Jorge Luis Borges, (1899-1986)

Argentine poet, essayist, and short-story writer whose works have become classics of 20th-century world literature. Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on August 24, 1899. Borges was reared in the then-shabby district of Palermo, 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. His father taught him philosophy, once using a chessboard to explain Zeno's paradox, and his mother, who would live to see 99, was a strong woman who would one day travel around the world with her son.

He established a friendship with a local poet, his neighbor Evaristo Carriego, a reckless man who represented much of the "sentimental machismo" of Argentine tradition and would become something of a minor idol to the young dreamer. It wasn't until much later, returning to Buenos Aires after spending seven years in Europe, that Borges admitted to himself that "for years I believed I had grown up in a suburb . . . of risky streets and visible sunsets. The truth is I grew up in a garden, behind lanceolate railings, and in a library of unlimited English books." He later wrote a small book on the poet Carriego in which he reconciles the fact that his younger self was no denizen of the streets, but rather a quiet intellectual. Nevertheless, images of the compadrito, stray gauchos, and knife fights would make their occasional appearances throughout the rest of his literary career.

He was always expected to be a writer, as his father had made several attempts, and as his blindness increased over the years, it became a tacit understanding that his son would carry on the tradition. (Of course the blindness was congenital, for Borges himself would later lose his sight as well.) He started writing at the age of six, mostly fanciful stories inspired by Cervantes. When he was nine, he translated Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince into Spanish, and effort which appeared in a local newspaper called El País.

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 Collège Calvin de Genève. It was at the College Calvin that Borges got his first taste of Symbolist literature, introduced to him via a pair of sophisticated Polish friends. Perusing the work of Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, he discovered a completely new way of relating the world through abstract literature. But that was just one facet of his new world -- he was learning about so many more writers and philosophers. From Carlyle, he discovered something as equally important as Symbolism: often inventing the idea of a book is just as effecting as writing it. . . . And it was also in Geneva where he first acquired his love of Schopenhauer, his favorite of all the philosophers, and Walt Whitman, whom for a while he believed to be the culmination of all the subtle aims of poetry. Leaving Geneva in 1919, the family spent a year in Majorca and a year in 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 '98.

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). 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), about his boyhood hero, the poet Carriego, who had died of tuberculosis in 1912. Unfortunately the book became more of a reminiscence of old-time Buenos Aires than a biography of the poet, and it was not very successful. The years from 1924 to 1933 were quite prolific and exciting for Borges. He founded several more literary magazines with varying amounts of success, and he contributed a variety of pieces to many existing magazines, most notably Martin Fierro. As a result, several more books of poems and essays were to issue from his pen, including Luna de Enfrente in 1925 and Cuaderno San Martín in 1929.

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). In 1936 he published another collection of essays, Historia de la eternidad, or A History of Eternity.

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 the series of Ficciones. In 1941, a collection of stories was published, The Garden of Forking Paths, which would later be added to Artifices and retitled Ficciones in 1944.

In 1942 he published a series of spoof detective stories with his younger friend Adolfo Bioy-Casares, Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, under the joint pen-name of "Bustos Domecq." In 1949 his second major book of short stories appeared, The Aleph. It is perhaps notable that the title story concerns itself with a disillusioned man who painfully denies the ability to experience the entire universe to his enemies. In 1950 Borges was elected President of the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (The Argentine Writer's Society.) and in 1952 published his major collection of essays, Other Inquisitions.

In 1955 Borges was appointed Director of the National Library, the job of his dreams. By this time Borges was going completely blind. He took it as stoically and gently as possible: "I speak of God's splendid irony in granting me at one time 800,000 books and darkness." He took his job very seriously, and determined to make the library into a cultural center, he started a program of lectures and resurrected the library's journal. In 1956 he was named to the professorship of English and American Literature at the University of Buenos Aires, a position he was to hold for twelve years; and later that same year, he unsurprisingly won the National Prize for literature.

In 1960 he published El hacedor or The Maker, which was later retitled in English as Dreamtigers. Essentially a collection of prose pieces, parables, and poems, Borges considered El hacedor to be his best, and most personal, work. In 1961 he and Samuel Beckett were jointly awarded the second-ever International Publishers Prize (the Formentor Prize), and he found that the global spotlight was suddenly turned upon him. In 1963 he travelled again to Europe, revisiting many locations from his childhood memories and meeting again with old friends and associates, and in 1967 he was invited by Harvard to spend a year in the U.S. as a visiting professor. Throughout these years he wrote many more volumes of poetry, and a few collections of short stories and essays. In 1967 he and his old friend Bioy-Casares published another "Bustos Domecq" book, The Chronicles of Bustos Domecq.

In 1970 a collection of more traditionally "Argentine" stories came out, El Informe de Brodie, Dr. Brodie's Report. He developed an acquaintance with one of the students who attended his lectures, María Kodama, an Argentine with Japanese ancestry. She agreed to work as his secretary, and eventually their association blossomed into a collaborative friendship. He would later marry her during the last year of his life. In 1973 he resigned as Director of the National Library, and decided to spend the next few years travelling and lecturing, producing another collection of stories, El libro de arena, or The Book of Sand in 1975. That same year, his mother died at the age of 99. His travels continued, and accompanied by María Kodama he journeyed around the world and compiled a travel atlas -- he provided the text, and she the pictures. The resulting work, Atlas, was published in 1984, and presented their journeys as an almost mythical voyage of discovery, a travelogue through both time and space. Two years later he and María were married.

On June 14, 1986, at the age of 86, Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer in Geneva.

Other works:

A Personal Anthology (1961)
The Book of Imaginary Beings (1969)
Seven Nights (1984)
Selected Poems (1999)
Collected Fictions (1999)
Selected Non-Fictions (1999)