Jorge Borges: Short Stories Jorge Luis Borges

Early life and education

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was born into an educated middle-class family on 24 August 1899.[9] They were in comfortable circumstances but not wealthy enough to live in downtown Buenos Aires, so the family resided in Palermo, then a poorer neighborhood. Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from a traditional Uruguayan family of criollo (Spanish) origin. Her family had been much involved in the European settling of South America and the Argentine War of Independence, and she spoke often of their heroic actions.[10]

His 1929 book Cuaderno San Martín includes the poem "Isidoro Acevedo", commemorating his grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier of the Buenos Aires Army. A descendant of the Argentine lawyer and politician Francisco Narciso de Laprida, Acevedo Laprida fought in the battles of Cepeda in 1859, Pavón in 1861, and Los Corrales in 1880. Acevedo Laprida died of pulmonary congestion in the house where his grandson Jorge Luis Borges was born.

According to a study by Antonio Andrade, Jorge Luis Borges had Portuguese ancestry: Borges's great-grandfather, Francisco, was born in Portugal in 1770, and lived in Torre de Moncorvo, in the north of the country, before he emigrated to Argentina, where he married Cármen Lafinur.

Borges's own father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was a lawyer and wrote the novel El caudillo in 1921. Borges Haslam was born in Entre Ríos of Spanish, Portuguese, and English descent, the son of Francisco Borges Lafinur, a colonel, and Frances Ann Haslam, an Englishwoman. Borges Haslam grew up speaking English at home. The family frequently traveled to Europe. Borges Haslam wedded Leonor Acevedo Suárez in 1898 and their children also included the painter Norah Borges, sister of Jorge Luis Borges.[10]

At age ten, Jorge Luis Borges translated Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince into Spanish. It was published in a local journal, but Borges's friends thought the real author was his father.[11] Borges Haslam was a lawyer and psychology teacher who harboured literary aspirations. Borges said his father "tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt", despite the 1921 opus El caudillo. Jorge Luis Borges wrote, "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."[10]

Jorge Luis Borges was taught at home until the age of 11 and was bilingual in Spanish and English, reading Shakespeare in the latter at the age of twelve.[10] 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."[12]

His father gave up practicing law due to the failing eyesight that would eventually affect his son. In 1914, the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, and spent the next decade in Europe.[10] In Geneva, Borges Haslam was treated by an eye specialist, while his son and daughter attended school. Jorge Luis learned French, read Thomas Carlyle in English, and began to read philosophy in German. In 1917, when he was eighteen, he met writer Maurice Abramowicz and began a literary friendship that lasted for the remainder of his life.[10] He received his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918.[13][Note 2] The Borges family decided that, due to political unrest in Argentina, they would remain in Switzerland during the war. After World War I, the family spent three years living in various cities: Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid.[10] They remained in Europe until 1921.

At that time, Borges discovered the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and Gustav Meyrink's The Golem (1915), which became influential to his work. In Spain, Borges became a member of the avant-garde, anti-Modernismo Ultraist literary movement, inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, close to the Imagists. His first poem, "Hymn to the Sea", written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published in the magazine Grecia.[14] While in Spain, he met such noted Spanish writers as Rafael Cansinos Assens and Ramón Gómez de la Serna.[15]

Early writing career

In 1921, Borges returned with his family to Buenos Aires. He had little formal education, no qualifications and few friends. He wrote to a friend that Buenos Aires was now "overrun by arrivistes, by correct youths lacking any mental equipment, and decorative young ladies".[10] He brought with him the doctrine of Ultraism and launched his career, publishing surreal poems and essays in literary journals. In 1923, Borges first published his poetry, a collection called Fervor de Buenos Aires and contributed to the avant-garde review Martín Fierro.

Borges co-founded the journals Prisma, a broadsheet distributed largely by pasting copies to walls in Buenos Aires, and Proa. Later in life, Borges regretted some of these early publications, attempting to purchase all known copies to ensure their destruction.[16]

By the mid-1930s, he began to explore existential questions and fiction. He worked in a style that Argentine critic Ana María Barrenechea has called "irreality." Many other Latin American writers, such as Juan Rulfo, Juan José Arreola, and Alejo Carpentier, were investigating these themes, influenced by the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. In this vein, Borges biographer Edwin Williamson underlines the danger of inferring an autobiographically inspired basis for the content or tone of certain of his works: books, philosophy, and imagination were as much a source of real inspiration to him as his own lived experience, if not more so.[10]

From the first issue, Borges was a regular contributor to Sur, founded in 1931 by Victoria Ocampo. It was then Argentina's most important literary journal and helped Borges find his fame.[17] Ocampo introduced Borges to Adolfo Bioy Casares, another well-known figure of Argentine literature who was to become a frequent collaborator and close friend. They wrote a number of works together, some under the nom de plume H. Bustos Domecq, including a parody detective series and fantasy stories. During these years, a family friend, Macedonio Fernández, became a major influence on Borges. The two would preside over discussions in cafés, at country retreats, or in Fernandez's tiny apartment in the Balvanera district. He appears by name in Borges's Dialogue about a Dialogue,[18] in which the two discuss the immortality of the soul.

In 1933, Borges gained an editorial appointment at Revista Multicolor de los Sábados (the literary supplement of the Buenos Aires newspaper Crítica), where he first published the pieces collected as Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy) in 1935.[10] The book includes two types of writing: the first lies somewhere between non-fiction essays and short stories, using fictional techniques to tell essentially true stories. The second consists of literary forgeries, which Borges initially passed off as 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 from 1936 to 1939 wrote weekly columns for El Hogar. In 1938, Borges found work as the first assistant at the Miguel Cané Municipal Library. It was in a working-class area[19] and there were so few books that cataloging more than one hundred books per day, he was told, would leave little to do for the other staff and would make them look bad. The task took him about an hour each day and the rest of his time he spent in the basement of the library, writing and translating.[10]

Later career

Borges's father died in 1938, shortly before his 64th birthday. On Christmas Eve that year, Borges had a severe head injury; during treatment, he nearly died of sepsis. While recovering from the accident, Borges began exploring a new style of writing for which he would become famous. His first story written after his accident, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," came out in May 1939. One of his most famous works, "Menard" examines the nature of authorship, as well as the relationship between an author and his historical context. His first collection of short stories, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), appeared in 1941, composed mostly of works previously published in Sur.[10]

The title story concerns a Chinese professor in England, Dr. Yu Tsun, who spies for Germany during World War I, in an attempt to prove to the authorities that an Asian person is able to obtain the information that they seek. A combination of book and maze, it can be read in many ways. Through it, Borges arguably invented the hypertext novel and went on to describe a theory of the universe based upon the structure of such a novel.[20][21]

Composed of stories taking up over sixty pages, the book was generally well received, but El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan failed to garner for him the literary prizes many in his circle expected.[22][23] Victoria Ocampo dedicated a large portion of the July 1942 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 "reparation" project.

With his vision beginning to fade in his early thirties and unable to support himself as a writer, Borges began a new career as a public lecturer.[Note 3][24][25] He became an increasingly public figure, obtaining appointments as president of the Argentine Society of Writers and as professor of English and American Literature at the Argentine Association of English Culture. His short story "Emma Zunz" was made into a film (under the name of Días de odio, Days of Hate, directed in 1954 by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson).[26] Around this time, Borges also began writing screenplays.

In 1955, he became director of the Argentine National Library. By the late 1950s he had become completely blind. Neither the coincidence nor the irony of his blindness as a writer escaped Borges:[10]

His later collection of poetry, Elogio de la Sombra (In Praise of Darkness),[28] develops this theme. In 1956 the University of Cuyo awarded Borges the first of many honorary doctorates and the following year he received the National Prize for Literature.[29] From 1956 to 1970, Borges also held a position as a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires and other temporary appointments at other universities.[29] He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1964.[30] In the fall of 1967 and spring of 1968, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University.[31]

As his eyesight deteriorated, Borges relied increasingly on his mother's help.[29] When he was not able to read and write anymore (he never learned to read Braille), his mother, to whom he had always been close, became his personal secretary.[29] When Perón returned from exile and was re-elected president in 1973, Borges immediately resigned as director of the National Library.[32]

International renown

Eight of Borges's poems appear in the 1943 anthology of Spanish American Poets by H. R. Hays.[33][Note 4] "The Garden of Forking Paths", one of the first Borges stories to be translated into English, appeared in the August 1948 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, translated by Anthony Boucher.[34] Though several other Borges translations appeared in literary magazines and anthologies during the 1950s (and one story appeared in the science fiction magazine Fantastic Universe in 1960),[35] his international fame dates from the early 1960s.[36]

In 1961, Borges received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. While Beckett had garnered a distinguished reputation in Europe and America, Borges had been largely unknown and untranslated in the English-speaking world and the prize stirred great interest in his work. The Italian government named Borges Commendatore and the University of Texas at Austin appointed him for one year to the Tinker Chair. This led to his first lecture tour in the United States. In 1962, two major anthologies of Borges's writings were published in English by New York presses: Ficciones and Labyrinths. In that year, Borges began lecture tours of Europe. Numerous honors were to accumulate over the years such as a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America "for distinguished contribution to the mystery genre" (1976),[37] the Balzan Prize (for Philology, Linguistics and literary Criticism) and the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize (all 1980), as well as the French Legion of Honour (1983) and the Diamond Konex Award for Literature Arts as the most important writer in the last decade in his country.

In 1967, Borges began a five-year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, through whom he became better known in the English-speaking world.[38][39][40] Di Giovanni contended that Borges's popularity was due to his writing with multiple languages in mind and deliberately using Latin words as a bridge from Spanish to English.[41]

Borges continued to publish books, among them El libro de los seres imaginarios (Book of Imaginary Beings, 1967, co-written with Margarita Guerrero),[42] El informe de Brodie (Dr. Brodie's Report, 1970),[43] and El libro de arena (The Book of Sand, 1975[42][43]). He lectured prolifically. Many of these lectures were anthologized in volumes such as Siete noches (Seven Nights)[44] and Nueve ensayos dantescos (Nine Dantesque Essays).[45]

His presence in 1967 on campus at the University of Virginia (UVA) in the U.S. influenced a group of students among whom was Jared Loewenstein, who would later become founder and curator of the Jorge Luis Borges Collection at UVA,[46] one of the largest repositories of documents and manuscripts pertaining to Borges's early works.[47] In 1984, he travelled to Athens, Greece, and later to Rethymnon, Crete, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the School of Philosophy at the University of Crete.[48]

Later personal life

In the mid-1960s, Borges became acquainted with Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis, who was at the time a young Jesuit priest. In 1979, Borges spoke appreciatively and at some length about Bergoglio to the Argentine poet and essayist Roberto Alifano.[49]

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.[50] Thereafter, he lived alone in the small flat he had shared with her, cared for by Fanny, their housekeeper of many decades.[51]

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, in what was then a common practice among Argentines wishing to circumvent the Argentine laws of the time regarding divorce. According to Kodama, Borges drank as a young man, but eventually gave up alcohol as he aged and "felt more secure."[52] On his religious views, Borges declared himself an agnostic, clarifying: "Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen."[53] Borges was taught to read the Bible by his English Protestant grandmother and he prayed the Our Father each night because of a promise he made to his mother. He also died in the presence of a priest.[54]