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Jorge Luis Borges

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Writers and critics

        Jorge Luis Borges
      Borges in Paris, 1969
   Born August 24, 1899
        Buenos Aires, Argentina
   Died June 14, 1986
        Geneva, Switzerland

   Jorge Luis Borges ( August 24, 1899 – June 14, 1986), was an Argentine
   writer who is considered one of the foremost literary figures of the
   20th century. Best-known in the English speaking world for his short
   stories and fictive essays, Borges was also a poet, critic, translator
   and man of letters.

Life

Youth

   Borges was born in 1899 in Buenos Aires. His father, Jorge Guillermo
   Borges Haslam, was a lawyer and psychology teacher, who also had
   literary aspirations ("he tried to become a writer and failed in the
   attempt", Borges once said. "He composed some very good sonnets").
   Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from an old Uruguayan
   family. His father was part Spanish, part Portuguese, and half British;
   his mother Spanish, and possibly Portuguese. At his home, both Spanish
   and English were spoken and from earliest childhood Borges was
   effectively bilingual. It is said that he was reading Shakespeare, in
   English, at the age of 12. He grew up in the then-distant and not very
   prosperous neighbourhood of Palermo, in a large house with an extensive
   English library.

   Borges's full name was Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo but,
   following Argentine custom, he never used the entire name.

   Jorge Guillermo Borges was forced into early retirement from the legal
   profession owing to the same failing eyesight that would eventually
   afflict his son, and in 1914, the family moved to Geneva, where Borges
   senior was treated by a Geneva eye specialist while Borges and his
   sister Norah (1901-1998) attended school. There Borges learned French,
   which he apparently had initial difficulties with, and taught himself
   German, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève 1918.

   After World War I ended, the Borges family spent three years variously
   in Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid. In Spain, Borges
   became a member of the avant-garde Ultraist literary movement. His
   first poem, "Hymn to the Sea," written in the style of Walt Whitman,
   was published in the magazine Grecia ("Greece", in Spanish). There he
   frequented such notable Spanish writers as Rafael Cansinos Assens and
   Ramón Gómez de la Serna.

Early writing career

   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.

   A major influence during these years was Macedonio Fernández, whose
   friendship he inherited from his father. Macedonio and Borges would
   hold court in cafés, country retreats, or Macedonio's tiny apartment in
   the Balvanera district.

   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.

   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.

Maturity

   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.

   In 1955, and after the initiative of Ocampo, the new anti-Peronist
   military government appointed him head of the National Library. By that
   time, he had become fully blind, like one of his best known
   predecessors, Paul Groussac (for whom Borges wrote an obituary).
   Neither coincidence nor the irony escaped Borges and he commented on
   them in his work:
   Borges at the Hotel Beaux, 1969.
   Enlarge
   Borges at the Hotel Beaux, 1969.

                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 or reproach
                besmirch this declaration
                of the mastery of God
                who, with magnificent irony,
                granted me both the gift of books
                and the night.

   The following year he received the National Prize for Literature and
   the first of many honorary doctorates, this one from the University of
   Cuyo. From 1956 to 1970, Borges also held a position as a professor of
   literature at the University of Buenos Aires, while frequently holding
   temporary appointments at other universities.

   Being unable to read and write (he never learned the Braille system),
   he relied on his mother, with whom he had always been personally close,
   and who began to work with him as his personal secretary.

International recognition

   Borges first appeared in English translation in the August 1948 issue
   of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine; the story was "The Garden of
   Forking Paths," and the translator Anthony Boucher. Some "seven or
   eight" other Borges translations appeared in literary magazines and
   anthologies during the 1950s, but 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 honours 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.

Later personal life

   When Perón returned from exile and was re-elected president in 1973,
   Borges immediately resigned as director of the National Library.

   Borges married recently widowed Elsa Astete Millán in 1967. It was
   believed that his mother, who was 90 years old and anticipated her own
   death, wanted to find someone to care for her blind son. 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 (see
   the book The Lessons of the Master by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni).
   Thereafter, he lived alone in the small flat he had shared with her and
   was cared for by Fanny, their housekeeper of many decades (see the book
   El Señor Borges by “Fanny”).

   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 his
   personal assistant María Kodama, an Argentine woman of Japanese and
   German ancestry.

   Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer in Geneva and is buried in the
   Cimetière des Rois (Plainpalais). A few months before his death, he was
   married by attorney in Paraguay to Maria Kodama. Kodama, as sole
   inheritor, has control of his works, estimated to generate a
   significant annual income. Kodama was denounced by the prestigious
   French editor Gallimard, and by intellectuals such as Beatriz Sarlo, as
   an obstacle to the serious reading of Borges works (see articles in Le
   Nouvel Observateur, diario El País and diario La Nación among other
   international media).

Other work

   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. On several
   occasions, especially early in his career, these mixtures sometimes
   crossed the line into the realm of hoax or literary forgery.

   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 " A 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." [Collected Fictions, p.67]

Borges as Argentine and as world citizen

   Special two-Argentine pesos coin with a Caricature of Borges, 1999
   Enlarge
   Special two- Argentine pesos coin with a Caricature of Borges, 1999

   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 colour", 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,^[ citations needed] 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.^[ citations needed] Due to the
   virtual absence of any discussion of sexuality from his works, some
   commentators^[ citations needed] speculate that he was asexual. Estela
   Canto, who had known Borges since 1944, asserted in Borges a contraluz
   ( 1989) that Borges' attitude to sex was one of "panicked terror".
   According to Canto, Borges' father had arranged a meeting between his
   son and a prostitute, out of a concern that a nineteen-year-old
   Argentine boy should not be a virgin. The trauma of this encounter, in
   which the young Borges failed to perform "as a man", may have planted
   persistent doubts in his mind concerning his sexual orientation.

   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.

International themes in Borges

     * Argentina: Biographer of Evaristo Carriego; earnest reader of
       Leopoldo Lugones, Almafuerte, others; "History of the Tango", "Our
       Poor Individualism", "Horse Cart Inscriptions", "Celebration of the
       Monster", "The South", "The Mountebank"
     * China: " The Garden of Forking Paths", "The Widow Ching, Lady
       Pirate"
     * Czech Republic: Prague setting for "The Secret Miracle" (part of
       Czechoslovakia at the time); strongly influenced by Franz Kafka
       (born in what was at the time Bohemia, Austro-Hungarian empire)
     * France: influenced by Leon Bloy, Victor Hugo; Charles Baudelaire;
       Stephane Mallarmé; Paul Verlaine; Arthur Rimbaud; Paul Valéry; fan
       of/essay about Guillaume Apollinaire; translator of Andre Gide.
     * Germany: Special affinity for Heinrich Heine, influenced by Kurd
       Lasswitz; earnest reader of Fritz Mauthner, Arthur Schopenhauer; "
       Deutsches Requiem", "German Literature in the Age of Bach"
     * India: setting for "Man on the Threshold", "Blue Tigers" and "The
       Approach to Al Mu'tasim"
     * Iran (Persia): "The Masked Dyer Hakim of Merv"; "The Simurgh and
       the Eagle" based on Farid ad-Din Attar; "The Enigma of Edward
       Fitzgerald" who based his most famous work on Omar Khayyam
     * Ireland: Influenced by John Scotus Erigena, Jonathan Swift George
       Bernard Shaw, subjective idealist metaphysicist George Berkeley who
       was also an Irish bishop; translated Oscar Wilde into Spanish;
       reviews of James Joyce; setting of " The Form of the Sword" and
       "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero".
     * Italy: Borges had a special affinity for Dante's The Divine Comedy,
       the subject of Nine Dantesque Essays
     * Japan: "The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kotsuke no Suke"
     * Mexico: "The Writing of the God" (also translated as "The God's
       Script")
     * Spain: Borges makes frequent reference to Don Quixote and to the
       17th century writer Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas. Setting for
       "Averroes' Search"
     * Portugal: scattered references to Eça de Queiroz.
     * United Kingdom: Extensive study of English/Anglo Saxon literature;
       influenced by Samuel Butler, G.K. Chesterton, Thomas de Quincey,
       David Hume, Rudyard Kipling, Herbert Spencer, Robert Louis
       Stevenson, Thomas Carlyle; "Everything and Nothing", "Shakespeare's
       Memory"
     * United States: translator of William Faulkner into Spanish; special
       affinity for Walt Whitman, influenced by/essays about Edgar Allan
       Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne; Mark Twain-inspired "The Dreaded
       Redeemer Lazarus Morel"; many reviews of films, e.g. Citizen Kane
       ("An Overwhelming Film");
     * Scandinavia: setting for "Undr" and "Three Versions of Judas";
       lectures on Norse Sagas; learned Old Norse
     * Uruguay: historical fiction "Avelino Arredondo"

Religious themes in Borges: Mainline, heretical, and mystical

     * Buddhist: "Theme of the Beggar and the King", lecture on Buddhism
       in Seven Nights
     * Christian: Influenced by John Scotus Erigena; "The Mirror of
       Enigmas" partially based on ideas of Léon Bloy; "A History of
       Eternity", "Three Versions of Judas", "The Sect of the Thirty",
       "The Theologians", "The Gospel of Mark", "The Theologian in Death",
       an early work in imitation of Emanuel Swedenborg
     * Gnostic: "A Defense of Basilides the False"
     * Islamic: "Approach to Al Mu'tasim", " Averroes' Search", "Hakim,
       Masked Dyer of Merv", "The Chamber of Statues"; "The Simurgh and
       the Eagle" based on Farid ad-Din Attar; "The Enigma of Edward
       Fitzgerald" who based his most famous work on Omar Khayyam;
       strongly influenced by/studied several translations of The Book of
       One Thousand and One Nights
     * Jewish: "Death and the Compass", "The Golem", "A Defense of the
       Cabala", lectures on Cabala and on Shmuel Agnon
     * Pagan: " The House of Asterion", "The Immortals"
     * Zoroastrian: " The Circular Ruins"
     * Fictional: The heresiarchs of Uqbar in " Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis
       Tertius", "The Sect of the Phoenix"

Quotations

     * "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

     * "I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library."

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