Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges ({{IPA|/ˈxoɾ.xe ˈlwis ˈboɾ.xes/}}, bôr?h?s) (August 24, 1899 – June 14, 1986) was an Argentine writer who is considered to be one of the foremost writers of the 20th century. Best-known in the English speaking world for his short stories and fictive essays, Borges was also a poet, critic, and man of letters.

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). His blindness (which, like his father's, developed in adulthood) strongly influenced his later writing. Paramount among his intellectual interests are elements of mythology, mathematics, theology, philosophy, and, as a personal integration of these, Borges' sense of literature as recreation — all of these disciplines are sometimes treated as a writer's playthings and at other times treated very seriously.

Related Topics:
Poetry - English - French - German - Spanish - Old English - Norse

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Borges lived through most of the twentieth century, and so was rooted in the Modernist period of culture and literature, especially Symbolism. His fiction is profoundly learned, and always concise. Like his contemporary Vladimir Nabokov and the somewhat older James Joyce, he combined an interest in his native land with far broader interests. 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.

Related Topics:
Modernist - Symbolism - Vladimir Nabokov - James Joyce

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Many of his most popular stories concern the nature of time, infinity, mirrors (of which a number of stories and an essay in Dreamtigers express disgust or fear), labyrinths, reality, and identity. A number of stories focus on fantastic 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 time standing still, given to a man standing before a firing squad ("The Secret Miracle"). The same Borges told more and less realistic stories of South American life, stories of folk heroes, streetfighters, soldiers, gauchos, detectives, historical figures. He mixed the real and the fantastic and fact with fiction. On several occasions, especially early in his career, these mixtures sometimes crossed the line into the realm of hoax or literary forgery.

Related Topics:
Infinity - Labyrinth - Reality - The Library of Babel - Forgets nothing - The Aleph - Gaucho

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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. His non-fiction also explores many of the themes that are found in his fiction. Essays such as "The History of the Tango" or his writings on the epic poem Martín Fierro explore specifically Argentine themes, such as the identity of the Argentinian people and of various Argentine subcultures. 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 Bioy Casares, with whom Borges coauthored several collections of tales between 1942 and 1967, sometimes under different pseudonyms (see main article: H. Bustos Domecq).

Related Topics:
Tango - Martín Fierro - Argentinian people - The Thousand and One Nights - Bestiary - Mythical creatures - H. Bustos Domecq

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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. His poems embrace the same wide range of interests as his fiction, along with issues that emerge in his critical works and translations, and from more personal musings. This breadth of interest can be found in his fiction, nonfiction, and poems. For example, his interest in philosophical idealism is reflected in the fictional world of Tlön in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", in his essay "New Refutation of Time", and in his poem "Things." Similarly, a common thread runs through his story "The Circular Ruins" and his poem "The Golem."

Related Topics:
Idealism - Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

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As well as his own original work, Borges was notable as a translator into Spanish. At the age of ten, he translated a story by Oscar Wilde into Spanish. At the end of his life he produced a Spanish-language version of the Prose Edda. 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. K. Chesterton. 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.

Related Topics:
Translator - Spanish - Prose Edda - Edgar Allan Poe - Franz Kafka - Hermann Hesse - Rudyard Kipling - Herman Melville - André Gide - William Faulkner - Walt Whitman - Virginia Woolf - Thomas Browne - G. K. Chesterton

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Borges also wrote in two very unusual literary forms: the literary forgery and the review of an imaginary work.

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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. Several of these are gathered in the Universal History of Infamy. He continued this pattern of literary forgery at several points in his career, for example sneaking three short, falsely attributed pieces into his otherwise legitimate and carefully researched anthology El matrero.

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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 this 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' (verbatim identical) work.

Related Topics:
Pierre Menard - Miguel de Cervantes

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While Borges was certainly the great popularizer of the review of an imaginary work, it was not his own invention.

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It is likely that he first encountered the idea in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a book-length review of a non-existent German transcendentalist philosophical work and biography of its equally non-existent author. This Craft of Verse (p. 104), records Borges as saying that in 1916 in Geneva he "discovered -- and was overwhelmed by -- Thomas Carlyle. I read Sartor Resartus, and I can recall many of its pages; I know them by heart." 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. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them." He then cites both Sartor Resartus and Samuel Butler's The Fair Haven, remarking, however, that "those works suffer 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."

Related Topics:
Thomas Carlyle - Sartor Resartus - Transcendentalist - Biography - Samuel Butler

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This form that Borges inherited from Carlyle and Butler was later further developed by Stanis?aw Lem in his Wielkosc Urojona (Warsaw, 1973, translated into English 1984 by Marc E. Heine under the title Imaginary Magnitude).

Related Topics:
Stanis?aw Lem - Imaginary Magnitude

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Borges as Argentine and as World Citizen

Borges' 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; in middle age he traveled through Argentina as a lecturer and internationally as a visiting professor; and he continued to tour the world as he grew older, ending his life in Geneva where he had attended university. Drawing on influences of many times and places, Borges' work belittled nationalism and racism.

Related Topics:
''pampas'' - Uruguay - Brazil - Switzerland - Spain - Geneva

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Borges grew acquainted with the literature from Argentine, Spanish, North American, English, German, Italian, and Northern European/Icelandic sources, including those of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. He also read many translations of Near Eastern and Far Eastern works. The universalism that made him interested in world literature—and interesting to world readers—reflected an attitude that was not congruent with the Perón government's extreme nationalism. That government's meddling with Borges' job fueled Borges' skepticism of government (he labeled himself an "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 have a Jew in their ancestry a millennium back).

Related Topics:
English - German - Italian - Northern European/Icelandic - Anglo-Saxon - Old Norse - Near Eastern - Far Eastern - Perón - Nationalism - "anarchist" - Nazis - Jewish - Christian - Genealogy - Castilian - Ancestry - Millennium

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Multicultural influences on Borges' writing

Borges' Argentina, despite its origin as a Spanish colony, 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. At the time of Argentine independence in 1816, the population was predominantly criollo—which in Argentine usage generally means people of Spanish ancestry, although it can allow for a small admixture of other ancestry. The Argentine national identity diversified, forming over a period of decades after formal independence. During that period substantial immigration came from Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Russia, Syria and Lebanon (then parts of the Ottoman Empire), the United Kingdom, Austria-Hungary, Portugal, Poland, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, North America, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and China, with the Italians and Spanish forming the largest influx. The diversity of coexisting cultures living characteristic Argentine lifestyles is especially pronounced in Six Problems for Don Isidoro Parodi, co-authored with Adolfo Bioy Casares, and in the unnamed multi-ethnic city that's the setting for "Death and the Compass", which may or may not be Buenos Aires. 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 .

Related Topics:
Italy - Spain - France - Germany - Russia - Syria - Lebanon - Ottoman Empire - United Kingdom - Austria-Hungary - Portugal - Poland - Switzerland - Yugoslavia - North America - Belgium - Denmark - Netherlands - Sweden - China - Adolfo Bioy Casares - Death and the Compass - Christian - Buddhist - Islamic - Jewish - International themes in Borges

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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' thorough attention to all things Argentine—ranging from Argentine culture ("History of the Tango"; "Inscriptions on Horse Wagons"), folklore ("Juan Muraña", "Night of the Gifts"), literature ("The Argentine Writer and Tradition", "Almafuerte") and current concerns ("Celebration of The Monster", "Hurry, Hurry", "The Mountebank", "Pedro Salvadores")—it is ironic indeed that ultra-nationalists would have questioned Borges' Argentine identity.

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Borges 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. "The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz," "The Dead Man," "Avelino Arredondo") as well as poetry ("General Quiroga Rides to His Death in a Carriage"). Borges's maternal great-grandfather was another military hero, whom Borges immortalized in the poem "A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suarez, Victor at Junín."

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Borges, Martin 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. Hernández's central character, Martín Fierro, is a gaucho, a free, poor, pampas-dweller, who is illegally drafted to serve at a border fort to defend against the Indians; he ultimately deserts and becomes a gaucho matrero, the Argentinian equivalent of a North American western outlaw. Borges' 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. He uses the occasion to tweak the noses of arch-nationalist interpreters of the poem, but disdains those (such as Eleuterio Tiscornia) who he sees as failing to understand its specifically Argentinian character.

Related Topics:
José Hernández - Gaucho - Pampas - Book of essays on the poem, ''El "Martín Fierro"''

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In "The Argentine Writer and Tradition", Borges celebrates how Hernández expresses that character in the crucial scene in which Martin Fierro and El Moreno compete by improvising songs about universal themes such as time, night, and the sea. The scene clearly reflects the real-world gaucho tradition of payadas, improvised musical dialogues on philosophical themes—as distinct from the type of slang that Hernández uses in the main body of Martín Fierro. 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.

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Borges uses Martin 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). "El Fin" is a sort of mini-sequel or conclusion to Martin Fierro. In his prologue to Artificios, Borges says of "El Fin," "Everything in the story is implicit in a famous book and I have been the first to decipher it, or at least, to declare it."

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Limits to universalism

To exaggerate Borges' universalism might be as much a mistake as the nationalists' questioning the validity of his Argentine identity. Borges' writing was evidently more influenced by some literatures than others, reflecting in part the particular contents of his library his father had amassed, and the particular population composition of Argentina during his lifetime. His writing reveals unintentional cultural prejudices—most noticeably by omission. A review of Borges' work reveals far more influences from European and New World sources than Asian-Pacific or African ones. Few references to Africans or African-Americans appear in Borges' work; rare mentions include an idosyncratic inventory of the latter-day effects of the slave trade in "The Dreaded Redeemer Lazarus Morrell" and a number of sympathetic references to a person of African descent (negro) killed by the fictional outlaw Martin Fierro. Indigenous (Amerind) sources are poorly represented, owing to the near-destruction of that population and culture in the Southern Cone region of South America; rare mentions include a captive Aztec priest, Tzinacán, in "The God's Script" and Amerinds who capture Argentines in "Story of the Warrior and the Captive" and "The Captive". Borges reveals what would now be generally considered homophobic sentiments in the essay "Our Inabilities". In contrast to his scholarship in Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist sources, Borges' view of Hinduism and Hindus seems to have been composed largely of only the sympathetic lens of the works of Rudyard Kipling, as in Borges' "The Approach to Al Mutasim".

Related Topics:
Europe - New World - African - African-American - Indigenous - Amerind - Southern Cone - Aztec - Homophobic - Rudyard Kipling

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International themes in Borges

• Argentina: Biographer of Evaristo Carriego; earnest reader of Leopoldo Lugones, Almafuerte, others; "History of the Tango", "Our Poor Individualism", "Horse Cart Inscriptions", "Celebration of the Monster", "The South", "The Mountebank"
• Uruguay: historical fiction "Avelino Arredondo"
• Italy: Borges had a special affinity for Dante's The Divine Comedy, the subject of Nine Dantesque Essays
• Spain: Borges makes frequent reference to Don Quixote and to the 17th century writer Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas.
• France: influenced by Leon Bloy; fan of/essay about Guillaume Apollinaire
• Germany: Special affinity for Heinrich Heine, influenced by/critic of Franz Kafka, influenced by Kurd Lasswitz; earnest reader of Fritz Mauthner, Arthur Schopenhauer; "Deutsches Requiem", "German Literature in the Age of Bach"
• UK: Extensive study of English/Anglo Saxon literature; influenced by Samuel Butler, G.K. Chesterton, Thomas de Quincey, David Hume, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Herbert Spencer, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Carlyle
• India: setting for "Man on the Threshold" and "The Approach to Al Mu'tasim"
• Ireland: Influenced by John Scotus Erigena, Jonathan Swift; translated Oscar Wilde into Spanish; reviews of James Joyce; setting of "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero", subjective idealist metaphysicist George Berkeley who was also an Irish bishop.
• United States: translator of William Faulkner into Spanish; special affinity for Walt Whitman, influenced by/essays about Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne; Mark Twain-inspired "The Dreaded Redeemer Lazarus Morel"; many reviews of films, e.g. Citizen Kane ("An Overwhelming Film");
• Russia: knew nothing on the subject and of all the Russians, read only Dostoyevsky and P. D. Ouspensky
• Japan: "The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kotsuke no Suke"
• China: "The Garden of Forking Paths", "The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate"
• Persia: "The Masked Dyer Hakim of Merv"
• Maghrib: setting for "Averroes's Search"
• Prague: setting for "The Secret Miracle"
• Scandinavia: setting for "Undr", in later life - learned Old Norse and read lectures on Norse sagas

Religious themes in Borges: Mainline, heretical, and mystical

• Christian: Influenced by Leon Bloy; "A History of Eternity" "Three Versions of Judas", "The Theologians", "The Gospel of Mark", "The Theologian in Death"
• Buddhist: "Theme of the Beggar and the King", lecture on Buddhism in Seven Nights
• Islamic: "Approach to Al Mu'tasim", "Averroes' Search", "Hakim, Masked Dyer of Merv", "The Chamber of Statues"; strongly influenced by/studied several translations of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights
• Jewish: "Death and the Compass", "The Golem", "A Defense of the Cabala", lectures on Cabala and on Shmuel Agnon
• Mystical: early writings in imitation of Emanuel Swedenborg; "A Defense of Basilides the False"
• Fictional: The heresiarchs of Uqbar in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
• Sufic: discussed in Jorge Luis Borges: Sources and Illumination by Giovanna de Garayalde, 1978, Octagon Press