Jorge Luis Borges

Early life and education Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges was born into an educated middle-class family on 24 August 1899. They lived in Palermo, a then-poor area of Buenos Aires. Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, worked as a translator and came from a 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. 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." 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. 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, Mallorca, Seville, and Madrid. While in Spain, he met such noted 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. 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". In the same article, he concluded by summarizing: Then Borges launched his career publishing surreal poems and essays in literary journals. In 1923, he 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. 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. 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, 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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). Around this time, Borges also began writing screenplays. The American novelist William Faulkner was already a well-known writer in the Spanish-speaking world when Borges translated his novel The Wild Palms in 1940. Borges was a great admirer of Faulkner, but it is likely that his choice to translate a lesser novel was born out of opportunity and need. The novel had been published in the US in 1939, and Borges may have needed the money such work would bring. Nevertheless, his translation formed an indelible bridge between contemporary Latin American literature and the writer of the southern United States. Borges's intuitive understanding of and ability to render Faulkner's style was an important influence on a later generation of writers such as Juan Rulfo, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. In 1955, Borges 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: His later collection of poetry, Elogio de la Sombra (In Praise of Darkness), 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. 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. In the fall of 1967 and spring of 1968, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. As his eyesight deteriorated, Borges relied increasingly on his mother's help. In 1976, Borges attended a lunch with the military dictator Jorge Rafael Videla alongside fellow writer Ernesto Sábato and priest Leonardo Castellani, on which occasion he thanked Videla for "saving the country from ignominy" with his March 1976 coup d'état. International renown Eight of Borges's poems appear in the 1943 anthology of Spanish American Poets by H. R. Hays. "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. Though several other Borges translations appeared in literary magazines and anthologies during the 1950s (and one story appeared in the fantasy and science fiction magazine Fantastic Universe'' in 1960), his international fame dates from the early 1960s. 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), 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. , Paris, 1969 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. 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. Borges continued to publish books, among them El libro de los seres imaginarios (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 and Nueve ensayos dantescos (Nine Dantesque Essays''). His presence in 1967 on campus at the University of Virginia (UVA) in the U.S. mirrored William Faulkner's tenure there ten years earlier as UVa's first writer-in-residence and 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, one of the largest repositories of documents and manuscripts pertaining to Borges's early works. 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. Later personal life at the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair 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. 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. Thereafter, he lived alone in the small flat he had shared with her, cared for by Fanny, their housekeeper of many decades. 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." 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." 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. ==Death==

, Plainpalais, Geneva During his final days in Geneva, Borges began brooding about the possibility of an afterlife. Although calm and collected about his own death, Borges began probing Kodama as to whether she inclined more towards the Shinto beliefs of her father or the Catholicism of her mother. Kodama "had always regarded Borges as an Agnostic, as she was herself", but given the insistence of his questioning, she offered to call someone more "qualified". Borges responded, "You are asking me if I want a priest." He then instructed 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 of liver cancer on 14 June 1986, aged 86, in Geneva. His burial was preceded by an ecumenical service at the Protestant St. Pierre Cathedral on 18 June. With many Swiss and Argentine dignitaries present, Pastor de Montmollin read the First Chapter of St John's Gospel. He then preached that "Borges was a man who had unceasingly searched for the right word, the term that could sum up the whole, the final meaning of things." He said, however, that no man can reach that word through his own efforts and in trying becomes lost in a labyrinth. Pastor de Montmollin concluded, "It is not man who discovers the word, it is the Word that comes to him." Father Jacquet also preached, saying that, when visiting Borges before his death, he had found "a man full of love, who received from the Church the forgiveness of his sins". After the funeral, Borges was laid to rest in Plainpalais Cimetière des Rois. His grave, marked by a rough-hewn headstone, is adorned with carvings derived from Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse art and literature. ==Legacy==

María Kodama, his widow and heir on the basis of the marriage and two wills, gained control over his works. Her assertive administration of his estate resulted in a bitter dispute with the French publisher Gallimard regarding the republication of the complete works of Borges in French, with Pierre Assouline in Le Nouvel Observateur (August 2006) calling her "an obstacle to the dissemination of the works of Borges". Kodama took legal action against Assouline, considering the remark unjustified and defamatory, asking for a symbolic compensation of one euro. Kodama also rescinded all publishing rights for existing collections of his work in English, including the translations by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in which Borges himself had collaborated, and from which di Giovanni would have received an unusually high fifty percent of the royalties. Kodama commissioned new translations by Andrew Hurley, which have become the official translations in English. At the time of her death, Kodama left no will and the status of the Borges estate is in limbo. Science, technology, and communications Over time, it has become increasingly difficult to be a reader of Borges "in the naïve sense of the word". Many believe they can find in every sentence—and even in every word of his stories—the most sophisticated and intricate messages and subtexts, which become the subject of new interpretations and counter-interpretations. It is interesting to note that among the ideas that underpin Borges's fantasies, alongside philosophical or pseudo-philosophical doctrines, there are also references to certain scientific ideas. These latter have greatly enthused some critics, who have sought to identify in them significant scientific anticipations and thus attribute to Borges a profound understanding of such subjects. This enthusiasm has been further encouraged by numerous references in popular science texts, for which Borges's stories provide effective and accessible illustrations of ideas that might otherwise appear extremely abstract and incomprehensible to a non-specialist audience. Numerous popular science texts cite Borges's stories. For example, The Library of Babel is cited to illustrate the paradoxes of infinite sets and fractal geometry, references to the fantastic taxonomy of Dr. Franz Kuhn in The Analytical Language of John Wilkins (a favorite among neuroscientists and linguists), invocations of Funes the Memorious to represent numeral systems, and even a citation of The Book of Sand in an article on the segregation of granular mixtures. More recently, in the fields of computing and generative artificial intelligence, it has been suggested that probabilistic computation and the processing of large volumes of data find a conceptual precursor in the combinatorial structure of The Library of Babel. In all these cases, references to Borges's stories are no more than metaphorical examples that enliven otherwise opaque technical explanations. However, a notable exception is The Garden of Forking Paths, in which Borges unwittingly (he could not have known it) proposes a solution to a still unresolved problem in quantum physics. The Garden, published in 1941, anticipates in an almost literal way the doctoral thesis of Hugh Everett III, published in 1957 under the title Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics, which Bryce DeWitt would later popularize as the Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Physicist Alberto Rojo has analyzed this striking correspondence and concluded that the similarity between the texts of Borges and Everett III shows the extraordinary way in which Borges's mind was immersed in the cultural fabric of the 20th century, within a complex network whose underlying components branch beyond the classificatory limits of each discipline. The structure of reasoned fiction in Borges's stories, which sometimes resemble theorems with fantastical hypotheses, is capable of distilling ideas in formation that, before becoming theories, make a stop in literature. Thus, just as the ideas of Everett and DeWitt can be read as science fiction, in The Garden of Forking Paths, fiction can be read as science. Many now believe that "contact with and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world", and perhaps this is as true as the idea that it has constructed another—rhizomatic and labyrinthine. Tlön means "map" in Icelandic, and Tlön is indeed an encyclopedic map of a labyrinth originating in Uqbar (meaning "deviating from the path"), a labyrinth that grows and constantly branches, whose ideal objects or hrönir (meaning in Icelandic "heaps of matter that change through external action") vary and succeed one another in wiki technology (in Hawaiian, "quickly"), forming a computational Tlön, a dynamic repository of collective human memory through the consensus of Wikipedians. As in Borges's story, "if our foresight is not mistaken, in a hundred years someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön." Of course, due to its digital medium, such a wait is unnecessary. Wikipedia is already being rewritten, constantly, at this very moment. Equally enigmatic and prophetic is the reference to Orbis Tertius (Third World, in Latin), a term ("World 3") that many years later would be used by the philosopher of science Karl Popper to designate worlds constructed by the human mind. ==Political opinions==

During the 1920s and 1930s, Borges was a vocal supporter of Hipólito Yrigoyen and the social democratic Radical Civic Union. In 1945, Borges signed a manifesto calling for an end to military rule and the establishment of political liberty and democratic elections. By the 1960s, he had grown more skeptical of democracy. During a 1971 conference at Columbia University, a creative writing student asked Borges what he regarded as "a writer's duty to his time". Borges replied, "I think a writer's duty is to be a writer, and if he can be a good writer, he is doing his duty. Besides, I think of my own opinions as being superficial. For example, I am a Conservative, I hate the Communists, I hate the Nazis, I hate the anti-Semites, and so on; but I don't allow these opinions to find their way into my writings—except, of course, when I was greatly elated about the Six-Day War. Generally speaking, I think of keeping them in watertight compartments. Everybody knows my opinions, but as for my dreams and my stories, they should be allowed their full freedom, I think. I don't want to intrude into them, I'm writing fiction, not fables." In the 1980s, towards the end of his life, Borges regained his earlier faith in democracy and held it out as the only hope for Argentina. Anti-communism Borges recurrently declared himself a "Spencerian anarchist who believes in the individual and not in the State" due to his father's influence. In an interview with Richard Burgin during the late 1960s, Borges described himself as a "mild" adherent of classical liberalism. He further recalled that his opposition to communism and to Marxism was absorbed in his childhood, stating: "Well, I have been brought up to think that the individual should be strong and the State should be weak. I couldn't be enthusiastic about theories where the State is more important than the individual." After the overthrow via coup d'état of President Juan Domingo Perón in 1955, Borges supported efforts to purge Argentina's Government of Peronists and dismantle the former President's welfare state. He was enraged that the Communist Party of Argentina opposed these measures and sharply criticized them in lectures and in print. Borges's opposition to the Party in this matter ultimately led to a permanent rift with his longtime lover, Argentine Communist Estela Canto. In a 1956 interview given to El Hogar, Borges stated that communists "are in favor of totalitarian regimes and systematically combat freedom of thought, oblivious of the fact that the principal victims of dictatorships are, precisely, intelligence and culture." He elaborated: "Many people are in favor of dictatorships because they allow them to avoid thinking for themselves. Everything is presented to them ready-made. There are even agencies of the State that supply them with opinions, passwords, slogans, and even idols to exalt or cast down according to the prevailing wind or in keeping with the directives of the thinking heads of the single party." In later years, Borges frequently expressed contempt for Marxist and communist authors, poets, and intellectuals. In an interview with Burgin, Borges referred to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda as "a very fine poet" but a "very mean man" for unconditionally supporting the Soviet Union and demonizing the United States. Borges commented about Neruda, "Now he knows that's rubbish." In the same interview, Borges also criticized famed poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who was abducted by Nationalist soldiers and executed without trial during the Spanish Civil War. In Borges's opinion, Lorca's poetry and plays, when examined against his tragic death, appeared better than they actually were. Anti-fascism In 1934, Argentine ultra-nationalists, sympathetic to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, asserted Borges was secretly Jewish and by implication not truly Argentinian. Borges responded with the essay "Yo, Judío" ("I, a Jew"), a reference to the old phrase "Yo, Argentino" ("I, an Argentine") uttered by potential victims during pogroms against Argentine Jews to signify one was not Jewish. In the essay, Borges declares he would be proud to be a Jew, and remarks that any pure Castilian is likely to come from ancient Jewish descent, from a millennium ago. In a 1938 essay, Borges reviewed an anthology which rewrote German authors of the past to fit the Nazi party line. He was disgusted by what he described as Germany's "chaotic descent into darkness" and the attendant rewriting of history. He argued that such books sacrificed the German people's culture, history and integrity in the name of restoring their national honour. Such use of children's books for propaganda he writes, "perfect the criminal arts of barbarians." In a 1944 essay, Borges postulated, In 1946, Borges published the short story "Deutsches Requiem", which masquerades as the last testament of a condemned Nazi war criminal named Otto Dietrich zur Linde. In a 1971 conference at Columbia University, Borges was asked about the story by a student from the creative writing program. He recalled, "When the Germans were defeated I felt great joy and relief, but at the same time I thought of the German defeat as being somehow tragic, because here we have perhaps the most educated people in Europe, who have a fine literature, a fine tradition of philosophy and poetry. Yet these people were bamboozled by a madman named Adolf Hitler, and I think there is tragedy there." In a 1967 interview with Burgin, Borges recalled how his interactions with Argentina's Nazi sympathisers led him to create the story. He recalled, "And then I realized that those people that were on the side of Germany, that they never thought of German victories or the German glory. What they really liked was the idea of the Blitzkrieg, of London being on fire, of the country being destroyed. As to the German fighters, they took no stock in them. Then I thought, well now Germany has lost, now America has saved us from this nightmare, but since nobody can doubt on which side I stood, I'll see what can be done from a literary point of view in favor of the Nazis. And then I created the ideal Nazi." At Columbia University in 1971, Borges further elaborated on the story's creation, "I tried to imagine what a real Nazi might be like. I mean someone who thought of violence as being praiseworthy for its own sake. Then I thought that this archetype of the Nazis wouldn't mind being defeated; after all, defeats and victories are mere matters of chance. He would still be glad of the fact, even if the Americans and British won the war. Naturally, when I am with Nazis, I find they are not my idea of what a Nazi is, but this wasn't meant to be a political tract. It was meant to stand for the fact that there was something tragic in the fate of a real Nazi. Except that I wonder if a real Nazi ever existed. At least, when I went to Germany, I never met one. They were all feeling sorry for themselves and wanted me to feel sorry for them as well." Anti-Peronism In 1946, Argentine President Juan Perón began transforming Argentina into a one-party state with the assistance of his wife, Evita. Almost immediately, the spoils system was the rule of the day, as ideological critics of the ruling Partido Justicialista were fired from government jobs. During this period, Borges was informed that he was being "promoted" from his position at the Miguel Cané Library to a post as inspector of poultry and rabbits at the Buenos Aires municipal market. Upon demanding to know the reason, Borges was told, "Well, you were on the side of the Allies, what do you expect?" Borges resigned the following day. Perón's treatment of Borges became a cause célèbre for the Argentine intelligentsia. The Argentine Society of Writers ( (SADE)) held a formal dinner in his honour. At the dinner, a speech was read which Borges had written for the occasion. It said: In the aftermath, Borges found himself much in demand as a lecturer and one of the intellectual leaders of the Argentine opposition. In 1951 he was asked by anti-Peronist friends to run for president of SADE. Borges, then having depression caused by a failed romance, reluctantly accepted. He later recalled that he would awake every morning and remember that Perón was president and feel deeply depressed and ashamed. Perón's government had seized control of the Argentine mass media and regarded SADE with indifference. Borges later recalled, however, "Many distinguished men of letters did not dare set foot inside its doors." Meanwhile, SADE became an increasing refuge for critics of the Perón government. SADE official Luisa Mercedes Levinson noted, "We would gather every week to tell the latest jokes about the ruling couple and even dared to sing the songs of the French Resistance, as well as 'La Marseillaise'". After Evita Perón's death on 26 July 1952, Borges received a visit from two policemen, who ordered him to put up two portraits of the ruling couple on the premises of SADE. Borges indignantly refused, calling it a ridiculous demand. The policemen replied that he would soon face the consequences. The Justicialist Party placed Borges under 24-hour surveillance and sent policemen to sit in on his lectures; in September they ordered SADE to be permanently closed down. Like much of the Argentine opposition to Perón, SADE had become marginalized due to persecution by the State, and very few active members remained. According to Edwin Williamson, On 16 September 1955, General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu's Revolución Libertadora toppled the ruling party and forced Perón into exile. Borges was overjoyed and joined demonstrators marching through the streets of Buenos Aires. According to Williamson, Borges shouted, "Viva la Patria", until his voice grew hoarse. Due to the influence of Borges's mother and his own role on the opposition to Peron, the provisional government appointed Borges as the Director of the National Library. In his essay ''L'Illusion Comique'', Borges wrote there were two histories of Peronism in Argentina. The first he described as "the criminal one", composed of the police state tactics used against both real and imagined anti-Peronists. The second history was, according to Borges, "the theatrical one" composed of "tales and fables made for consumption by dolts." He argued that, despite their claims to detest capitalism, Juan and Eva Perón "copied its methods, dictating names and slogans to the people" in the same way that multi-national corporations "impose their razor blades, cigarettes, and washing machines." Borges then listed the numerous conspiracy theories the ruling couple dictated to their followers and how those theories were accepted without question. Borges concluded: In a 1967 interview, Borges said, "Perón was a humbug, and he knew it, and everybody knew it. But Perón could be very cruel. I mean, he had people tortured, killed. And his wife was a common prostitute." When Perón returned from exile in 1973 and regained the Presidency, Borges was enraged. In a 1975 interview for National Geographic, he said "Damn, the snobs are back in the saddle. If their posters and slogans again defile the city, I'll be glad I've lost my sight. Well, they can't humiliate me as they did before my books sold well." After being accused of being unforgiving, Borges quipped, "I resented Perón's making Argentina look ridiculous to the world ... as in 1951, when he announced control over thermonuclear fusion, which still hasn't happened anywhere but in the sun and the stars. For a time, Argentines hesitated to wear band aids for fear friends would ask, 'Did the atomic bomb go off in your hand?' A shame, because Argentina really has world-class scientists." In 1985, he wrote a short poem about the Falklands War called Juan López y John Ward, about two fictional soldiers (one from each side), who died in the Falklands, in which he refers to "islands that were too famous". He also said about the war: "The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb." Borges was an observer at the trials of the military junta in 1985 and wrote that "not to judge and condemn the crimes would be to encourage impunity and to become, somehow, its accomplice." ==Religion==

Throughout his life, Borges did not profess any religion and at times described himself as agnostic and at others as atheist. However, at the express request of his mother—a devout Catholic—Borges would recite a Lord's Prayer and a Hail Mary before going to sleep, and on his deathbed he received the assistance of a Catholic priest. In 1978, in an interview with Peruvian journalist César Hildebrandt, Borges stated that he was certain that God does not exist. ==Works==

Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort argue that Borges "may have been the most important figure in Spanish-language literature since Cervantes. He was clearly of tremendous influence, writing intricate poems, short stories, and essays that instantiated concepts of dizzying power." Borges's work has been compared to that of Homer and Milton. Indeed, the critic Harold Bloom numbers Borges among the key figures of the Western literary canon. In addition to short stories, for which he is most noted, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, screenplays, and literary criticism, and edited numerous anthologies. His longest work of fiction is a fourteen-page story, "The Congress", first published in 1971. Paramount among his intellectual interests were elements of mythology, mathematics, theology, integrating these through literature, sometimes playfully, sometimes with great seriousness. Borges composed poetry throughout his life. As his eyesight waned (it came and went, with a struggle between advancing age and advances in eye surgery), he increasingly focused on writing poetry, since he could memorize an entire work in progress. His poems embrace the same wide range of interests as his fiction, along with issues that emerge in his critical works and translations, and from more personal musings. For example, his interest in idealism runs through his work, reflected in the fictional world of Tlön in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and in his essay "A New Refutation of Time". Short stories Like his contemporary Vladimir Nabokov and the slightly older James Joyce, Borges combined an interest in his homeland with much broader concerns. He also shared their multilingualism and their delight in playing with language; however, unlike Nabokov and Joyce, who over time turned to writing longer works, Borges never wrote a novel. To those who reproached him for this omission, Borges replied that his preference lay with the short story, which is an essential genre, and not with the novel, which requires padding. Among authors who attempted both genres, he generally preferred their short stories. Of Franz Kafka, for example, he stated that his shorter narratives were better than The Trial. In the prologue to Ficciones, he wrote that it was a "laborious and impoverishing folly to compose vast books; to set out over 500 pages an idea whose perfect oral exposition can be given in a few minutes". Translations by Borges Borges was a notable translator. He translated works of literature in English, French, German, Old English, and Old Norse into Spanish. His first publication, for a Buenos Aires newspaper, was a translation of Oscar Wilde's story "The Happy Prince" into Spanish when he was ten. André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf. Borges wrote and lectured extensively on the art of translation, holding that a translation may improve upon the original, may even be unfaithful to it, and that alternative and potentially contradictory renderings of the same work can be equally valid. Borges employed the devices of literary forgery and the review of an imaginary work, both forms of modern pseudo-epigrapha. Discography Borges's recorded work includes readings of his poems, a collaboration with Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, and a series of lectures on a characteristically wide range of topics, from Buddhism to the nature of poetry. Music • El Tango (1965) with Astor Piazzolla Polydor – 20291 Poetry • Por El Mismo Sus Poemas Y Su Voz (1967) AMB Discografica – 123 – 1 • Jorge Luis Borges (1968) Universidad Nacional Autonoma De Mexico – VVAL-13, UNAM-113/114 Lectures and other works • La Divina Comedia (1978) Microfon – SUP 955 • ¿Qué Es La Poesía? (1978) Microfon – SUP 959 • El Budismo (1978) Microfon – SUP 958 • La Cabala (1978) Microfon – SUP 960 • El Libro De Las Mil Y Una Noches (1978) Microfon – SUP 957 • Borges Para Millones. Banda Original De Sonido De La Pelicula (1978) with Luis Maria Serra EMI – 8569/70 Hoaxes and forgeries Borges's best-known set of literary forgeries date from his early work as a translator and literary critic with a regular column in the Argentine magazine El Hogar. Along with publishing numerous legitimate translations, he also published original works, for example, in the style of Emanuel Swedenborg 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." On the other hand, some works were wrongly attributed to Borges, like the poem "Instantes". Criticism of Borges's work Borges's change in style from regionalist criollismo to a more cosmopolitan style brought him much criticism from journals such as Contorno, a leftist, Sartre-influenced Argentine publication founded by David Viñas and his brother, along with other intellectuals such as Noé Jitrik and Adolfo Prieto. In the post-Peronist Argentina of the early 1960s, Contorno met with wide approval from the youth who challenged the authenticity of older writers such as Borges and questioned their legacy of experimentation. Magic realism and exploration of universal truths, they argued, had come at the cost of responsibility and seriousness in the face of society's problems. The Contorno writers acknowledged Borges and Eduardo Mallea for being "doctors of technique" but argued that their work lacked substance due to their lack of interaction with the reality that they inhabited, an existentialist critique of their refusal to embrace existence and reality in their artwork. The story "The Sect of the Phoenix" is famously interpreted to allude to the ubiquity of sexual intercourse among humans – a concept whose essential qualities the narrator of the story is not able to relate to. For example, scenes of sexual acts are almost entirely absent from Borges's writings (the sexual encounter in the short story Emma Zunz with an anonymous sailor is the most notable exception, and even then it is narrated elliptically); the most veiled suggestion of erotic activity is limited to a few stories. With a few notable exceptions, women are almost entirely absent from Borges's fiction. The fictional world created by Borges is one in which women, when they appear, seem to exist as secondary objects whose purpose is to provide men with opportunities for sex. Sex and women are used primarily as bargaining elements in relationships between men, never for procreation or pleasure. The protagonist of the story "El muerto" also lusts after the "splendid, contemptuous, red-haired woman" of Azevedo Bandeira and later "sleeps with the woman with shining hair". "Emma Zunz" is a story with an eminent female protagonist. Originally published in 1948, this work tells the tale of a young Jewish woman who kills a man in order to avenge the disgrace and suicide of her father. She carefully plans the crime, submitting to an unpleasant sexual encounter with a stranger in order to create the appearance of sexual impropriety in her intended victim. Despite the fact that she premeditates and executes a murder, the eponymous heroine of this story is surprisingly likable, both because of intrinsic qualities in the character (interestingly enough, she believes in nonviolence) and because the story is narrated from a "remote but sympathetic" point of view that highlights the poignancy of her situation. Nobel Prize omission Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, something which continually distressed the writer. He was one of several distinguished authors who never received the honour. Borges commented, "Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition; since I was born they have not been granting it to me." This view was indeed expressed by Nobel committee member Artur Lundkvist, who in 1979 wrote that Borges's "hasty political gestures, now with fascist tendencies, make him in my view an improper Nobel laureate, for ethical and humane reasons." Borges was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature over thirty times, and was among the short-listed candidates several times. In 1965 he was considered along with Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Neruda, and Mikhail Sholokhov, and in 1966 a shared prize to Borges and Miguel Ángel Asturias was proposed. Borges was nominated again in 1967, and was among the final three choices considered by the committee according to Nobel records unsealed on the 50th anniversary in 2017. The committee considered Borges, Graham Greene and Miguel Ángel Asturias, choosing Asturias as the winner. ==Fact, fantasy and non-linearity==

Many of Borges's best-known stories deal with themes of time ("The Secret Miracle"), infinity ("The Aleph"), mirrors ("Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius") and labyrinths ("The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths", "The House of Asterion", "The Immortal", and "The Garden of Forking Paths"). Williamson writes, "His basic contention was that fiction did not depend on the illusion of reality; what mattered ultimately was an author's ability to generate 'poetic faith' in his reader." Borges's interest in fantasy was shared by Bioy Casares, with whom he coauthored several collections of tales between 1942 and 1967. Often, especially early in his career, the mixture of fact and fantasy crossed the line into the realm of hoax or literary forgery. "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941) presents the idea of forking paths through networks of time, none of which is the same, all of which are equal. Borges uses the recurring image of "a labyrinth that folds back upon itself in infinite regression" so we "become aware of all the possible choices we might make." The forking paths have branches to represent these choices that ultimately lead to different endings. Borges saw man's search for meaning in a seemingly infinite universe as fruitless and instead uses the maze as a riddle for time, not space. Borges and science fiction John Clute writes: "as was earlier the case with Franz Kafka, a collection of whose work he translated as La Metamorfosis (coll. 1938), Borges's influence on twentieth century literature worldwide has been so deep and pervasive that any [science fiction] written in English since about 1960 may consciously or subliminally reflect his work. Any [science fiction] story whose structure or arguments question or play with the nature of reality – or which makes fantastic use of images of the Labyrinth, the Mirror, the Library, the Map, and/or the Book and/or the Dream to inform the world – will necessarily navigate seas of imagination he has already plumbed, apodictically, in ten or twenty short stories." Clute notes that Borges "revealed a first-hand (if at points inaccurate) knowledge of [science fiction] and its authors, including H. P. Lovecraft, Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt and Ray Bradbury" and cites Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut and Gene Wolfe as being directly influenced by Borges. William Gibson recalls "the sensation, both complex and eerily simple", of reading "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in Labyrinths as a young man, seated at a writing desk said to have belonged to Francis Marion: Had the concept of software been available to me, I imagine I would have felt as though I were installing something that exponentially increased what one day would be called bandwidth, though bandwidth of what, exactly, I remain unable to say. This sublime and cosmically comic fable of utterly pure information (i.e. the utterly fictive) gradually and relentlessly infiltrating and eventually consuming the quotidian, opened something within me which has never yet closed ... Works we all our lives recall reading for the first time are among the truest milestones, but Labyrinths was a profoundly singular one, for me, and I believe I knew that, then, in my early adolescence. It was demonstrated to me, that afternoon. Proven. For, by the time I had finished with "Tlön" (though one never finishes with Tlön, nor indeed any story by Borges) and had traversed "The Garden of Forking Paths" and had wondered, literally bug-eyed, at "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", I discovered that I had ceased to be afraid of any influence that might dwell within Francis Marion's towering desk." Borgesian conundrum The philosophical term "Borgesian conundrum" is named after him and has been defined as the ontological question of "whether the writer writes the story, or it writes him." The original concept was put forward by Borges in his essay "Kafka and His Precursors". After reviewing works that were written before those of Kafka, Borges wrote: ==Culture and Argentine literature==

Martín Fierro and Argentine tradition Along with other young Argentine writers of his generation, Borges initially rallied around the fictional character of Martín Fierro. Martín Fierro, a poem by José Hernández, was a dominant work of 19th-century Argentine literature. Its eponymous hero became a symbol of Argentine sensibility, untied from European values – a gaucho, free, poor, pampas-dwelling. As Borges matured, he came to a more nuanced attitude toward the Hernández poem. In his book of essays on the poem, Borges separates his admiration for the aesthetic virtues of the work from his mixed opinion of the moral virtues of its protagonist. In his essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition" (1951), Borges celebrates how Hernández expresses the Argentine character. In a key scene in the poem, Martín Fierro and El Moreno compete by improvising songs on universal themes such as time, night, and the sea, reflecting the real-world gaucho tradition of payadas, improvised musical dialogues on philosophical themes. Borges points out that Hernández evidently knew the difference between actual gaucho tradition of composing poetry versus the "gauchesque" fashion among Buenos Aires literati. In his works he refutes the arch-nationalist interpreters of the poem and disdains others, such as critic Eleuterio Tiscornia, for their Europeanising approach. Borges denies that Argentine literature should distinguish itself by limiting itself to "local colour", which he equates with cultural nationalism. Spurred by pride in his family's heritage, Borges often used those civil wars as settings in fiction and quasi-fiction (for example, "The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz", "The Dead Man", "Avelino Arredondo") as well as poetry ("General Quiroga Rides to His Death in a Carriage"). Borges's maternal great-grandfather, Manuel Isidoro Suárez, was another military hero, whom Borges immortalized in the poem "A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suárez, Victor at Junín". His nonfiction explores many of the themes found in his fiction. Essays such as "The History of the Tango" or his writings on the epic poem "Martín Fierro" explore Argentine themes, such as the identity of the Argentine people and of various Argentine subcultures. The varying genealogies of characters, settings, and themes in his stories, such as "La muerte y la brújula" ("Death and the Compass"), used Argentine models without pandering to his readers or framing Argentine culture as "exotic". In his essay "El escritor argentino y la tradición", Borges notes that the very absence of camels in the Qur'an was proof enough that it was an Arabian work, despite the fact that camels are mentioned in the Qur'an. He suggested that only someone trying to write an "Arab" work would purposefully include a camel. He uses this example to illustrate how his dialogue with universal existential concerns was just as Argentine as writing about gauchos and tangos. Borges detested football. Multicultural influences At the time of the Argentine Declaration of Independence in 1816, the population was predominantly criollo (of Spanish ancestry). From the mid-1850s on, waves of immigration from Europe, especially Italy and Spain, arrived in the country, and in the following decades the Argentine national identity diversified. Borges was writing in a strongly European literary context, immersed in Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature. He also read translations of Near Eastern and Far Eastern works. Borges's writing is also informed by scholarship of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, including prominent religious figures, heretics, and mystics. Religion and heresy are explored in such stories as "Averroes's Search", "The Writing of the God", "The Theologians", and "Three Versions of Judas". The curious inversion of mainstream Christian concepts of redemption in the last story is characteristic of Borges's approach to theology in his literature. In describing himself, Borges said, "I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors." As a young man, he visited the frontier pampas which extend beyond Argentina into Uruguay and Brazil. Borges said that his father wished him "to become a citizen of the world, a great cosmopolitan," in the way of Henry and William James. Borges lived and studied in Switzerland and Spain as a young student. As Borges matured, he traveled through Argentina as a lecturer and, internationally, as a visiting professor; he continued to tour the world as he grew older, finally settling in Geneva, where he had spent some of his youth. Drawing on the influence of many times and places, Borges's work belittled nationalism and racism. Portraits of diverse coexisting cultures characteristic of Argentina are especially pronounced in the book Six Problems for don Isidoro Parodi (co-authored with Bioy Casares) and Death and the Compass. Borges wrote that he considered Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes to be "the best prose-writer in the Spanish language of any time." Borges was also an admirer of Asian culture, e.g. the ancient Chinese board game of Go, about which he penned some verses, while "The Garden of Forking Paths" had a strong Chinese theme. ==Influences==

Modernism Borges was rooted in the Modernism predominant in its early years and was influenced by Symbolism. Like Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce, he combined an interest in his native culture with broader perspectives, also sharing their multilingualism and inventiveness with language. However, while Nabokov and Joyce tended toward progressively larger works, Borges remained a miniaturist. His work progressed away from what he referred to as "the baroque": his later style is far more transparent and naturalistic than his earlier works. Borges represented the humanist view of media that stressed the social aspect of art driven by emotion. If art represented the tool, then Borges was more interested in how the tool could be used to relate to people. Mathematics The essay collection Borges y la Matemática (Borges and Mathematics, 2003) by Argentine mathematician and writer Guillermo Martínez outlines how Borges used concepts from mathematics in his work. Martínez states that Borges had, for example, at least a superficial knowledge of set theory, which he handles with elegance in stories such as "The Book of Sand". Other books such as ''The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel by William Goldbloom Bloch (2008) and Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics'' by Floyd Merrell (1991) also explore this relationship. Philosophy Borges maintained a highly original relationship with philosophy. Evidence of this can be found in the countless philosophical references present in both his essays and fiction, as well as in his influence on important contemporary philosophers and thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Ilya Prigogine, Richard Rorty, Umberto Eco and Fernando Savater. Although not strictly a philosopher, Borges was nevertheless an avid reader of philosophy. One of the distinctive features of his approach is that philosophical ideas in his texts appear in such a way that readers experience them before conceptualizing them. Borges selects certain ideas and represents them in literary form, emphasizing what is vivid and marvelous about them, appealing to the reader's intuition rather than to conceptual or argumentative understanding. Ideas presented in this way are grasped in their full expressive force. To achieve this effect, one of his methods consists of adopting the premises of a given philosophical system and recreating the universe as its adherents perceive it. For example, in his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Borges illustrates philosophical idealism by presenting a world—Tlön—whose inhabitants conceive reality as a product of the mind. According to Nicolás Zavadivker, Borges does not speak about idealism in that story, but rather directly presents a world constructed according to idealist premises. In this way, he generates an understanding of these ideas from within the system itself, from its possibilities and its limits. He suggests, for example, that there are no nouns in the languages of Tlön, for the simple reason that its inhabitants do not believe that there are things to which such words could refer, as idealism maintains. This emphasis by Borges on the most marvelous consequences of philosophical perspectives is linked to his explicit preference for beauty over truth. Thus, Borges stated that he found in his work a consistent tendency to "value religious or philosophical ideas for their aesthetic worth and even for what they contain of the singular and the marvelous". His aestheticism may be one of the keys to the apparent adherence of Borges to contradictory philosophies, which has generated debate regarding his own philosophical position. He also repeatedly emphasized his skepticism regarding the possibilities of philosophy: "There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless. A philosophical doctrine is at first a plausible description of the universe; with the passing of years it becomes a mere chapter—or even a paragraph or a name—in the history of philosophy". Fritz Mauthner, philosopher of language and author of the Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Dictionary of Philosophy), had an important influence on Borges. Borges always recognized the influence of this German philosopher. According to the literary review Sur, the book was one of the five books most noted and read by Borges. The first time that Borges mentioned Mauthner was in 1928 in his book The language of the Argentines (El idioma de los argentinos) to justify the impossibility of ordering ideas by affinity (psychological classification). Subsequently, he referred to him in various journals and writings as one of his favorite authors. In a 1962 interview Borges described Mauthner as possessing a fine sense of humor as well as great knowledge and erudition. Borges addressed the subject of language in several of his works from different perspectives. The direct influence of Mauthner is evident in eight short stories, as noted by Silvia G. Dapía. In an interview, Denis Dutton asked Borges who were the "philosophers who have influenced your works, in whom you've been the most interested". In reply, Borges named Berkeley and Schopenhauer. He was also influenced by Spinoza, about whom Borges wrote a famous poem. It is not without humour that Borges once wrote: "" ("I always imagined Paradise to be some kind of a library.") == Awards, distinctions, and tributes ==

; sculpture by Federico Brook He received important awards and distinctions from various universities and governments in different countries. In 1961 he shared the Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett, awarded by the International Publishers' Congress, which marked the beginning of his reputation throughout the Western world. In the 1960s he received the rank of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government and was appointed an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE); and in 1980 was awarded the Miguel de Cervantes Prize. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages and adapted for film and television. Despite his enormous intellectual prestige and the universal recognition of his work, he was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, despite being nominated for many consecutive years. It has been speculated that he was excluded from receiving the prize after accepting an award from the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. == Notes ==