (1969) Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, Holt Rhinehart Winston
Burgin, Richard (1998) Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, University Press of Mississippi
De Behar, Block (2003). Borges, the Passion of an
Endless Quotation. Albany: State University of New
York Press. ISBN 1-4175-2020-5.
Di Giovanni, Norman Thomas (1995). The Borges
Tradition. London: Constable in association with
the Anglo-Argentine Society. ISBN 0-09-4738408.

Lindstrom, Naomi (1990). Jorge Luis Borges.

Boston: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0-8057-8327-X.
Manguel, Alberto (2006). With Borges. City: Telegram. ISBN 978-1-84659-005-4.
Manovich, Lev, New Media from Borges to HTML,
2003
McMurray, George (1980). Jorge Luis Borges. New
York: Ungar. ISBN 0-8044-2608-2.
Molloy, Sylvia (1994). Signs of Borges. Durham:
Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-1406-1.
Murray, Janet H., Inventing the Medium, 2003
Nez-Faraco, Humberto (2006). Borges and
Dante. Frankfurt Am Main: P. Lang. ISBN 9783-03910-511-3.
Racz, Gregary (2003). Jorge Luis Borges (1899
1986) as Writer and Social Critic. Lewiston: Edwin
Mellen Press. ISBN 0-7734-6904-4.
Rodrguez, Monegal (1978). Jorge Luis Borges.
New York: Dutton. ISBN 0-525-13748-3.
Rodrguez-Luis, Julio (1991). The Contemporary
Praxis of the Fantastic. New York: Garland. ISBN
0-8153-0101-4.

Di Giovanni, Norman Thomas (2003). The Lesson

of the Master. London: Continuum. ISBN 0-82646110-7.

Sarlo, Beatriz (2007). Jorge Luis Borges: a Writer

on the Edge. London: Verso. ISBN 978-1-84467588-3.

Dunham, Lowell (1971). The Cardinal Points of

Borges. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
ISBN 0-8061-0983-1.

Shaw, Donald (1992). Borges Narrative Strategy.

Liverpool: Francis Cairns. ISBN 0-905205-84-7.

Fishburn, Evelyn (2002). Borges and Europe Revisited. City: Univ of London. ISBN 1-900039-21-4.
Frisch, Mark (2004). You Might Be Able to Get
There from Here. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press. ISBN 0-8386-4044-3.
Kristal, Efran (2002). Invisible Work. Nashville:
Vanderbilt University Press. ISBN 0-585-40803-3.
Lan Corona, Guillermo. Borges and Cervantes:
Truth and Falsehood in the Narration. Neophilologus, 93 (2009): 421-37.
Lan Corona, Guillermo.
Teora y prctica
de la metfora en torno a Fervor de Buenos
Aires, de Borges. Cuadernos de Aleph. Revista de literatura hispnica, 2 (2007): 7993.
http://cuadernosdealeph.com/revista_2007/
A2007_pdf/06%20Teor%C3%ADa.pdf
Lima, Robert (1993). Borges and the Esoteric.
Crtica hispnica. Special issue (Duquesne University) 15 (2). ISSN 0278-7261.

Stabb, Martin (1991). Borges Revisited. Boston:

Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0-8057-8263-X.
Sturrock, John (1977). Paper Tigers.
Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-815746-0.

Oxford:

Todorov, Tzvetan (1970). Introduction la littrature fantastique. Paris: Seuil.

Toro, Alfonso (1999). Jorge Luis Borges. Frankfurt
Am Main: Vervuert. ISBN 3-89354-217-5.
Volek, Emil (1984). Aquiles y la Tortuga: Arte,
imaginacin y realidad segn Borges. In: Cuatro
claves para la modernidad. Analisis semitico de textos hispnicos. Madrid.
Waisman, Sergio (2005). Borges and Translation.
Lewisburg Pa.: Bucknell University Press. ISBN 08387-5592-5.
Williamson, Edwin (2004). Borges: A Life. New
York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-88579-7.
Wilson, Jason (2006). Jorge Luis Borges. London:
Reaktion Books. ISBN 978-1-86189-286-7.

18

11

Woscoboinik, Julio (1998). The Secret of Borges.

Washington: University Press of America. ISBN 07618-1238-5.
Mualem, Shlomy (2012). Borges and Plato: A
Game with Shifting Mirrors. Madrid and Frankfurt:
Iberoamericana/Vervuert. ISBN 978-8484895954.

10.1

Documentaries

Eduardo Montes-Bradley (Writer/Director) (1999).

Harto The Borges (Feature Documentary). USA:
Patagonia Film Group, US.
Ricardo Wullicher (Director) (1978). Borges para
millones (Feature Documentary). Argentina.
David Wheatley (Director) (1983). Prole Of
A Writer: Borges and I (Feature Documentary).
Arena.

11

External links

Jorge Luis Borges at DMOZ

Works by Jorge Luis Borges at Open Library
Ronald Christ (WinterSpring 1967). Jorge Luis
Borges, The Art of Fiction No. 39. Paris Review.
BBC Radio 4 discussion programme from In our
time. (Audio 45 mins)
Jorge Luis Borges at The Modern Word
Borges Center, University of Pittsburgh.
The Friends of Jorge Luis Borges Worldwide Society & Associates
International Foundation Jorge Luis Borges

EXTERNAL LINKS

19

12
12.1

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

Text

Jorge Luis Borges Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges?oldid=670829857 Contributors: Joao, The Epopt, The Cunctator, Eloquence, Bryan Derksen, Tarquin, Sjc, Eclecticology, Youssefsan, Shsilver, Deb, Ellmist, Panairjdde~enwiki, Hephaestos, Olivier,
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20

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TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

Periglio, Lugia2453, Cocolacoste, JustAMuggle, Shlorit1, TRGUY, Windro, Timhart45, Xiaomiyurz, Yeyinpe, Abin, CTDJL, Monkbot,
Alcazar77, SantiagoFonsi, Icaamfah, Leonina666444, Sarbojnan, KasparBot, Bhanka, Kent Krupa, Cabrera Arredondo Alejandro XXI and
Anonymous: 702

12.2

Images

File:Bioy_Casares,_Ocampo_y_Borges.jpg Source:
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