Artistic and Literature in Spanish America

Jorge Luis Borges

Dra. Patricia Nigro

Jorge Luis Borges

• Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges

Acevedo: born August 24, 1899, Buenos

Aires, Argentina—died June 14, 1986,

Geneva, Switzerland.

• Argentine poet, essayist, and short-story

writer whose works have become classics of

20th-century world literature.

• 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.

Jorge Luis Borges

• Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from a traditional

Uruguayan family of "pure" criollo, (Spanish) descent. Her family had

been much involved in the European settling of South America and she

spoke often of their heroic actions. Borges's 1929 book Cuaderno San

Martín includes the poem "Isidoro Acevedo," commemorating his

grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier of the Buenos Aires

Army. 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 grew up hearing about the faded family glory.

Jorge Luis Borges

• Borges's father, Jorge

Guillermo Borges Haslam,

was part Spanish, part

Portuguese, and half English,

also the son of a colonel.

Haslam, whose mother Fanny

was English, grew up speaking

English at home, and took his

own family frequently to

Europe. England and English

pervaded the family home.

• Fanny married Colonel

Francisco Borges.

Jorge Luis Borges

• Borges had a two years younger sister:

Norah.

• She was his companion and a very good

painter.

Jorge Luis Borges

• Borges was taught at home until the age of 11, bilingual, reading

Shakespeare in English at the age of twelve. 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 father's library.“

Jorge Luis Borges

• 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.

Jorge Luis Borges

• 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 de

Genève.

• 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.

Jorge Luis Borges

• 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, (1923;

“Fervour of Buenos Aires, Poems”).

Jorge Luis Borges

• 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 municipal library,

Biblioteca Miguel Cané. He remained there for nine unhappy years.

Jorge Luis Borges

• 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. He nearly died of septicemia.

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.

Jorge Luis Borges

• 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.

Jorge Luis Borges

• 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 Public Library (1955-1973), an honorific position, and also

professor of English and American literature at the University of

Buenos Aires (1956-1970).

Jorge Luis Borges

• 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.

Jorge Luis Borges

By the late 1950s, he had become completely blind, as had one of his best

known predecessors, Paul Groussac, for whom Borges wrote an obituary.

Neither the coincidence nor the irony of his blindness as a writer escaped

Borges:

Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche

esta declaración de la maestría de Dios,

que con magnífica ironía

me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.

(Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch this declaration of the mastery of

God who, with magnificent irony, granted me both the gift of books and the

night.)

Jorge Luis Borges

• 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.

Jorge Luis Borges

• 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.

Jorge Luis Borges

• 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.

• The Italian government named Borges Commendatore and the

University of Texas at Austin appointed him for one year to the Tinker

Chair.

• In 1962, Borges began lecture tours of Europe. In 1980, he was awarded

the Balzan Prize (for Philology, Linguistics and literary Criticism) and

the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca; numerous other honors were to

accumulate over the years, such as the French Legion of Honour in

1983, the Cervantes Prize, and a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award

from the Mystery Writers of America, "for distinguished contribution to

the mystery genre".

Jorge Luis Borges

• In 1967, Borges married the recently

widowed Elsa Astete Millán. Friends

believed that his mother, who was 90 and

anticipating her own death, wanted to find

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 until

her death at age 99. Thereafter, he lived

alone in the small flat he had shared with

her, cared for by Fanny, their housekeeper

of many decades.

Jorge Luis Borges

• From 1975 until the time of his death, Borges traveled internationally.

He was often accompanied in these travels by his personal assistant

María 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.

Jorge Luis Borges

• He died of liver cancer in 1986 in

Geneva and was buried there in the

Cimetière des Rois. After years of legal

wrangling about the legality of the

marriage, Kodama, as sole inheritor of

a significant annual income, gained

control over his works.

Jorge Luis Borges

• 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.

Jorge Luis Borges

• Borges became a journalist. He

wrote about art, literature, movies,

books reviews. He worked for

different newspapers and

magazines:

– Revista Multicolor de los

Sábados (Crítica).

– Revista El Hogar.

– Revista Sur.

– La Nación; Clarín.

Jorge Luis Borges

• In 1933, he gained an

editorial appointment at the

literary supplement Crítica.

He wrote essays, literary

forgeries, translations of

famous works, and served as

a literary adviser.

• He wrote weekly columns for

El Hogar, which appeared

from1936 to 1939.

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges: his writing style

– Use of symbols: the tiger, the rose, the knife, the

mirror, the labyrinth, the face, the circle, the

libraries, monster, a pact, the shadow, an

oxymoron, fallacies.

Jorge Luis Borges: his huge knowledge

• Borges had a huge knowledge of many

different topics and languages:

Literature, Philosophy, Theology,

Ancient Cultures, Languages,

Geography, Mithologies, History…

Jorge Luis Borges

– Some ideas obsessed him:

• Destiny, Hope.

• The existence of God,

Redemption.

• A man life reflected in other

man’s life.

• Writing, Paradoxes,

Conjectures.

• Universe, Randomness.

• Kabaláh, Guilt.

Jorge Luis Borges

• Barbarity against civilisation.

• Story and history.

• Identity.

• Orthodoxy and heresy.

• Ancestors.

• Courage, Fear.

• Truth, Dreams.

Jorge Luis Borges

• Games with the idea of time

and place.

• Fiction and non ficition:

books that not exist.

• Use of parentheses for

important facts.

• Quotes from actual books or

imaginary books.

• Use reflections in the middle

of the telling of the story.

Jorge Luis Borges: his writing style

• Narrator: he as a character, stories first told by

other people, different versions of the fact.

• A very accurate use of adjectives: vast, infinite,

dark, obscure, fantastic, real, intimate, true, false,

blind, antique, unique, courageous, coward, brave,

fundamental, eternal, silent, immortal, secret,

taciturn, infinite, vain, last, black, vague, happy,

inscrutable, wide, vast, persistent, trivial, cruel…

Jorge Luis Borges

– Frequently used verbs:

• To remember, to know.

• To believe, to trust.

• To dream, to hate.

• To surprise, to wonder.

• To see, to tire.

• To forget, to frequent.

• To define, to be reflected.

José Hernández and Jorge Luis Borges

• José Hernández (1834-1886) wrote Martín Fierro (1872) and La

vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879).

José Hernández and Jorge Luis Borges

• Borges’ 1953 book of essays about the poem and its

critical and popular reception – “El Martín Fierro”

(written with Margarita Guerrero) – shows Borges's

identity as an Argentine.

• Borges has nothing but praise for the aesthetic merit

of Martín Fierro, but refuses to project that as

indicating moral merit for its protagonist.

Jorge Luis Borges