Jorge Luis
Borges
Jorge Luis Borges, (b. August 24, 1899, Buenos Aires,
Argentina—d. June 14, 1986, Geneva, Switzerland), Argentine
poet, essayist, and short-story writer whose works have
become classics of 20th-century world literature.
Life
Borges was reared in the then-shabby Palermo district of
Buenos Aires, the setting of some of his works. His family,
which had been notable in Argentine history, included
British ancestry, and he learned English before Spanish. The
first books that he read—from the library of his father, a
man of wide-ranging intellect who taught at an English
school—included The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the
novels of H.G. Wells, The Thousand and One Nights, and Don
Quixote, all in English. Under the constant stimulus and
example of his father, the young Borges from his earliest
years recognized that he was destined for a literary career.
In 1914, on the eve of
World War I, Borges was taken by his family to Geneva, where
he learned French and German and received his B.A. from the
Collčge de Genčve. Leaving there in 1919, the family spent a
year on Majorca and a year in mainland Spain, where Borges
joined the young writers of the Ultraist movement, a group
that rebelled against what it considered the decadence of
the established writers of the Generation of 1898.
Returning to Buenos Aires
in 1921, Borges rediscovered his native city and began to
sing of its beauty in poems that imaginatively reconstructed
its past and present. His first published book was a volume
of poems, Fervor de Buenos Aires, poemas (1923; “Fervour of
Buenos Aires, Poems”). He is also credited with establishing
the Ultraist movement in South America, though he later
repudiated it. This period of his career, which included the
authorship of several volumes of essays and poems and the
founding of three literary journals, ended with a biography,
Evaristo Carriego (1930).
During his next phase,
Borges gradually overcame his shyness in creating pure
fiction. At first he preferred to retell the lives of more
or less infamous men, as in the sketches of his Historia
universal de la infamia (1935; A Universal History of
Infamy). To earn his living, he took a major post in 1938 at
a Buenos Aires library named for one of his ancestors. He
remained there for nine unhappy years.
In 1938, the year his
father died, Borges suffered a severe head wound and
subsequent blood poisoning, which left him near death,
bereft of speech, and fearing for his sanity. This
experience appears to have freed in him the deepest forces
of creation. In the next eight years he produced his best
fantastic stories, those later collected in Ficciones
(“Fictions”) and the volume of English translations titled
The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933–69. During this time, he
and another writer, Adolfo Bioy Casares, jointly wrote
detective stories under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq
(combining ancestral names of the two writers’ families),
which were published in 1942 as Seis problemas para Don
Isidro Parodi (Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi). The
works of this period revealed for the first time Borges’s
entire dreamworld, an ironical or paradoxical version of the
real one, with its own language and systems of symbols.
When the dictatorship of
Juan Perón came to power in 1946, Borges was dismissed from
his library position for having expressed support of the
Allies in World War II. With the help of friends, he earned
his way by lecturing, editing, and writing. A 1952
collection of essays, Otras inquisiciones (1937–1952) (Other
Inquisitions, 1937–1952), revealed him at his analytic best.
When Perón was deposed in 1955, Borges became director of
the national library, an honorific position, and also
professor of English and American literature at the
University of Buenos Aires. By this time, Borges suffered
from total blindness, a hereditary affliction that had also
attacked his father and had progressively diminished his own
eyesight from the 1920s onward. It had forced him to abandon
the writing of long texts and to begin dictating to his
mother or to secretaries or friends.
The works that date from
this late period, such as El hacedor (1960; “The Doer,” Eng.
trans. Dreamtigers) and El libro de los seres imaginarios
(1967; The Book of Imaginary Beings), almost erase the
distinctions between the genres of prose and poetry. His
later collections of stories include El informe de Brodie
(1970; Dr. Brodie’s Report), which deals with revenge,
murder, and horror, and El libro de arena (1975; The Book of
Sand), both of which are allegories combining the simplicity
of a folk storyteller with the complex vision of a man who
has explored the labyrinths of his own being to its core.
Assessment
After 1961, when he and Samuel Beckett shared the Formentor
Prize, an international award given for unpublished
manuscripts, Borges’s tales and poems were increasingly
acclaimed as classics of 20th-century world literature.
Prior to that time, Borges was little known, even in his
native Buenos Aires, except to other writers, many of whom
regarded him merely as a craftsman of ingenious techniques
and tricks. By the time of his death, the nightmare world of
his “fictions” had come to be compared to the world of Franz
Kafka and to be praised for concentrating common language
into its most enduring form. Through his work, Latin
American literature emerged from the academic realm into the
realm of generally educated readers.
Emir
Rodríguez-Monegal
