Discover the biography of Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine writer, essayist and poet whose legacy is engraved in our literary DNA.
He was a lawyer. He became the scientists’ favorite writer for his prophetic mind, above all he was an artist of the tale and magical realism he printed on each of his works, such as L’Aleph.
- The great impact of this writer’s work on universal culture makes him a true reference of 20th-century literature.
- Among his many recognitions are the Cervantes Prize for Literature.
- The Commander of arts and letters of France and even the title of Knight of the Order of the British Empire.
The recognition that escaped him was, curiously, the Nobel Prize in Literature. According to comments from his nearest entourage, the motives evoked political problems.
Others said his style was too cultivated and, at the same time, fantastic to give this distinction.
In any case, for this Argentine writer not to have won the Nobel Prize has never been a cause for great concern, he had a style of his own, always incomparable. The news was his favorite genre because, according to him, he did not force the writer to use the “filling”, as happened, for example, with the novel.
The philosophical reflections he presented to us in each of his stories trace a unique and exceptional universe that no other author has yet surpassed.
“My childhood is a memory of the ‘thousand one nights’, ‘Don Quixote’, tales of Wells, the English Bible, Kipling, Stevenson’. J. L. Borges-
Jorge Luis Borges was born in 1899 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, his family had two completely unique spheres: the army and literature; his grandfather, Francisco Borges Lafinur, was a Uruguayan colonel; while his great-grandfather and paternal uncle were poets and composers.
His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was a professor of psychology and, at the same time, had a refined literary taste; Moreover, as Borges himself once said, it was he who revealed the power of poetry and the magical symbolism of the word.
At the same time, what marked his childhood most was precisely his father’s library, in which Borges himself spent much of his childhood.
“If I had to indicate the main event of my life, I would say my father’s library. In fact, I don’t think I ever left this library, is it like you’re still looking at it?Do I still remember the steel engravings of the cameras and Encyclopedia of Britannia?
He was a precocious child. He learned to read and write very quickly, perhaps because of the obvious need to enter the literary universe in which he lived as soon as possible, but outside the walls of this library and the family environment, his childhood was not really easy.
It was this child who was two years ahead of school, it was this student who knew everything, fragile and stuttering, which made him an object of ridicule and ridicule by the other children.
At the beginning of World War I, the Borges family was in Europe, his father had just lost his sight (a disease later inherited by Jorge Luis Borges himself) and was in a clinic for ophthalmological treatment.
The war forced them to travel continuously to Europe, until they settled for a few years in Spain. In 1919, Borges wrote two books: The Red Rhythms and The Cards of Tah-r.
In turn, he came into contact with writers very relevant to his later work, such as Ramón Gumez de la Serna, Valle Inclon and Gerardo Diego.
In 1924 and back in Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges began to create numerous magazines to testify to his ideas, of everything he learned, saw and felt in Europe. His short stories, essays and poems make him one of the youngest and most promising. writers in America.
During this period, his style first sailed through an avant-garde and cosmopolitan air that then moved into a more metaphysical style.
Gradually he refines this fascination with time, space, infinity, life and death that make him a true scholar in these subjects, exactly where the real is combined with the fictional, where the stranger invites the reader to delve into philosophical questions.
Perón’s coming to power in 1946 was not good news for Jorge Luis Borges, his reputation as an anti-preonist and a follower of a more conservative political line has accompanied him forever.
When the 1950s arrived, the Argentine Society of Writers appointed him president, however, he resigned a few years later.
His literary career marked all his obligations. In Paris much of his works were published, such as Death and the Compass, and essays such as Other Inquisitions reached the Argentine public with great success.
His fundamental work, O Aleph, was in its second edition and films were also recorded from some of his short stories, such as Hate Days.
However, in the same decade what he defined as the true contradiction of his destiny occurred: the Peronist government had been defeated after a military coup and Borges was appointed director of the National Library.
By this time, the disease inherited from his father was already manifesting: he was going blind, I could not read or write.
No one backs up or rejects
This statement of mastery
Of God, who with magnificent irony
Did you give me both books and the night?
-Jorge Luis Borges-
Blindness did not prevent him from continuing to work, his family, especially his mother, later his wife, Elsa Astete Mlon, and later his last companion, the Argentine writer María Kodama, played a fundamental role in his literary and reading work.
He continued to publish books such as The Book of Imaginary Beings and The Doer, books by poems such as The Tiger Gold, and even collaborated for years with Harvard University.
His artistic life was intense, rich and very productive regardless of the world of darkness that covered his eyes, and he also applied for retirement as director of the National Library of Buenos Aires in 1973, to whom he had already dedicated almost 20 years of his life. to this job.
Jorge Luis Borges died in 1986 of pancreatic cancer in Geneva, Switzerland.
Was he buried in a cemetery in the same country, under a tombstone with a white cross engraved on the following inscription?And does forhtedon na? (and don’t be afraid) in reference to a 13th-century Norwegian work that appeared in one of your tales: Ulrica.