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Jorge Luis Borges nel 1969

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (Buenos Aires, 24 agosto 1899 – Ginevra, 14 giugno 1986) è stato uno scrittore e poeta argentino.

È ritenuto uno dei più importanti e influenti scrittori del XX secolo ed è stato ispirato tra gli altri da Macedonio Fernández, Rafael Cansinos Assens, dalla letteratura inglese (Chesterton, Shaw), Franz Kafka, Emanuel Swedenborg e dal Taoismo. Narratore, poeta e saggista, è famoso sia per i suoi racconti fantastici, in cui ha saputo coniugare idee filosofiche e metafisiche con i classici temi del fantastico (quali: il doppio, le realtà parallele del sogno, i libri misteriosi e magici, gli slittamenti temporali), sia per la sua più ampia produzione poetica, dove, come afferma Claudio Magris, si manifesta "l'incanto di un attimo in cui le cose sembra stiano per dirci il loro segreto".

Oggi l'aggettivo «borgesiano» definisce una concezione della vita come storia (fiction), come menzogna, come opera contraffatta spacciata per veritiera (come nelle sue famose recensioni di libri immaginari).

Vita e carriera

Infanzia ed educazione

Jorge Luis Borges nacque in una famiglia colta e benestante. Si trovavano in circostanze agiate, ma non abbastanza da vivere nel centro della sua città natale, Buenos Aires; vivevano infatti nel quartiere di Palermo. Si trasferirono poi più in periferia.

La madre di Borges, Leonor Acevedo Suàrez, discendeva da una famiglia uruguagliana di origine creola. La sua famiglia era stata molto attiva nella conquista europea del Sud America e lei parlava frequentemente delle gesta eroiche dei suoi avi. A riguardo il libro di Borges Cuaderno San Martín (1929) contiene la poesia "Isidoro Acevedo", che commemora suo nonno, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, un soldato dell'esercito di Buenos Aires che combattè nelle battaglie di Cepeda (1859), Pavòn (1861) e Los Corrales (1880). Borges crebbe dunque ascoldando le storie delle ormai scomparse fama e gloria della sua famiglia.

Il padre, invece, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, era in parte spagnolo, in parte portoghese ed in parte inglese. Haslam, la cui madre era inglese, parlava correntemente inglese e portò la sua famiglia spesso e volentieri in Europa. Dunque anche Inghilterra e inglese influenzavano di non poco la cultura familiare.

Egli era un legale ed un insegnante di psicologia che nutriva passioni per la letteratura. Di lui il figlio disse che "tentò di diventare uno scrittore e fallì nel tentativo". Scrisse anche:

(EN)

«As most of my people had been soldiers and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action.»

(IT)

«Dato che la maggior parte dei miei antenati sono stati soldati e io sapevo che non lo sarei mai stato, finii presto per vergognarmi di essere una persona decisamente più studiosa che d'azione.»

A sette anni Borges scrisse il suo primo racconto (La visiera fatal) ed all'età di soli nove anni tradusse in spagnolo il racconto Il principe felice, dalla raccolta di fiabe di Oscar Wilde Il principe felice e altri racconti. Esso fu pubblicato in un giornale locale, ma il merito dell'opera fu attribuito al padre.

Borges fu istruito in casa sin dall'età di undici anni, oltre che dal padre e dalla nonna materna, da un'istitutrice inglese; imparò le due lingue dei genitori e cominciò a leggere Shakespeare a soli dodici anni. Nella casa di famiglia possedeva, infatti, una biblioteca di oltre mille volumi; dirà in seguito:

(EN)

«if I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library.»

(IT)

«Se chiedessero l'evento principale della mia vita, dovrei rispondere la biblioteca di mio padre.»

Nel 1914 la famiglia si trasferì a Ginevra in Svizzera e trascorse i successivi dieci anni in Europa. Haslam, diventato ceco (come lo sarebbe poi diventato il figlio), fu preso in cura da uno specialista, mentre i figli, Luis con la sorella Nora, andarono a scuola, dove Borges "junior" imparò il francese. Cominciò anche a fare letture filosofiche in tedesco. Nel 1917, all'età di diciotto anni, incontrò Maurice Abramowicz con cui iniziò un'amicizia che durò per il resto della sua vita. Ricevette il Baccalauréat l'anno successivo. La famiglia decise di rimanere in Europa fino al 1921 per evitare i problemi politici che affigevano il loro Paese. Dopo la prima guerra mondiale vissero infatti in diverse città: Lugano, Barcellona, Majorca, Seville, e Madrid.

In quel periodo Borges scoprì gli scritti di Arthur Schopenhauer e lesse Il Golem di Gustav Meyrink. In Spagna Borges divenne membro del movimento avanguardista, antimodernista e ultraista che si ispirava a Apollinaire e Marinetti. La sua prima poesia, Himno del mar (Inno al Mare), scritta nello stile di Walt Whitman, fu pubblicata sulla rivista Grecia. Incontrò sempre in Spagna alcuni noti scrittori come Rafael Cansinos Assens e Ramón Gómez de la Serna.

Inizi della carriera letteraria

Jorge Luis Borges negli anni '40. Fotografia presa da "Historia de la Literatura Argentina Vol II" (1968)

Il 4 marzo del 1921, Borges si imbarcò con la sua famiglia per tornare a Buenos Aires. Della sua città scrisse ad un amico che era "infestata da arrivisti, da bravi ragazzi privi di ogni facoltà mentale e da giovani ragazze semplicemente ornamentali".

Portò con sé il pensiero Ultraista e cominciò la sua carriera pubblicando poesie surreali e saggi in giornali letterari. Nel 1930, Nestor Ibarra chiamò il poetà il "Grande apostolo del criollismo", celebrando il regionalismo latino americano. Borges pubblicò la sua prima raccolta di poesie, Fervor de Buenos Aires, nel 1923, in cui si prefigurava, come disse lo stesso Borges, tutta la sua opera successiva. Fu un'edizione preparata in fretta e furia in cui erano presenti alcuni refusi ed era priva di prologo. Per la copertina sua sorella Norah realizzò un'incisione, e ne furono stampate all'incirca trecento copie; le poche che ancora si conservano sono considerate dei tesori dai bibliofili: in alcune sono addirittura rinvenibili correzioni manoscritte realizzate dallo stesso Borges. L'unica copia appartenente alla Biblioteca Nazionale Argentina è stata rubata nel 2000 insieme ad altre prime edizioni di Borges. Lavorò anche per la rivista avanguardista Martin Fierro, una delle riviste chiave della storia della letteratura argentina della prima metà del XX secolo.

Nonostante la sua formazione europeista, Borges rivendicò con le tematiche trattate le sue radici argentine, e in particolare "porteñas" (cioè di Buenos Aires), nelle opere come Fervore di Buenos Aires (1923), Luna di fronte (Luna de enfrente) (1925) e Quaderno San Martín (Cuaderno de San Martín) (1929).

Co-fondò anche il giornale Prisma, largamente distribuito incollandone copie sui muri della città, e Proa. Più tardi Borges rimpianse queste sue pubblicazioni giovanili e tentò addirittura di comprarne tutte le copie in circolazione per assicurarsi della loro distruzione.

Verso la metà degli anni '30 cominciò ad interessarsi alle questioni ed alla letteratura esistenziali. Lavorò con uno stile che Ana María Barrenechea definì poi "irrealismo". Molti altri scrittori latino americani, come Juan Rulfo, Juan José Arreola e Alejo Carpentier esplorarono come lui questi temi, sotto l'influenza della fenomenologia di Husserl e Heidegger e dell'esistenzialismo di Jean-Paul Sartre. A riguardo, il suo biografo Williamson sottolinea quanto sia importante non trovare fondamenti biografici nei lavori di Borge, dato che questi erano piuttosto una forma di vera ispirazione, di esperienza personale per lui.

Borges collaborò regolarmente anche alla rivista Sur, fondata nel 1931 da Victoria Ocampo, sin dal suo primo numero. Diventò in seguito il giornale letterario più importante in Argentina ed aiutò molto il poeta a raggiungere la fama.

La stessa Ocampo presentò Borges ad Adolfo Bioy Casares, un'altra nota figura nel panorama letterario argentino; i due diventarono amici e collaboratori. Insieme scrissero, infatti, diversi lavori, alcuni sotto il nom de plume di H. Bustos Domecq, compresa una parodica serie di gialli e alcuni racconti fantastici.

Nel 1933, Borges ottenne un impiego come redattore dell'inserto letterario per il giornale Crítica, sul quale pubblicò scritti raccolti in seguito nella Historia universal de la infamia (Storia universale dell'infamia, 1935).

Negli anni seguenti lavorò come consultente letterario per la casa editrice Emecé Editores e scrisse settimanalmente sul giornale El Hogar, che venne pubblicato dal 1936 al 1939. Nel 1938 trovò lavoro come primo assistente alla Biblioteca Municipale di Buenos Aires, dove c'erano così pochi libri che gli fu detto che catalogarne più di cento al giorno avrebbe lasciato poco o niente da fare al resto dello staff. I compiti da bibliotecario lo tenevano impegnato ogni giorno per circa un'ora, dopodiché passava il suo tempo nel seminterrato della biblioteca a scrivere articoli, piccole storie e traduzioni.

La maturità

Il padre di Borges morì nel 1938, ceco ormai da diversi anni, e questo fu una tragedia per lo scrittore, che aveva un rapporto molto intimo con lui. La vigilia di Natale di quell'annno subì anche una grave ferita alla testa, per la quale, durante le cure, morì quasi di setticemia. Durante il suo ricovero, Borges cominciò ad esplorare un nuovo stile di scrittura, per la quale sarebbe poi diventato celebre. La sua prima storia dopo quell'evento, "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote", arrivò nel maggio 1939; la sua prima raccolta di brevi racconti, intitolata El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (Il giardino dei sentieri che si biforcano) uscì nel 1941, composta prevalentemente da storie già pubblicate sul Sur. Il racconto che dà il titolo alla raccolta parla di un professore cinese in inghilterra, il Dr. Yu Tsun, che fa la spia per la Germania durante la Prima Guerra Mondiale, tentando di provare alle autorità che un asiatico è in grado di ottenere le informazioni che cercano. Attraverso questo libro, che potrebbe essere interpretato in varie maniere, Borges inventò l'ipertesto letterario.

Composto di otto storie in circa sessanta pagine, il libro ebbe un discreto sucesso, ma non riuscì a far avere al suo autore alcun premio, benché molti se lo aspettassero. Ad esso, comunque, la sua amica Victoria Ocampo dedicò una buona parte del numero della rivista Sur nel luglio 1941.

All'età di circa trent'anni la sua vista cominciò a calare, come era successo per l'ormai defunto padre e Borges dovette presto ridurre il suo lavoro di scrittore, e cominciando, invece, a tenere conferenze. La sua fama crebbe tanto da ricevere le nomine di Presidente dell'Associazione Argentina degli Scrittori e di progessore di letteratura inglese ed americana all'Associazione Argentina della Cultura Inglese. Il suo breve racconto Emma Zunz fu trasformato in un film (con il titolo Días de odio, Giorni di odio, diretto nel 1954 dal regista argentino Leopoldo Torre Nilsson). Sempre in questo periodo Borges iniziò a scrivere sceneggiature.

Verso la fine degli anni '50 diventò completamente cieco, ma questo non gli impedì di continuare la sua carriera di scrittore.

(IT)

«
Nessuno pianga o rimproveri
questa affermazione della maestosità
di Dio, che con magnifica ironia
mi ha concesso il dono dei libri e della notte.»

(ES)

«
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.»

L'anno seguente Borges fu premiato con il Premio Nazionale per la Letteratura dall'Università di Cuyo e con il primo di molte altre lauree ad honorem. Dal 1956 al 1970 ricoprì anche il ruolo di professore di letteratura all'Università di Buenos Aires, tenendo frequentemente lezioni anche in altre università. A causa dei suoi problemi di vista, Borges contò sempre più sull'aiuto della madre. Quando non poté più scrivere né leggere (non imparò mai a leggere il Braille) sua madre, alla quale era stato sempre molto affezionato, divenne la sua assistente personale.

Fama internazionale

Otto dei poemi di Borges furono inseriti nell'antologia del 1943 dei Poeti Spagnoli in America di Hays

"Il giardino dei sentieri che si biforcano", uno dei primi racconti dello scrittore ad essere tradotto in inglese, fu pubblicato sul numero dell'agosto 1948 de La rivista di Ellery Queen, grazie al lavoro di Anthony Boucher. Benché diverse altre traduzioni di Borges furono pubblicate su diverse riviste ed antologie durante gli anni '50, egli divenne realmente famoso nel decennio successivo. Nel 1961 ricevetto infatti il primo premio internazionale degli editori, il Premio Formentor, che divise con Samuel Beckett. Mentre, però, quest'ultimo aveva già guadagnato molta fama in Europa ed America, Borges era ancora praticamente sconosciuto nel mondo inglese ed il premio attirò molta attenzione sui suoi lavori. Il governo italiano nominò Borges Commendatore e l'Università di Austin, in Texas, lo assunse per un anno. Questo lo portò al suo primo tour di comizi negli Stati Uniti. Nel 1962 furono pubblicate due raccolte degli scritti di Borges in Inghilterra: Finzioni e Labirinti. Nello stesso anno, Borges cominciò un tour di comizi in Europa.

Nel 1967 Borges inizio una collaborazione durata cinque anni con il traduttore americano Norman Thomas di Giovanni, che gli consentì di diventare più famoso nel mondo anglofono. Continuò anche a pubblicare libri; tra questi El libro de los seres imaginarios (1967, scritto con Margarita Guerrero), El informe de Brodie (1970), e El libro de arena ('1975). Tenne anche diverse conferenze, molte di queste raccolte in volumi come Siete noches eNueve ensayos dantescos.

Nel 1980 gli fu conferito il Premio Balzan (filologia, linguistica e critica letteraria) ed il Premio Mondiale Cino del Duca; ottenne diverse altre onoreficenze lungo gli anni, come il Premio Cervantes, la legione d'onore francese (1983) ed anche uno Speciale Premio Edgar Allan Poe conferitoglie dall'organizzazione Mystery Writers of America "per l'illustre contributo al genere giallo".

Gli ultimi anni

Citazione di Borges nella metropolitana di Madrid:"Mi sa di finzione che Buenos Aires sia mai stata fondata. La reputo eterna come il mare ed il vento"

Nel 1967 Borges sposò Elsa Astete Millàn, che era rimasta vedova da poco. Gli amici credevano che sua madre, ormai novantenne, volesse trovare qualcuno a cui affidare il figlio, completamente cieco. Lo scrittore, tuttavia, divorziò dopo tre anni e tornò da sua madre, con la quale visse fin quando morì, all'età di novantanove anni. Dal 1975 fino alla sua morte lo scrittore prevalentemente viaggiò, accompagnato dall'assistente personale María Kodama, che sposo nell'aprile 1986 in Paraguay, pochi mesi prima della sua morte.

Morì lo stesso anno di cancro al fegato a Ginevra e lì fu sepolto nel Cimetière des Rois (cimitero dei re). Dopo anni di trattative legali riguardo la legittimitò del matrimonio, Kodama, come unica erede di un notevole ammontare di denaro, ottenne il controllo sui suoi lavori. Il passaggio nelle sue mani della gestione del patrimonio del defunto marito fu denunciata dall'editore francese Gallimard, da Le Nouvel Observateur e da intellettuali come Beatriz Sarlo, come un serio ostacolo alla lettura delle opere di Borges.

Con Kodama, furono ritirati tutti i diritti di pubblicazione delle collezioni esistenti delle sue opere in inglese, incluse quelle tradotto da Norman Thomas di Giovanni (in cui collaborò lo stesso Borges), e furono commissionate nuove traduzioni a Andrew Hurley.

Opinioni politiche

Anti-Comunismo

In un intervista con Richard Burgin verso la fine degli anni '60, Borges affermò che la sua opposizione al Marxismo ed al Comunismo era nata durante la sua infanzia.

(EN)

«Well, I have been brought up to think that the individual should be strong and the State should be weak. I couldn't be enthusiastic about theories where the State is more important than the individual.»

(IT)

«Beh, sono stato portato a pensare che l'individeo dovrebbe essere forte e lo stato debole. Non potrei essere entusiasta riguardo teorie in cui lo stato è più importante dell'individuo.»

Dopo il ribaltamento dovuto al colpo di stato di Peron nel 1955, Borges appoggiò i tentativi di cacciare dall'argentina il governo peronista. Si infuriò per il fatto che il Partito Comunista Argentino si fosse opposto a queste forme di ribellione e li criticò duramente sia nelle conferenze che negli scritti. Negli anni seguenti Borges espresse spesso disprezzo per la presenza di ideali comunisti all'interno dell'elite culturale latino-americana. Sempre nell'intervista con Burgin, lo scrittore definì, ad esempio, Pablo Neruda come "un eccellente poeta", ma anche un "uomo miserabile, per il suo supporto all'Unione Sovietica e la sua diffidenza verso gli Stati Uniti.

Opposizione al peronismo

Quando il presidente Juan Domingo Perón prese il potere nel 1946 lo spoil system divenne una cosa abituale e, durante questo periodo, Borges fu informato di essere stato sollevato dal suo incarico alla biblioteca "Miguel Cané" e di averne ricevuto uno come controllore del pollame e dei conigli al mercato municipale di Buenos Aires. Il giorno dopo questo fatto, lo scrittore si licenziò.

Peron's treatment of Borges became a cause célèbre for the Argentine intelligentsia. The Argentine Society of Writers (SADE) held a formal dinner in his honour. At the dinner, a speech was read which Borges had written for the occasion. It said,

"Dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships breed servility, dictatorships breed cruelty; more loathsome still is the fact that they breed idiocy. Bellboys babbling orders, portraits of caudillos, prearranged cheers or insults, walls covered with names, unanimous ceremonies, mere discipline usurping the place of clear thinking... Fighting these sad monotonies is one of the duties of a writer. Need I remind readers of Martín Fierro or Don Segundo that individualism is an old Argentine virtue."

In the aftermath, Borges found himself much in demand as a lecturer and one of the intellectual leaders of the Argentine opposition. In 1951 he was asked by Anti-Peronist friends to run for president of SADE. Borges, then suffering from depression caused by a failed romance, reluctantly accepted. He later recalled that he would awake every morning and remember that Peron was President and feel deeply depressed and ashamed. Peron's government had seized control of the Argentine mass media and regarded SADE with indifference. Borges later recalled, however, "Many distinguished men of letters did not dare set foot inside its doors." Meanwhile, SADE became an increasing refuge for critics of the regime. SADE official Luisa Mercedes Levinson noted, "We would gather every week to tell the latest jokes about the ruling couple and even dared to sing the songs of the French Resistance, as well as 'La Marseillaise'."

After Evita's death on July 26, 1952, Borges received a visit from two policemen, who ordered him to put up two portraits of the ruling couple on the premises of SADE. Borges told them he would do nothing of the sort and that it was a ridiculous demand. He was told he would face the consequences." The regime placed Borges under 24-hour surveillance and sent policemen to sit in on his lectures; in September it ordered SADE to be permanently closed down. Like much of the Argentine opposition to Peron, SADE had become marginalized due to persecution by the State and very few active members remained. Borges later came to believe that the Peronistas had manipulated his appointment in order to destroy his influence over Argentine writers and intellectuals.

In 1955, after General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu's Anti-Peronist coup d'etat, or "Revolución Libertadora", forced Peron into exile, Borges was overjoyed. The new regime appointed Borges as the Director of the National Library. However, Peron's fall did not in any way alter Borges' animosity. In an interview with Richard Burgin in 1967, he said "Peron was a humbug, and he knew it, and everybody knew it. But Peron could be very cruel. I mean, he had people tortured, killed. And his wife was a common prostitute."

When Peron returned from exile in 1973 and regained the Presidency, Borges was enraged. In a 1975 interview for National Geographic, he said "Damn, the snobs are back in the saddle. If their posters and slogans again defile the city, I'll be glad I've lost my sight. Well, they can't humilate me as they did before my books sold well." After being accused of being unforgiving, Borges quipped, "I resented Peron's making Argentina look ridiculous to the world... as in 1951, when he announced control over thermonuclear fusion, which still hasn't happened anywhere but in the sun and the stars. For a time, Argentinians hesitated to wear bandaids for fear friends would ask, 'Did the Atomic Bomb go off in your hand?' A shame, because Argentina really has world class scientists."

After Borges' death in 1986, the Peronist Partido Justicialista declined to send a delegate to the writer's memorial service in Buenos Aires. A spokesman for the Party stated that this was in reaction to, "certain declarations he had made about the country." One Peronist declared that Borges had made statements about Evita Peron which were, "unacceptable." Later, at the City Council of Buenos Aires, a storm raged when Peronist politicians decided to give only conditional support for a condolence on the writer's death.

Works

Borges in L'Hôtel, Paris

Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort argue that Borges "may have been the most important figure in Spanish-language literature since Cervantes. But whatever his particular literary rank, he was clearly of tremendous influence, writing intricate poems, short stories, and essays that instantiated concepts of dizzying power."

In addition to short stories for which he is most noted, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, screenplays, literary criticism, and edited numerous anthologies. His longest work of fiction was a 14 page story, "The Congress", first published in 1971. He was a prominent translator of English-, French- and German-language literature into Spanish, including works in Old English and Old Norse. His late-onset blindness strongly influenced his later writing. Borges wrote: "When I think of what I've lost, I ask, 'Who knows themselves better than the blind?' - for every thought becomes a tool." Paramount among his intellectual interests are elements of mythology, mathematics, theology, integrating these through literature, sometimes playfully, sometimes with great seriousness.

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), he increasingly focused on writing poetry, since 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. For example, his interest idealism is reflected in the fictional world of Tlön in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", in his essay "A New Refutation of Time", "On Exactitude in Science", and in his poem "Things". Similarly, a common thread runs through his story "The Circular Ruins" and his poem "El Golem" ("The Golem").

Borges was a notable translator. His first publication, for a Buenos Aires newspaper, was a translation of Oscar Wilde's story The Happy Prince into Spanish when he was nine. At the end of his life he produced a Spanish-language version of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda. He also translated (while simultaneously subtly transforming) the works of, among others, Edgar Allan Poe, Kafka, Hesse, Kipling, Faulkner,Gide, Whitman and Woolf. Borges wrote and lectured extensively on the art of translation, holding that a translation may improve upon the original, may even be unfaithful to it, and that alternative and potentially contradictory renderings of the same work can be equally valid. Borges also employed the devices of literary forgery and the review of an imaginary work, both forms of modern pseudo-epigrapha.

Hoaxes and forgeries

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, for example, in the style of Emanuel Swedenborg or One Thousand and One Nights, originally claiming them to be translations of works he had chanced upon. In another case, he added three short, falsely attributed pieces into his otherwise legitimate and carefully researched anthology El matrero. Several of these are gathered in the A Universal History of Infamy.

At times he wrote reviews of nonexistent work, by some other person. The key example of this is "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", which imagines a twentieth-century Frenchman who tries to write Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote verbatim, not by having memorized Cervantes' work, but as an "original" narrative of his own invention. Initially the Frenchman tries to immerse himself in sixteenth-century Spain, but dismisses the method as too easy, instead trying to reach Don Quixote through his own experiences. He finally manages to (re)create "the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of the first part of Don Quixote and a fragment of chapter twenty-two." Borges's "review" of the work of the fictional Menard uses tongue-in-cheek comparisons to explore the resonances which Don Quixote has picked up over the centuries since it was written. He discusses how much "richer" Menard's work is than that of Cervantes, even though the actual text is exactly the same.

While Borges was the great popularizer of the review of an imaginary work, Borges developed the idea from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a book-length review of a non-existent German transcendentalist work, and the biography of its equally non-existent author. In This Craft of Verse, Borges says that in 1916 in Geneva "[I] 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."

Criticism of Borges' work

Borges's change in style from regionalist criollismo to a more cosmopolitan style brought him much criticism from journals such as Contorno, a left-of-centre, Sartre-influenced Argentine publication founded by the Viñas brothers, Noé Jitrik, Adolfo Prieto, and other intellectuals. In the post-Peronist Argentina of the early 1960s, Contorno met with wide approval from the youth who challenged the authenticity of older writers such as Borges and questioned their legacy of experimentation. Magic realism and exploration of universal truths, they argued, had come at the cost of responsibility and seriousness in the face of society's problems. The Contorno writers acknowledged Borges and Eduardo Mallea for being "doctors of technique" but argued that their work lacked substance due to their lack of interaction with the reality that they inhabited, an existentialist critique of their refusal to embrace existence and reality in their artwork.

Sexuality

With a few notable exceptions, women are almost entirely absent from the majority of Borges's fictional output. There are, however, some instances in Borges's writings of romantic love, for example the story "Ulrikke" from The Book of Sand. The protagonist of the story "El muerto" also lusts after the "splendid, contemptuous, red-haired woman" of Azevedo Bandeira. and later "sleeps with the woman with shining hair". The plot of La Intrusa was based on a true story of two friends. Borges turned their fictional counterparts into brothers, excluding the possibility of a homosexual relationship.

Nobel Prize omission

Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, something which continually distressed the writer. He was one of several distinguished authors who never received the honour. Borges commented "Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition; since I was born they have not been granting it to me." Some observers speculated that Borges did not receive the award because of his conservative political views; or more specifically, because he had accepted an honour from dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Fact, fantasy and non-linearity

Many of Borges's most popular stories concern the nature of time ("The Secret Miracle"), infinity "(The Aleph"), mirrors ("Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius") and Labyrinths ("The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths", "The House of Asterion", The Immortal, "The Garden of Forking Paths"). Williamson writes, "His basic contention was that fiction did not depend on the illusion of reality; what mattered ultimately was an author’s ability to generate 'poetic faith' in his reader." His stories often have fantastical 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 still time given to a man standing before a firing squad ("The Secret Miracle"). Borges also told realistic stories of South American life, of folk heroes, streetfighters, soldiers, gauchos, detectives, historical figures. He mixed the real and the fantastic: fact with fiction. His interest in compounding fantasy, philosophy, and the art of translation are evident in articles such as "The Translators of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights". In The Book of Imaginary Beings, a thoroughly (and obscurely) researched bestiary of mythical creatures, 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, often under different pseudonyms including H. Bustos Domecq. Often, especially early in his career, the mixture of fact and fantasy, crossed the line into the realm of hoax or literary forgery.

"The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941) presents the idea of forking paths through networks of time, none of which is the same, all of which are equal. Borges uses the recurring image of "a labyrinth that folds back upon itself in infinite regression" so we "become aware of all the possible choices we might make." The forking paths have branches to represent these choices that ultimately lead to different endings. Borges saw man's search for meaning in a seemingly infinite universe as fruitless and instead uses the maze as a riddle for time, not space. Borges also examined the themes of universal randomness and madness (The Lottery in Babylon) and (The Zahir). Due to the success of the "Forking Paths" story, the term "Borgesian" came to reflect a quality of narrative non-linearity.

Multiculturalism and Argentine literature

Martín Fierro and Argentine tradition

Along with other young Argentine writers of his generation, Borges initially rallied around the fictional character of Martín Fierro. Martín Fierro, a poem by José Hernández, was a dominant work of 19th century Argentine literature. Its eponymous hero became a symbol of Argentine sensibility, untied from European values - a gaucho, free, poor, pampas-dwelling. The character Fierro is illegally drafted to serve at a border fort to defend against the Indians but ultimately deserts to become a gaucho matrero, the Argentine equivalent of a North American western outlaw. Borges contributed keenly to the avant garde Martín Fierro magazine in the early 1920s.

As Borges matured, he came to a more nuanced attitude toward the Hernández poem. In his book of essays on the poem, Borges separates his admiration for the aesthetic virtues of the work from his mixed opinion of the moral virtues of its protagonist. In his essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition" (1951), Borges celebrates how Hernández expresses the Argentine character. In a key scene in the poem, Martín Fierro and El Moreno compete by improvising songs on universal themes such as time, night, and the sea, reflecting the real-world gaucho tradition of payadas, improvised musical dialogues on philosophical themes. Borges points out that, Hernández evidently knew the difference between actual gaucho tradition of composing poetry, versus the "gauchesque" fashion among Buenos Aires literati.

In his works he refutes the arch-nationalist interpreters of the poem, and disdains others as critic Eleuterio Tiscornia, for their Europeanising approach. Borges denies that Argentine literature should distinguish itself by limiting itself to "local colour", which he equates with cultural nationalism. Racine and Shakespeare's work, he says, looked beyond their countries' borders. Neither, he argues, need the literature be bound to the heritage of old world Spanish or European tradition. Nor should it define itself by the conscious rejection of its colonial past. 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 those who have inherited the whole of world literature. Williamson says "Borges's main argument is that the very fact of writing from the margins provides Argentine writers with a special opportunity to innovate without being bound to the canons of the centre, [...] at once a part of and apart from the centre which gives them much potential freedom".

Argentine culture

Borges focused on universal themes, but also composed a substantial body of literature on themes from Argentine folklore and history. Borges's first book, the poetry collection Fervor de Buenos Aires (Passion for Buenos Aires), appeared in 1923. Borges's writings on things Argentine, include 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 national concerns ("Celebration of The Monster", "Hurry, Hurry", "The Mountebank", "Pedro Salvadores"). Ultra-nationalists, however, continued to question 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 (for example, "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, Manuel Isidoro Suárez , was another military hero, whom Borges immortalized in the poem "A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suárez, Victor at Junín." The city of Coronel Suárez in the south of Buenos Aires Province is named after him.

His non-fiction explores many of the themes found in his fiction. Essays such as "The History of the Tango" or his writings on the epic poem Martín Fierro explore Argentine themes, such as the identity of the Argentine people and of various Argentine subcultures. The varying genealogies of characters, settings, and themes in his stories, such as "La muerte y la brújula", used Argentine models without pandering to his readers or framing Argentine culture as 'exotic'. In his essay "El escritor argentino y la tradición", Borges notes that the very absence of camels in the Qur'an was proof enough that it was an Arabian work. He suggested that only someone trying to write an "Arab" work would purposefully include a camel. He uses this example to illustrate how his dialogue with universal existential concerns was just as Argentine as writing about gauchos and tangos.

Multiculturalism

Borges's work maintained a 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. At the time of Argentine independence in 1816, the population was predominantly criollo (of Spanish ancestry). The Argentine Declaration of Independence in 1816 led to waves of immigration from Europe and Asia and in the following decades and the Argentine national identity diversified. Borges therefore was writing in a heavily multicultural and strongly European literary context, and worked immersed in Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature. He also read translations of Near Eastern and Far Eastern works. Borges's writing is also informed by scholarship of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, including prominent religious figures, heretics, and mystics. Religion and heresy are explored in such stories as "Averroes's Search", "The Writing of the God", "The Theologians" and "Three Versions of Judas". The curious inversion of mainstream Christian concepts of redemption in the latter story is characteristic of Borges's approach to theology in his literature.

In describing himself, he said, "I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors." As a young man, he visited the frontier pampas where the boundaries of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil blurred. He lived and studied in Switzerland and Spain as a young student. As Borges matured, he traveled through Argentina as a lecturer and, internationally, as a visiting professor; he continued to tour the world as he grew older, finally settling in Geneva where he had spent some of his youth. Drawing on the influence of many times and places, Borges's work belittled nationalism and racism. Portraits of diverse coexisting cultures characteristic of Argentina are especially pronounced in the book Six Problems for Don Isidoro Parodi (co-authored with Adolfo Bioy Casares) and the story "Death and the Compass", which may or may not be set in Buenos Aires. Borges wrote that he considered Mexican essayist Alfonso Reyes "the best prose-writer in the Spanish language of any time."

Influences

Modernism

Borges lived through most of the 20th century, and was rooted in the Modernism pre-dominant in its early years. He was especially influenced by Symbolism. Like contemporary novelists Vladimir Nabokov and the older James Joyce, he combined an interest in his native culture with broader perspectives. He also shared their multilingualism and their inventiveness with language. However, while Nabokov and Joyce tended toward progressively larger works as they grew older, Borges remained a miniaturist. Borges's work progressed away from what he referred to as "the baroque", while Joyce's and Nabokov's moved towards it: his later style is far more transparent and naturalistic than his earlier works. Borges represented the humanist view of media that stressed the social aspect of art driven by emotion. If art represented the tool, then Borges was more interested in how the tool could be used to relate to people.

Existentialism saw its apogee during the years of Borges's greatest artistic production. It has been argued that his choice of topics largely ignored existentialism's central tenets. Critic Paul de Man notes, "Whatever Borges's existential anxieties may be, they have little in common with Sartre's robustly prosaic view of literature, with the earnestness of Camus' moralism, or with the weighty profundity of German existential thought. Rather, they are the consistent expansion of a purely poetic consciousness to its furthest limits."

Political influences

As a political conservative, Borges "was repulsed by Marxism in theory and practice. Abhorring sentimentality, he rejected the politics and poetics of cultural identity that held sway in Latin America for so long." As a universalist, his interest in world literature reflected an attitude that was also incongruent with the Perónist Populist nationalism. That government's confiscation of Borges's job at the Miguel Cané Library fueled his skepticism of government. He labeled himself a Spencerian anarchist, following his father.

In 1934, extreme Argentine nationalists, sympathetic to the growing Nazi ideology of the time, asserted Borges was secretly Jewish, and by implication, not a full Argentine. Borges responded with the essay "Yo Judío" ("I, a Jew"), a reference to the old "Yo, Argentino" ("I, an Argentine"), a phrase used during nationalistic beatings of Argentine Jews to make it clear to approaching attackers that one was a "true" Argentine, and not a Jew. In the essay he notes, that he would be proud to be a Jew, with a backhanded reminder that any "pure" Castilian might be likely to have Jewish ancestry from a millennium ago.

Mathematics

The essay collection Borges y La Matematica (Borges and Mathematics, 2003) by Argentine mathematician and writer Guillermo Martinez, outlines how Borges used concepts from mathematics in his work. Martínez states that Borges had, for example, at least a superficial knowledge of set theory, which he handles with elegance in stories such as "The Book of Sand". Other books such as The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel by William Goldbloom Bloch (2008) and Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics by Floyd Merrell (1991) also explore this relationship.

Further reading

• Ion Agheana, The Meaning of Experience in the Prose of Jorge Luis Borges, Frankfurt Am Main, P. Lang, 1988, ISBN 0-8204-0595-7.
• Ion Agheana, The Prose of Jorge Luis Borges, Frankfurt Am Main, P. Lang, 1984, ISBN 0-8204-0130-7.
• Edna Aizenberg, The Aleph Weaver: Biblical, Kabbalistic and Judaic Elements in Borges, Potomac, Scripta Humanistica, 1984, ISBN 0-916379-12-4.
• Edna Aizenberg, Borges and His Successors, Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1990, ISBN 0-8262-0712-X.
• Jaime Alazraki, Borges and the Kabbalah, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, ISBN 0-521-30684-1.
• Jaime Alazraki, Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges, Boston, G.K. Hall, 1987, ISBN 0-8161-8829-7.
• Daniel Balderston, Out of Context, Durham, Duke University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-8223-1316-2.
• Willis Barnstone, With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1993, ISBN 0-252-01888-5.
• Gene Bell-Villada, Borges and His Fiction, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1981, ISBN 0-8078-1458-X.
• Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges, City, Destino Ediciones, 2006, ISBN 978-950-732-085-9.
• Harold Bloom, Jorge Luis Borges, New York, Chelsea House Publishers, 1986, ISBN 0-87754-721-1.
• Burgin, Richard (1969) Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges. Holt Rhinehart Winston
• Block De Behar, Borges, the Passion of an Endless Quotation, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2003, ISBN 1-4175-2020-5.
• Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, The Borges Tradition, London, Constable in association with the Anglo-Argentine Society, 1995, ISBN 0-09-473840-8.
• Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, The Lesson of the Master, London, Continuum, 2003, ISBN 0-8264-6110-7.
• Lowell Dunham, The Cardinal Points of Borges, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1971, ISBN 0-8061-0983-1.
• Evelyn Fishburn, Borges and Europe Revisited, City, Univ of London, 2002, ISBN 1-900039-21-4.
• Mark Frisch, You Might Be Able to Get There from Here, Madison, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8386-4044-3.
• Efraín Kristal, Invisible Work, Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-585-40803-3.
• Naomi Lindstrom, Jorge Luis Borges, Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1990, ISBN 0-8057-8327-X.
• Alberto Manguel, With Borges, City, Telegram, 2006, ISBN 978-1-84659-005-4.
• Manovich, Lev, New Media from Borges to HTML, 2003
• George McMurray, Jorge Luis Borges, New York, Ungar, 1980, ISBN 0-8044-2608-2.
• Sylvia Molloy, Signs of Borges, Durham, Duke University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-8223-1406-1.
• Murray, Janet H., Inventing the Medium, 2003
• Humberto Núñez-Faraco, Borges and Dante, Frankfurt Am Main, P. Lang, 2006, ISBN 978-3-03910-511-3.
• Gregary Racz, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) as Writer and Social Critic, Lewiston, Edwin Mellen Press, 2003, ISBN 0-7734-6904-4.
• Monegal Rodríguez, Jorge Luis Borges, New York, Dutton, 1978, ISBN 0-525-13748-3.
• Julio Rodríguez-Luis, The Contemporary Praxis of the Fantastic, New York, Garland, 1991, ISBN 0-8153-0101-4.
• Beatriz Sarlo, Jorge Luis Borges: a Writer on the Edge, London, Verso, 2007, ISBN 978-1-84467-588-3.
• Donald Shaw, Borges' Narrative Strategy, Liverpool, Francis Cairns, 1992, ISBN 0-905205-84-7.
• Martin Stabb, Borges Revisited, Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1991, ISBN 0-8057-8263-X.
• John Sturrock, Paper Tigers, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1977, ISBN 0-19-815746-0.
• Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique, Paris, Seuil, 1970.
• Alfonso Toro, Jorge Luis Borges, Frankfurt Am Main, Vervuert, 1999, ISBN 3-89354-217-5.
• Emil Volek, "Aquiles y la Tortuga: Arte, imaginación y realidad según Borges". In: Cuatro claves para la modernidad. Analisis semiótico de textos hispánicos., Madri, 1984.
• Sergio Waisman, Borges and Translation, Lewisburg Pa., Bucknell University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-8387-5592-5.
• Edwin Williamson, Borges: A Life, New York, Viking, 2004, ISBN 0-670-88579-7.
• Jason Wilson, Jorge Luis Borges, London, Reaktion Books, 2006, ISBN 978-1-86189-286-7.
• Julio Woscoboinik, The Secret of Borges, Washington, University Press of America, 1998, ISBN 0-7618-1238-5.
• Donald Yates, Jorge Luis Borges, Life, Work, and Criticism, Baltimore, York Press, 1985, ISBN 0-919966-47-0.

Documentaries

• Montes-Bradley, Eduardo (Director), Harto The Borges, Patagonia Film Group, US, USA, 1999.
• Willicher, Ricardo, Borges para millones, , Argentina.

External links

• A set of English translations of Borges short stories and poems
• Fundación San Telmo's Jorge Luis Borges Collection. (Spanish)
• The Norton Lectures, delivered at Harvard University in the fall of 1967, by Borges
• An essay from Borgesland by Susana Medina "Hallucinating Spaces"
• Ronald Christ, Jorge Luis Borges, The Art of Fiction No. 39, in Paris Review, Winter-Spring 1967.
• 02/14/08 Interview with Borges at the University of Buenos Aires from Habitus: A Diaspora Journal (in English)
• Jorge Luis Borges at The Modern Word
• BBC Radio 4: In Our Time. Historical Discussion on Borges life and work.
• Borges Center, University of Pittsburgh. Multiple resources and archive. Publishes the journal Variaciones Borges.
• Slate.com revisionist essay by Clive James "Borges' Bad Politics"
• The Friends of Jorge Luis Borges Worldwide Society & Associates