Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine writer born on 24 August 1899 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was brought up bilingual in Spanish and English. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, then traveled around Spain. On return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began his career as a writer with the publication of poems and essays in Surrealism literary journals. He worked as a librarian, suffering political persecution at the hands of the Peron administration. He then became a public lecturer.
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Who is Jorge Luis Borges?
Due to a hereditary condition, Borges became blind in his late fifties. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library (Biblioteca Nacional) and professor of Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first International Publishers' Prize Prix Formentor. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. He died in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1986.
J. M. Coetzee said of Borges: "He more than anyone renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists."
Early life and education
Jorge Luis Borges was born to an educated middle-class family. In accordance with Argentine custom, he never used his entire name. Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from a traditional Uruguayan family. His 1929 book Cuaderno San Martín included a poem "Isidoro Acevedo," commemorating his maternal grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier of the Buenos Aires Army who stood against dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. A descendant of the Argentine lawyer and politician Francisco Narciso de Laprida, Acevedo fought in the battles of Cepeda in 1859, Pavón 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's father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was a lawyer and psychology teacher with literary aspirations. ("...he tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt," Borges once said, "...[but] composed some very good sonnets"). His father was part Spanish, part Portuguese, and half British; his father's mother was British and maintained a strong spirit of English culture in Borges's home. In this home, both Spanish and English were spoken. From earliest childhood Borges was bilingual, reading Shakespeare in English, at the age of 12. His family was comfortably wealthy, but not quite wealthy enough to live in downtown Buenos Aires. Instead, they lived in the then suburb of Palermo, in a large house equipped with an extensive English library. The neighborhood, famous for its knife-fights was somewhat poor, and urban space gave way to the countryside.
His father was forced into early retirement from the legal profession due to failing eyesight that would eventually afflict his son. In 1914, the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland. Borges senior was treated by a Geneva eye specialist, while his son and daughter Norah attended school. There Borges junior learned French, initially with some difficulties, and taught himself German. He received his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The Borges family stayed until 1921 because of domestic unrest in neutral Argentina. After World War I ended, the Borges family spent three years living in various cities: Lugano (Switzerland), Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid.
Borges discovered several authors who would influence his writing, the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and Gustav Meyrink's The Golem (1915) being key examples. In Spain, Borges became a member of the avant-garde Ultraist literary movement (anti-Modernism, which ended in 1922 with the cessation of the journal Ultra). His first poem, "Hymn to the Sea", written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published in the magazine Grecia (Spanish for "Greece"). While in Spain, he met with such notable Spanish writers as Rafael Cansinos Assens and Ramón Gómez de la Serna.
Writer
In 1921, Borges returned with his family to Buenos Aires where he imported the doctrine of Ultraism and launched his career as a writer by publishing poems and essays in literary journals. Borges's first collection of poetry was Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923). He contributed to the avant-garde review Martín Fierro (whose "art for art's sake" approach contrasted to that of the more politically-involved Boedo group), co-founded the journals Prisma (1921–1922, a broadsheet distributed largely by pasting copies to walls in Buenos Aires) and Proa (1922–1926). He was, from the first issue, a regular contributor to Sur, founded in 1931, by Victoria Ocampo, which became Argentina's most important literary journal. Ocampo herself introduced Borges to Adolfo Bioy Casares, who was to become Borges's frequent collaborator and Ocampo's brother-in-law, and another well-known figure of Argentine literature.
In 1933 Borges was appointed editor of the literary supplement of the newspaper Crítica, and it was there that the pieces later published in Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy) appeared. These pieces lay somewhere between non-fictional essays and fictional short stories, using fictional techniques to tell essentially true stories, and literary forgeries, which typically claimed to be translations of passages from famous but seldom read works. In the following years, he served as a literary adviser for the publishing house Emecé Editores and wrote weekly columns for El Hogar, which appeared from 1936 to 1939.
Starting in 1937, friends of Borges found him work at the Miguel Cané branch of the Buenos Aires Municipal Library as a first assistant. The other employees immediately forbade Borges from cataloging more than 100 books each day, a task which would take him about one hour. The rest of his days he would spend in the basement of the library, writing articles and short stories. When Juan Perón came to power in 1946, Borges was effectively fired; "promoted" to the position of poultry inspector for the Buenos Aires municipal market (from which he immediately resigned; when he told this story, he would always embellish this to "Poultry and Rabbit Inspector"). His offenses against the Peronistas up to that time had apparently consisted of little more than adding his signature to pro-democratic petitions, but shortly after his resignation he addressed the Argentine Society of Letters saying, in his characteristic style, "Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy."
Borges's father died in 1938, a great blow because the two were very close. On Christmas Eve 1938, Borges suffered a severe head wound in an accident; during treatment for that wound, he nearly died of septicemia. (He based his 1944 short story "The South" on this event.) While recovering from the accident, he began writing in a style he became famous for, and his first collection of short stories, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths) appeared in 1941. The book included El sur, a piece that incorporated some autobiographical elements, notably the accident, and which Borges later called "perhaps my best story." Though generally well received, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan failed to garner the literary prizes many in his circle expected for it. 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 project.
Later life
Left without a job, his vision beginning to fade due to glaucoma, and unable to fully support himself as a writer, Borges began a new career as a public lecturer. Despite a certain amount of political persecution, he was reasonably successful, and became an increasingly public figure, obtaining appointments as President of the Argentine Society of Writers (1950–1953) and as Professor of English and American Literature (1950–1955) at the Argentine Association of English Culture. His short story Emma Zunz was turned into a film (under the name of Días de odio, which in English became Days of Wrath) in 1954 by Argentine director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson. Around this time, Borges also began writing screenplays.
His international fame dates from the early 1960s. In 1961, he received the Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. As Beckett was well-known and respected in the English-speaking world, while Borges at this time remained unknown and untranslated, English-speakers became curious about who the person was who shared the prize. The Italian government named him Commendatore; and the University of Texas at Austin appointed him for one year to the Tinker chair. This led to his first lecture tour of the United States. The first translations of his work into English were to follow in 1962, with lecture tours of Europe and the Andean region of South America in subsequent years. In 1965, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom appointed him O.B.E. In 1980 he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca and numerous other honors were to accumulate over the years, such as the French Legion of Honour in 1983, the Cervantes Prize, and even a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America, "for distinguished contribution to the mystery genre".
In 1967, Borges began a five-year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, thanks to whom he became better known in the English-speaking world. He also continued to publish books, among them El libro de los seres imaginarios (The Book of Imaginary Beings, 1967, co-written with Margarita Guerrero), El informe de Brodie (Dr. Brodie's Report, 1970), and El libro de arena (The Book of Sand, 1975). He also lectured prolifically. Many of these lectures were anthologized in volumes such as Siete noches (Seven Nights) and Nueve ensayos dantescos.
Though a contender since at least the late 1960s, Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Especially in the late 1980s, when Borges was clearly growing old and infirm, the failure to grant him the prize became a glaring omission. It was speculated that Borges was considered unfit to receive the award because of his tacit support of, or unwillingness to condemn, the military dictatorships that were being installed in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and elsewhere. Although this political stance stemmed from his self-described "Anarcho-Pacifism," it forced Borges to join the distinguished company of Nobel Prize in Literature non-winners, a group including, among others, Graham Greene, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy and Alfonso Reyes (Borges said of Reyes: "the best prose-writer in the Spanish language of any time"). He did, however, receive the Jerusalem Prize in 1971, awarded to writers who deal with themes of human freedom and society.
When Perón returned from exile and was re-elected president in 1973, Borges immediately resigned as director of the National Library.
Borges was forced to marry, first in 1967 by his mother, who at over 90 years old and anticipating her own death, wanted to find someone to care for her blind son. Thus she and his sister Norah arranged for Borges to marry the recently widowed Elsa Astete Millán. It is said that Borges never consummated the marriage. He and his wife slept in separate bedrooms and the marriage lasted less than three years. After the legal separation, Borges moved back in with his mother, with whom he lived until her death at 99. Thereafter he lived alone in the small flat he had shared with her and was cared for by their housekeeper of many decades.
After 1975, the year his mother died, Borges commenced a series of extensive visits to countries all over the world, that continued until the time of his death. He was often accompanied in these travels by an assistant, Miss María Kodama, an Argentine woman of Japanese and German ancestry.
Death
Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer in Geneva and is buried in the Cimetière des Rois (Plainpalais), where to the dismay of his close lifelong friends, such as Adolfo Bioy Casares, he was married in extremis to Maria Kodama. She also obtained the absolute control of his works, estimated to generate an annual income of many millions of dollars. Kodama was denounced by the prestigious French editor Gallimard and by intellectuals of renown, such as Beatriz Sarlo, as the obstacle to the serious reading of Borges works.
Works
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, and, as a personal integration of these, Borges's sense of literature as recreation all of these disciplines are sometimes treated as a writer's playthings and at other times treated very seriously.
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.
Many of his most popular stories concern the nature of time, infinity, mirrors, labyrinths, reality, philosophy, 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.
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. In this respect, and regarding Borges's personal pantheon, he considered the Mexican essayist of similar topics Alfonso Reyes "the best prose-writer in the Spanish language of any time" (In: Siete Noches, p. 156). 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 Adolfo Bioy Casares, with whom Borges coauthored several collections of tales between 1942 and 1967, sometimes under different pseudonyms (see main article: H. Bustos Domecq).
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 "El Golem" ("The Golem").
As well as his own original work, Borges was notable as a translator into Spanish. He translated Oscar Wilde's story The Happy Prince into Spanish when he was ten, perhaps an early indication of his literary talent. 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.
Borges also employed two very unusual literary forms: the literary forgery and the review of an imaginary work. Both constitute a form of modern pseudo-epigrapha.
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.
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 the 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's (verbatim identical) work.
While Borges was certainly the great popularizer of the review of an imaginary work, it was not his own invention. 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."
Borges as Argentine and as world citizen
Borges's 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 high school (he never went to university). Drawing on influences of many times and places, Borges's work belittled nationalism and racism.
Borges grew acquainted with the literature from Argentine, Spanish, North American, English, French, 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's job fueled his skepticism of government (he labeled himself a Spencerian 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 likely have a Jew in their ancestry a millennium back).
Multicultural influences on Borges's writing
Borges's Argentina 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 Religious themes in Borges.
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's 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"; "Evaristo Carriego") and current concerns ("Celebration of The Monster", "Hurry, Hurry", "The Mountebank", "Pedro Salvadores") it is ironic indeed that ultra-nationalists would have questioned his Argentine identity.
Borges's 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."
Borges, Martín 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's 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.
In "The Argentine Writer and Tradition", Borges celebrates how Hernández expresses that character in the crucial scene in which Martín 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.
Borges uses Martín 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 Martín Fierro. In his prologue to Artificios, Borges says of "El Fin," "Everything in the story is implicit in a famous book [Martín Fierro] and I have been the first to decipher it, or at least, to declare it."
Limits to universalism
To exaggerate Borges's universalism might be as much a mistake as the nationalists' questioning the validity of his Argentine identity. His 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. A review of his 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 his work; rare mentions include an idiosyncratic inventory of the latter-day effects of the slave trade in "The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morrell" and a number of sympathetic references to a person of African descent 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". "Lo Gauchesco" (Gaucho culture), has, however, a big presence throughout his work. Gauchos are of mixed blood (spanish and indigenous) and have always been associated with the barabic, indigenous and unruly elements of Argentine culture.
In contrast to his scholarship in Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist sources, Borges's view of Hinduism and Hindus seems to have been formed by peering through the sympathetic lens of the works of Rudyard Kipling, as in Borges's "The Approach to Al Mutasim".
Sexuality and sexual orientation
There has been much discussion of Borges' attitudes to sex and women. Herbert J. Brant, in his essay The Queer Use of Communal Women in Borges’ "El muerto" and "La intrusa", has argued that Borges employed women as intermediaries of male affection, allowing men to engage each other romantically without resorting to direct homosexuality. For instance, the plot of La Intrusa was based on a true story of two friends, but Borges made their fictional counterparts brothers, thus excluding (in his mind) the possibility of a homosexual relationship. Borges had always dismissed these suggestions, though they were common even among his friends. It may be inferred from statements made in the essay "Our Inabilities" that he harbored homophobic views, though this may have arisen from his general abhorrence of carnality. This is shown in his short story "The Sect of The Phoenix", which focuses entirely on sex yet never names the act otherwise than under the signifier "Secret", while every clue he gives indicates furtive sexual encounters. Due to the virtual absence of any discussion of sexuality from his works, some commentators speculate that he was asexual.
Not every instance of a woman in Borges is either as an object or as a part of what Daniel Balderston has called "the fecal dialectic." The story "Ulrica" from The Book of Sand tells a romantic tale of heterosexual desire, love, trust and actual sex, though it may have been only a dream. Also, the protagonist of "El muerto" clearly relishes and lusts after the "Splendid, contemptuous, red-haired woman" of Azevedo Bandeira (Hurley 197). Later he "sleeps with the woman with shining hair" (200). "El muerto" ("The Dead Man") contains two seperate examples of definitive gaucho heterosexual lust, though Brant might counter that the woman represents an intermediary of unfulfilled masculine desire between Azevedo and the protagonist Otálora. Speculations as to the author's sexuality may be called pointless when the text is read from a hermeneutic or Roland Barthes style perspective, denying authorial intention. Finally, to quote the narrator of Borges's "Pierre Menard" concerning intellectual debate, "There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless." The key to understanding Borges's sexuality then, according to his own writings, would be to not look for it in his writings.
James Woodall and Edwin Williamson have both written biographies of Borges, both of which are titled Borges, a Life. Their investigations of his actual relationships and his personal correspondence elaborate on the debate surrounding Borges's sexuality.
Citation from Andrew Hurley Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin, 1998.
Jorge Luis Borges quotes
"The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it." — (dogma of a fictional religion in "Hakim, the masked dyer of Merv". Part of this quote is also attributed to a heresiarch of Uqbar in "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius".)
"The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry."
"I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as 'The Masses'. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time." - Introduction to The Book of Sand
Jorge Luis Borges books in order
Fervor de Buenos Aires, 1923, poetry.
Inquisiciones, 1925, essays. English title: Inquiries.
Luna de Enfrente, 1925, poetry.
El tamaño de mi esperanza, 1925, essays.
El idioma de los argentinos, 1928, essays.
Cuaderno San Martín, 1929, poetry.
Evaristo Carriego, 1930, a tightly linked collection of essays on the Argentine poet Evaristo Carriego. An expanded edition was published in 1955, with essays on other Argentine topics.
Discusión, 1932, essays and literary criticism. An expanded version was published in 1957.
Historia universal de la infamia, 1935, short non-fictional stories and literary forgeries
The edition of 1958 adds a prologue and several more literary forgeries. English title: A Universal History of Infamy, 1972, Several web sources mis-attribute this as Historia universal de la infancia (which would be A Universal History of Childhood).
Historia de la eternidad, 1936, essays.
El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, 1941, short stories. English title: Garden of Forking Paths, published as a section of Ficciones.
Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi, 1942, comic detective fiction, written with Adolfo Bioy Casares, originally published under the name H. Bustos Domecq. English title: Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, 1981.
Poemas : 1922-1943, 1943, poetry. This was a complete republication of his three previous volumes of poetry, plus some additional poems. Some of the republished poems were modified for this edition.
Ficciones, 1944, short stories, an expanded version of El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, 1941. The 1956 edition adds 3 stories. US title Ficciones, 1962 Also published in UK as "Fictions", in a translation by Andrew Hurley.
Un modelo para la muerte, 1946, detective fiction, written with Adolfo Bioy Casares, originally published under the name B. Suarez Lynch. The original publication was a private printing of only 300 copies. The first commercial printing was in 1970.
Dos fantasías memorables, 1946, two fantasy stories, written with Adolfo Bioy Casares. Like Un modelo para la muerte, the original publication was a private printing of 300 copies, with no commercial printing until 1970.
El Aleph, 1949, essays and short stories. A slightly expanded edition was published in 1957. English title: The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969 (ISBN 0-525-05154-6). The English-language edition is an incomplete translation of the Spanish-language book, but contains an autobiographical essay originally written for The New Yorker. Borges's Spanish-language Autobiografía (2000) is simply a translation of this English-language essay into Spanish.
Aspectos de la poesía gauchesca, 1950, literary criticism.
Antiguas literaturas germánicas, 1951, literary criticism, written with Delia Ingenieros.
La muerte y la brújula, 1951, short stories selected from earlier published volumes.
Otras inquisiciones 1937-1952, 1952, essays and literary criticism. English title: Other Inquisitions 1937-1952, 1964
Historia de la eternidad, 1953, essays, short stories, and literary criticism.
El "Martín Fierro", 1953, essays on the epic Argentine poem Martín Fierro, written with Margarita Guerrero
Poemas : 1923-1953, 1954, poetry. Essentially the same as Poemas : 1922-1943, but with the addition of a few newer poems.
Los orilleros; El paraíso de los creyentes, 1955, 2 screenplays, written with Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Leopoldo Lugones, 1955, literary criticism, written with Betina Edelborg.
La hermana de Eloísa, 1955, short stories. This slim book consists of two stories by Borges, two by Luisa Mercedes Levinson, and the title story, on which they collaborated.
Manual de zoología fantástica, 1957, short pieces about imaginary beings, written with Margarita Guerrero.
Libro del cielo y del infierno, 1960, essays and one poem, written with Adolfo Bioy Casares. Some of this material comes from Antiguas literaturas germánicas, 1951.
El Hacedor, 1960, poetry and short prose pieces, first published as the ninth volume in his Obras completas (Complete Works), a project which had begun in 1953. English title: Dreamtigers, 1964.
Antología Personal, 1961, essays, poetry, literary criticism, some of it not previously published in book form. English title: A Personal Anthology, 1967
El lenguaje de Buenos Aires, 1963, long essays, written with José Edmundo Clemente. The 1968 edition adds several new essays by Clemente.
Introducción a la literatura inglesa, 1965, literary criticism, written with María Esther Vázquez.
Para las seis cuerdas, 1965, lyrics for tangos and milongas. An expanded edition came out in 1970, but all of the poems in either edition can also be found in El otro, el mismo, 1969. Ástor Piazzolla composed the music for these tangos and milongas, the result of which was a record praised by Borges.
Literaturas germánicas medievales, 1966, literary criticism, written with María Esther Vázquez. This is a reworking of Antiguas literaturas germánicas, 1951.
Crónicas de Bustos Domecq, literary forgery/essays, 1967, written with Adolfo Bioy Casares. An odd book: deliberately pompous critical essays by an imaginary author. English title: Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, 1976.
Introducción a la literatura norteamericana, 1967, literary criticism, written with Esther Zemborain de Torres. English title: An Introduction to American Literature, 1971
El libro de los seres imaginarios, 1967, expansion of Manual de zoología fantástica, 1957, written with Marguerita Guerrero. English title: The Book of Imaginary Beings, 1969 the English-language volume is actually a further expansion of the work.
Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, 1968, with Richard Burgin, originally published in English.
Nueva Antología Personal, 1968, essays, poetry, literary criticism, some of it not previously published in book form. This includes quite a few previously unpublished poems, and has very little intersection with Antología Personal, 1961. English title New Personal Anthology.
Museo, 1969?, poetry
Elogio de la Sombra, 1969, poetry. English title In Praise of Darkness, 1974.
El otro, el mismo, 1969, poetry, including a complete reprint of Para las seis cuerdas, 1965.
El informe de Brodie, short stories, 1970. English title: Dr. Brodie's Report, 1971.
El congreso, 1971, essays.
Nuevos Cuentos de Bustos Domecq, 1972. Borges, a Reader, 1977, written with Adolfo Bioy Casares.
El oro de los tigres, 1972, poetry. English title: The Gold of the Tigers, Selected Later Poems, 1977. The English-language volume also includes poems from La Rosa Profunda.
El libro de arena, 1975, short stories, English title: The Book of Sand, 1977.
La Rosa Profunda, 1975, poetry.
La moneda de hierro, 1976, poetry.
Diálogos, 1976, conversations between Borges and Ernesto Sabato, transcribed by Orlando Barone.
¿Que es el budismo?, 1976, lectures, written with Alicia Jurado
Historia de la noche, 1977, poetry.
Prólogos con un prólogo de prólogos, 1977, a collection of numerous book prologues Borges had written over the years.
Borges El Memorioso, 1977, conversations with Antonio Carrizo. The title is a play on Borges's story "Funes El Memorioso", known in English as "Funes, the Memorious".
Rosa y Azul: La rosa de Paracelso; Tigres azules, 1977, (short stories).
Borges, oral, 1979, lectures.
Siete noches, 1980, lectures. English title, Seven Nights.
La cifra, 1981, poetry.
Nueve ensayos dantescos, 1982, essays on Dante.
Un argumento, 1983, (genre?).
Veinticinco de Agosto de 1983 y otros cuentos, 1983, short stories (also entitled La memoria de Shakespeare, English: Shakespeare's Memory)
Altas, 1984, stories and essays, written with María Kodama.
Los conjurados, 1985, poetry.
Textos cautivos, 1986, literary criticism, book reviews, short biographies of authors, translations. This book collects the columns Borges wrote in the popular Buenos Aires magazine El Hogar 1936-1939.
This Craft of Verse, 2000, lectures, edited by Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu, a collection of six originally English-language lectures by Borges dating from 1967-1968, transcribed from recently discovered tapes.
Source and additional information: Jorge Luis Borges