Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (pronounced BOR-hess; Spanish: [ˈxoɾxe ˈlwis ˈboɾxes]; August 24, 1899 – June 14, 1986) was an Argentine writer, poet, essayist, and translator. He is considered an important figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His most famous works, Ficciones (translated as Fictions) and El Aleph (translated as The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories. These stories explore themes such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers, and mythology. Borges’s writing has influenced philosophical literature, the fantasy genre, and the magical realism movement in 20th-century Latin American literature.
Borges was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 1914, his family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. His family traveled widely in Europe, including Spain. When he returned to Argentina in 1921, he began publishing poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he became director of the National Public Library and a professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. By the age of 55, he was completely blind. Some experts believe his loss of sight helped him create unique symbols in his writing. By the 1960s, his work was translated and published in the United States and Europe. Borges was fluent in several languages.
In 1961, Borges gained international recognition after winning the first International Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. His reputation grew in the 1960s, helped by increasing English translations, the Latin American Boom, and the success of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. His final work, The Conspirators, was dedicated to Geneva, Switzerland. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said, “He changed the way stories are written and opened the path for a generation of Spanish-American novelists.” David Foster Wallace wrote, “Borges is a key figure who connected modernism and post-modernism in world literature. His stories are complex and mysterious, like a game with unknown rules and high stakes.”
Life and career
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, into an educated middle-class family. He was born in Palermo, a poor area of Buenos Aires at the time. Borges’s mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, worked as a translator and came from a family of criollo (Spanish) origin. Her family had a long history of involvement in European settlement in South America and the Argentine War of Independence. She often spoke about the brave actions of her ancestors.
In 1929, Borges published a book called Cuaderno San Martín, which included the poem “Isidoro Acevedo.” This poem honored his grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier in the Buenos Aires Army. Acevedo Laprida was a descendant of Francisco Narciso de Laprida, an Argentine lawyer and politician. He fought in battles such as Cepeda in 1859, Pavón in 1861, and Los Corrales in 1880. Acevedo Laprida died of lung congestion in the house where his grandson, Jorge Luis Borges, was born. A study by Antonio Andrade showed that Borges had Portuguese ancestry. His great-grandfather, Francisco, was born in Portugal in 1770 and lived in Torre de Moncorvo before moving to Argentina, where he married Carmen Lafinur.
Borges’s father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was a lawyer who wrote a novel called El caudillo in 1921. He was born in Entre Ríos and had Spanish, Portuguese, and English heritage. His parents were Francisco Borges Lafinur, a colonel, and Frances Ann Haslam, an Englishwoman. Borges Haslam spoke English at home, and his family often traveled to Europe. He married Leonor Acevedo Suárez in 1898, and their children included Norah Borges, a painter and the sister of Jorge Luis Borges.
At age ten, Jorge Luis Borges translated Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince into Spanish. The translation was published in a local journal, but his friends thought his father was the real author. Borges Haslam was a lawyer and psychology teacher who wanted to write but never completed a book. Borges later said his father “tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt,” despite writing El caudillo in 1921. 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.”
Borges was homeschooled until he was 11 and could read and write in Spanish and English. He read Shakespeare in English by age 12. His family lived in a large house with an English library of over 1,000 books. He later said, “If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library.”
His father gave up practicing law because of poor eyesight, which later affected his son. In 1914, the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, and lived in Europe for the next decade. Borges Haslam received treatment for his eyesight, while his children attended school. Jorge Luis learned French, read Thomas Carlyle in English, and began studying philosophy in German. In 1917, at age 18, he met writer Maurice Abramowicz, and their friendship lasted his entire life. He earned his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family decided to stay in Europe during World War I due to political unrest in Argentina. After the war, they lived in cities such as Lugano, Barcelona, Mallorca, Seville, and Madrid for three years before returning to Argentina in 1921.
In 1921, Borges discovered the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem (1915), which influenced his work. In Spain, he joined the avant-garde, anti-Modernismo Ultraist literary movement, inspired by writers like Guillaume Apollinaire and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. His first poem, “Hymn to the Sea,” written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published in the magazine Grecia. While in Spain, he met other notable Spanish writers, including Rafael Cansinos Assens and Ramón Gómez de la Serna.
In 1921, Borges returned to Buenos Aires with his family. 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.” He brought the ideas of Ultraism with him. In the same year, he wrote in the magazine Nosotros:
“These words were written in the autumn of 1918. Today, after two years of highly varied lyrical experiments carried out by some thirty poets in the Spanish journals Cervantes and Grecia—the latter led by Isaac del Vando-Villar—we can specify and delimit that broad and cautious declaration of the master. In schematic form, the present attitude of Ultraism can be summarized in the following principles:
Ultraist poems thus consist of a series of metaphors, each of which has its own suggestiveness and encapsulates an unprecedented vision of some fragment of life. The fundamental difference between current poetry and ours is as follows: in the former, the lyrical discovery is magnified, expanded, and developed; in the latter, it is briefly noted. And do not believe that such a procedure diminishes emotional force!
In the same article, he concluded by summarizing:
Lyric poetry has so far done nothing but oscillate between the pursuit of auditory or visual effects and the urge to express the personality of its creator. The first of these aims belongs to painting or music, and the second rests on a psychological error, since personality, the self, is merely a broad collective designation encompassing the plurality of states of consciousness. Any new state that is added to the others becomes an essential part of the
Death
During his final days in Geneva, Borges began thinking deeply about the possibility of an afterlife. Even though he was calm about his own death, he started asking Kodama questions about whether she believed more in the Shinto beliefs of her father or the Catholicism of her mother. Kodama said she always saw Borges as an agnostic, just as she was, but because he kept asking, she agreed to call someone more experienced. Borges replied, "You are asking me if I want a priest." He then told her to call two clergymen: a Catholic priest, in memory of his mother, and a Protestant minister, in memory of his English grandmother. He was visited first by Father Pierre Jacquet and by Pastor Edouard de Montmollin.
Borges died from liver cancer on June 14, 1986, at the age of 86, in Geneva. Before his burial, an ecumenical service was held at the Protestant St. Pierre Cathedral on June 18. Many Swiss and Argentine officials attended, and Pastor de Montmollin read the First Chapter of St. John’s Gospel. He then said, "Borges was a man who always searched for the right word, the term that could explain everything." He added that no person can find this word on their own and that the search can lead to confusion. Pastor de Montmollin concluded, "It is not people who find the word, but the Word that comes to them."
Father Jacquet also spoke, saying that when he visited Borges before his death, he found "a man full of love, who received forgiveness for his sins from the Church." After the funeral, Borges was buried in Plainpalais Cimetière des Rois. His grave, marked by a roughly carved headstone, is decorated with carvings inspired by Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse art and literature.
Legacy
María Kodama, who became the owner of Jorge Luis Borges’s works after his death and through two wills, managed his estate. Her strong management of his estate caused a strong disagreement with the French publisher Gallimard about republishing all of Borges’s works in French. Pierre Assouline, writing in Le Nouvel Observateur in August 2006, called Kodama “an obstacle to the sharing of Borges’s works.” Kodama took legal action against Assouline, saying the comment was unfair and damaging to her reputation. She asked for a small payment of one euro as compensation. Kodama also stopped the rights to publish existing English collections of Borges’s work, including translations by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, which Borges had helped create. Di Giovanni would have received a very high fifty percent of the money from sales. Kodama hired new translators, Andrew Hurley, whose translations are now the official English versions. When Kodama died, she left no will, and the future of the Borges estate remains unclear.
Over time, it has become harder to read Borges’s work in the simple way people once did. Many readers believe that every sentence—and even every word—in his stories hides complex messages and ideas that lead to new interpretations and debates. Some of Borges’s stories include ideas from science, not just philosophy. These scientific references have interested many critics, who believe Borges understood these subjects deeply. This interest has grown because popular science books often use Borges’s stories to explain difficult scientific ideas in simple ways.
Many science books mention Borges’s stories. For example, The Library of Babel is used to explain ideas about infinite sets and fractal geometry. The Analytical Language of John Wilkins is referenced in books about neuroscience and linguistics. Funes the Memorious is used to explain number systems. The Book of Sand appears in articles about mixing materials. More recently, in fields like computing and artificial intelligence, some say that The Library of Babel provides a basic idea for how computers handle large amounts of data.
In most cases, Borges’s stories are used as simple examples to help explain technical topics. However, one story stands out: The Garden of Forking Paths. This story, written in 1941, closely matches an idea from a 1957 scientific paper by Hugh Everett III, which later became known as the “Many-worlds interpretation” of quantum physics. Physicist Alberto Rojo studied this connection and said that Borges’s story shows how deeply Borges understood the ideas of his time. Borges’s stories often mix real ideas with imaginary ones, making them useful for exploring scientific thoughts before they become formal theories.
Some modern writers, like Umberto Eco, believe Borges’s stories also predicted the internet. In a 2007 book, Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds, Perla Sassón-Henry compared the internet—like YouTube, blogs, and Wikipedia—with Borges’s stories, which make readers active participants in the story.
Today, many people say that “contact with Tlön has changed this world,” and this idea might be as true as the idea that it created a new one. Tlön means “map” in Icelandic. In Borges’s story, Tlön is a map of a labyrinth that keeps growing and branching. This labyrinth connects to the way Wikipedia works, where people constantly update and change information. Just as Borges wrote, “in a hundred years someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.” Because of the internet, this is not needed—Wikipedia is already being rewritten constantly.
Another idea from Borges, Orbis Tertius (meaning “Third World” in Latin), later became a term used by scientist Karl Popper to describe worlds created by the human mind.
Political opinions
During the 1920s and 1930s, Borges supported Hipólito Yrigoyen and the social democratic Radical Civic Union. In 1945, Borges signed a statement calling for an end to military rule and the creation of political freedom and democratic elections. By the 1960s, he became more doubtful about democracy. At a 1971 conference at Columbia University, a student asked Borges about a writer’s duty to society. Borges answered, “A writer’s duty is to be a writer and to write well. I believe my personal opinions are not important. For example, I consider myself a Conservative and dislike Communists, Nazis, and anti-Semites, but I do not include these views in my writing—except when I was happy about the Six-Day War. I keep my opinions separate from my stories. Everyone knows my views, but my stories and dreams should remain free. I do not want to control them; I write fiction, not fables.” In the 1980s, near the end of his life, Borges again believed in democracy and saw it as Argentina’s only hope. In 1983, Borges praised the election of Raúl Alfonsín from the Radical Civic Union and welcomed the end of military rule, saying, “I once wrote that democracy is the misuse of numbers. On October 30, 1983, Argentine democracy proved me wrong clearly and strongly.”
Borges often said he was a “Spencerian anarchist” who believed in individuals, not the government, because of his father’s influence. In the late 1960s, he described himself as a “mild” supporter of classical liberalism. He also said his dislike for communism and Marxism began in childhood, explaining, “I was taught that individuals should be strong and the government should be weak. I could not support ideas that put the government above the individual.” After President Juan Domingo Perón was removed from power in 1955, Borges supported efforts to remove Peronists from the government and end the welfare state Perón had created. He was angry that the Communist Party of Argentina opposed these actions and criticized them in speeches and writings. His disagreement with the Communist Party caused a lasting argument with his longtime lover, Estela Canto, an Argentine Communist.
In a 1956 interview with El Hogar, Borges said communists “support dictatorships and fight against freedom of thought. They ignore that the main victims of dictatorships are intelligence and culture.” He added, “Many people like dictatorships because they avoid thinking for themselves. The government gives them ready-made ideas, slogans, and even idols to worship or hate based on the government’s orders.”
Later in life, Borges often criticized Marxist and communist writers, poets, and thinkers. In an interview, he called Chilean poet Pablo Neruda “a very fine poet” but “a very mean man” for supporting the Soviet Union and criticizing the United States. He said, “Now he knows that’s nonsense.” He also criticized Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, who was captured and killed during the Spanish Civil War, saying Lorca’s work seemed better when compared to his tragic death.
In 1934, Argentine ultra-nationalists, who supported Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, claimed Borges was secretly Jewish and not truly Argentinian. Borges responded with an essay titled “Yo, Judío” (“I, a Jew”), referencing the phrase “Yo, Argentino” (“I, an Argentine”) used by Jews during attacks to show they were not Jewish. In the essay, Borges said he would be proud to be Jewish and suggested many pure-blooded Castilians had Jewish ancestors from a thousand years ago. Before and during World War II, Borges wrote essays condemning the Nazi regime and its racist ideas. His anger came from his love for German literature. In a 1937 essay, he criticized the Nazi Party for using children’s books to spread antisemitism, writing, “I don’t know if the world can live without German culture, but I know that corrupting it with hatred is a crime.”
In a 1938 essay, Borges reviewed an anthology that changed German authors to fit Nazi ideas. He was horrified by Germany’s “chaotic fall into darkness” and the rewriting of history. He said such books destroyed Germany’s culture, history, and honor in the name of national pride. He called the use of children’s books for propaganda “perfecting the criminal acts of barbarians.” In a 1944 essay, Borges wrote, “Nazism is like a false hell. It is not real, and no one truly wants it to succeed. Hitler is helping his own destruction, like monsters helped Hercules in old stories.”
In 1946, Borges wrote the short story “Deutsches Requiem,” which pretends to be the final words of a Nazi war criminal named Otto Dietrich zur Linde. At a 1971 conference, a student asked Borges about the story. He explained, “When Germany lost the war, I felt joy and relief, but I also saw tragedy. Germany had the best education, literature, and philosophy in Europe, yet its people were tricked by Adolf Hitler.”
In a 1967 interview, Borges said his interactions with Nazi supporters in Argentina inspired the story. He said, “Those who supported Germany did not care about German victories or glory. They liked the idea of the Blitzkrieg, of cities burning, and of destruction. They ignored German soldiers. I wanted to write a story that showed what a real Nazi might be like. I imagined someone who thought violence was good for its own sake. This person would not mind losing the war, because winning or losing is just luck. I did not write this to take sides politically, but to explore what a Nazi might truly be.”
Religion
Throughout his life, Borges did not declare any religion and sometimes described himself as agnostic and other times as atheist. However, his mother, who was a deeply religious Catholic, specifically asked him to do this. Because of this, Borges would recite a Lord's Prayer and a Hail Mary before going to sleep, and on his deathbed he had help from a Catholic priest. In 1978, during an interview with Peruvian journalist César Hildebrandt, Borges said he was certain that God does not exist.
Works
Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort say that Borges "may have been the most important figure in Spanish-language literature since Cervantes. He was clearly very influential, writing complex poems, short stories, and essays that used powerful ideas." Borges's work has been compared to that of Homer and Milton. The critic Harold Bloom lists Borges as one of the important figures in Western literature.
In addition to short stories, for which he is best known, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, screenplays, and literary criticism. He edited many anthologies. His longest fiction work is a fourteen-page story called "The Congress," first published in 1971. His later blindness strongly influenced his writing. Borges once said, "When I think of what I've lost, I ask, 'Who knows themselves better than the blind?' – for every thought becomes a tool." He was deeply interested in mythology, mathematics, and theology, and he included these ideas in his writing, sometimes playfully and sometimes seriously.
Borges wrote poetry throughout his life. As his eyesight worsened (it changed over time due to age and medical advances), he focused more on poetry because he could memorize his work. His poems cover the same wide range of interests as his fiction, along with ideas from his critical works and translations, and personal reflections. For example, his interest in idealism appears in his story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and in his essay "A New Refutation of Time."
Like his contemporary Vladimir Nabokov and the slightly older James Joyce, Borges combined interest in his homeland with broader themes. He also shared their ability to speak many languages and enjoyed playing with words. However, unlike Nabokov and Joyce, who wrote longer works over time, Borges never wrote a novel. When people criticized him for this, he said he preferred short stories, which are an important genre, over novels, which require more words. He believed that shorter stories were often better than longer ones. For example, he said that Franz Kafka's shorter stories were better than his novel The Trial. In the introduction to Ficciones, he wrote that writing very long books was a "laborious and impoverishing folly" because an idea that can be explained in a few minutes does not need to be written over 500 pages.
Borges was a well-known translator. He translated works from English, French, German, Old English, and Old Norse into Spanish. His first published work, at age ten, was a translation of Oscar Wilde's story "The Happy Prince" for a Buenos Aires newspaper. Later in life, he translated part of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda into Spanish. He also translated works by writers such as Ambrose Bierce, William Faulkner, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf. He translated these works while also making small changes to them. Borges wrote and spoke about translation, saying that translations can improve on the original, be unfaithful to it, and that different translations of the same work can be equally valid. He used techniques like literary forgery and writing about imaginary works, both of which are forms of modern pseudo-epigrapha.
Borges's recorded work includes readings of his poems, a collaboration with Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, and a series of lectures on many different topics, such as Buddhism and the nature of poetry.
AMB Discografica – 123 – 1
Universidad Nacional Autonoma De Mexico – VVAL-13, UNAM-113/114
Borges's most famous literary forgeries came from his early work as a translator and literary critic, when he wrote a regular column for the Argentine magazine El Hogar. Alongside translating many works, he also published original stories that he claimed were translations of books he had found. For example, he wrote pieces in the style of Emanuel Swedenborg or One Thousand and One Nights, pretending they were translations. In another case, he added three short, falsely attributed stories to his anthology El matrero. Some of these stories are collected in A Universal History of Infamy. Borges helped popularize the idea of writing about imaginary works, but he got the idea from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a book that reviews a non-existent German work and its author. In This Craft of Verse, Borges said he discovered Sartor Resartus in 1916 in Geneva and was deeply moved by it.
In the introduction to his first published fiction collection, The Garden of Forking Paths, Borges wrote, "It is a difficult and unproductive madness to write very long books, spending 500 pages to explain an idea that can be said in five minutes. A better way is to pretend those books already exist and write a summary or commentary about them." He then mentioned Sartor Resartus and The Fair Haven by Samuel Butler, but said those works had a flaw because they were books themselves, not summaries. He chose to write notes about imaginary books instead. Some works were wrongly credited to Borges, such as the poem "Instantes."
Borges changed his writing style from regionalist criollismo to a more global style, which caused criticism from journals like Contorno, a leftist publication influenced by Sartre. In post-Peronist Argentina of the early 1960s, Contorno was popular among young people who questioned older writers like Borges and argued that their focus on experimentation ignored real societal problems. They said that magic realism and exploring universal truths came at the cost of responsibility and seriousness. Contorno writers acknowledged Borges and Eduardo Mallea as "doctors of technique" but said their work lacked substance because they did not engage with the reality they lived in, a critique of their refusal to embrace existence and reality in their art.
Sex and women are two topics that appear rarely in Borges's fiction. Sexual activity
Fact, fantasy and non-linearity
Many of Borges's most famous stories explore themes such as 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," and "The Garden of Forking Paths"). Williamson wrote, "His main idea was that fiction does not need to seem real; what is most important is an author's ability to create 'poetic faith' in the reader."
His stories often include imaginary or unusual themes, such as a library containing every possible 410-page book ("The Library of Babel"), a man who never forgets what he experiences ("Funes, the Memorious"), an object that lets the user see everything in the universe ("The Aleph"), and a man who is given a year of still time before a firing squad ("The Secret Miracle"). Borges also wrote realistic stories about South American life, including tales about folk heroes, street fighters, soldiers, gauchos, detectives, and historical figures. He combined real events with imaginary ones. His interest in blending fantasy, philosophy, and translation is shown in articles like "The Translators of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights." In The Book of Imaginary Beings, a detailed collection of mythical creatures, Borges wrote, "There is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way knowledge." Borges shared an interest in fantasy with Bioy Casares, with whom he coauthored several story collections between 1942 and 1967.
Early in his career, the mix of real and imaginary elements sometimes crossed into the category of hoaxes or fake writings. "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941) describes a concept of time that splits into many different paths, each with its own outcome. Borges often used the image of a labyrinth that folds back on itself to show how choices lead to different results. He believed that humans searching for meaning in an endless universe might not find it, instead using labyrinths as symbols for time, not space. He also explored themes like randomness ("The Lottery in Babylon") and madness ("The Zahir"). Because of the popularity of "The Garden of Forking Paths," the term "Borgesian" came to describe stories that are not told in a straight line.
John Clute wrote: "Like Franz Kafka, whose work Borges translated as La Metamorfosis (1938), Borges had such a strong influence on 20th-century literature that many science fiction stories written in English since about 1960 may unconsciously or intentionally reflect his work. Any science fiction story that questions the nature of reality or uses symbols like labyrinths, mirrors, libraries, maps, books, or dreams will likely draw from ideas Borges explored in his short stories." Clute also noted that Borges had knowledge of science fiction writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, and Ray Bradbury, and that writers like Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gene Wolfe were directly influenced by him.
William Gibson described reading "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in Labyrinths as a young man: "If the idea of software had existed then, I might have felt like I was installing something that greatly increased what would later be called bandwidth, though I still don’t know exactly what that bandwidth was. This story, which shows how imaginary information can slowly take over the everyday world, opened something in me that has never closed. Works we remember reading for the first time are important life events, but Labyrinths was especially meaningful to me. That afternoon, I realized that I was no longer afraid of the influence that might exist in a desk once owned by Francis Marion."
The term "Borgesian conundrum" refers to a philosophical question about whether a writer creates a story or the story creates the writer. Borges introduced this idea in his essay "Kafka and His Precursors." After reviewing works that came before Kafka’s, Borges wrote: "If I am not mistaken, the pieces I have listed resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, they do not all resemble each other. The second fact is more important. Each of these texts has some of Kafka’s style, but if Kafka had never written anything, we would not notice this style. In other words, it would not exist. A poem by Robert Browning called 'Fears and Scruples' seems to predict Kafka’s work, but our understanding of Kafka changes how we read the poem. Browning did not read it the way we do now. The word 'precursor' is important in criticism, but it should not suggest competition. The truth is that every writer creates their own precursors. Their work changes how we see the past, just as it will change how we see the future."
Culture and Argentine literature
Jorge Luis Borges, along with other young Argentine writers of his time, was influenced by the character of Martín Fierro, a poem written by José Hernández. This poem was an important work in 19th-century Argentine literature. The hero of the poem, Martín Fierro, became a symbol of Argentine identity, representing a gaucho (a type of cowboy in Argentina) who lived freely on the pampas (grasslands) and rejected European values. In the story, Fierro is forced to serve in the military to protect a border from indigenous people but later escapes to become a gaucho matrero, similar to a western outlaw in North America. Borges helped write for the innovative Martín Fierro magazine in the early 1920s.
As Borges grew older, he developed a more thoughtful view of Hernández’s poem. In his book of essays about the poem, Borges praised its artistic qualities but noted that he had mixed feelings about the moral choices of the main character. In his 1951 essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition," Borges celebrated how Hernández captured the spirit of Argentina. A key part of the poem shows Martín Fierro and El Moreno competing by creating songs about universal themes like time, night, and the sea. This reflects the real-life tradition of payadas, which are improvised musical dialogues about deep ideas. Borges pointed out that Hernández understood the difference between real gaucho poetry and the "gauchesque" style used by writers in Buenos Aires.
Borges disagreed with people who saw the poem as a tool for extreme nationalism. He also criticized critics like Eleuterio Tiscornia for promoting European ideas in Argentine literature. Borges believed Argentine writers should not limit themselves to "local color," which he compared to cultural nationalism. He argued that great works, like those by Racine and Shakespeare, looked beyond their own countries. He said Argentine literature should not be tied to old Spanish or European traditions, nor should it reject its colonial past. Borges believed Argentine writers should be free to create new ideas, writing about Argentina and the world from the perspective of those who have studied global literature.
Williamson wrote that Borges’s main argument was that writing from the margins of the world gives Argentine writers a chance to be creative without being limited by traditional ideas. Borges focused on universal themes but also wrote about Argentine folklore and history. His first book, a poetry collection called Fervor de Buenos Aires (Passion for Buenos Aires), was published in 1923. His works about Argentina include topics like tango music, horse wagons, folklore, and the lives of famous Argentinians. Some people questioned Borges’s connection to Argentina, but his interest in Argentine themes was partly inspired by his family background.
Borges’s paternal grandmother was English, and she married Francisco Borges, a criollo (a person of Spanish descent in Argentina) who had a military role in the Argentine Civil Wars in what are now Argentina and Uruguay. Borges often used these wars as settings in his stories and poems. His maternal great-grandfather, Manuel Isidoro Suárez, was a military hero, and Borges honored him in a poem. His nonfiction works explore themes similar to those in his stories, such as the identity of the Argentine people. Borges’s stories often used Argentine models without making them seem exotic or overly focused on local culture.
In fact, the places in Borges’s stories do not always match real locations in Argentina. In his essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition," Borges noted that the absence of camels in the Qur’an proved it was an Arabian work, even though camels are mentioned in the Qur’an. He argued that only someone trying to write an "Arab" story would include camels. He used this example to show that his focus on universal ideas was just as Argentine as writing about gauchos or tango. Borges did not like football.
At the time of Argentina’s independence in 18
Influences
Jorge Luis Borges was influenced by a style called Modernism that was popular early on. He was also affected by Symbolism, a movement that focused on using symbols to express ideas. Like writers Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce, Borges was interested in his own culture but also explored ideas from other parts of the world. He knew many languages and used them creatively in his writing. However, while Nabokov and Joyce wrote longer works, Borges focused on shorter, more detailed stories. Over time, his writing became simpler and more realistic compared to his earlier, more complex style. Borges believed that art should connect people through emotions and that the tools of art, like language, were important for sharing human experiences.
During the time Borges was most active as a writer, a philosophical movement called Existentialism was at its peak. Some people argue that Borges did not focus on the main ideas of Existentialism in his work. A critic named Paul de Man said that Borges' concerns were different from those of other Existentialist thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Instead of focusing on practical or moral questions, Borges explored ideas that were more poetic and imaginative.
A book called Borges y la Matemática by Guillermo Martínez explains how Borges used mathematical ideas in his writing. For example, Borges had some knowledge of set theory, a branch of mathematics, and used it in stories like "The Book of Sand." Other books, such as The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel and Unthinking Thinking, also discuss how mathematics influenced Borges' work.
Borges had a unique relationship with philosophy. His writing and essays include many references to philosophical ideas, and he influenced important thinkers like Michel Foucault, Ilya Prigogine, Richard Rorty, Umberto Eco, and Fernando Savater. Though he was not a philosopher himself, he read philosophy extensively. Borges often presented philosophical ideas in a way that made them feel vivid and imaginative before explaining them clearly. He used stories to show how philosophical systems shape the way people see the world. For example, in his story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Borges describes a world where people believe reality is created by the mind, which reflects the idea of philosophical idealism. This approach helps readers understand complex ideas through experience rather than logic.
Borges valued beauty in his writing more than truth. He said he focused on the artistic and magical aspects of religious and philosophical ideas rather than their logical details. This focus on beauty might explain why his work seems to mix different philosophical ideas. He also believed that philosophy was not always useful, saying that over time, even the best ideas become just parts of history.
A philosopher named Fritz Mauthner, who wrote a book called Dictionary of Philosophy, had a strong influence on Borges. Borges acknowledged Mauthner's impact, and the book was one of the five most important to him. Borges first mentioned Mauthner in 1928 to explain why it was impossible to organize ideas by similarity. Later, he often praised Mauthner for his humor and deep knowledge.
Borges explored the topic of language in many of his works. The influence of Mauthner is clearly seen in eight of his short stories, as noted by Silvia G. Dapía.
In an interview, Denis Dutton asked Borges which philosophers most influenced his work. Borges named George Berkeley and Arthur Schopenhauer. He was also inspired by Baruch Spinoza, about whom he wrote a famous poem. Borges once humorously said, "I always imagined Paradise to be some kind of a library."
Awards, distinctions, and tributes
He received important awards and honors from universities and governments in many countries. In 1961, he shared the Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett, given by the International Publishers' Congress. This prize helped start his fame around the world. In the 1960s, he was named a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government and received an honorary title from the British Empire called Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE). In 1971, he won the Jerusalem Prize, and in 1980, he was awarded the Miguel de Cervantes Prize. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages and used in movies and TV shows.
Even though his work was widely respected and recognized globally, he never won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was nominated many times, but some people believe he was not chosen after he accepted an award from the military government led by Augusto Pinochet in Chile.