Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, as well as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature.
102 Facts About Jorge Luis Borges
2.
On his return to Argentina in 1921, Jorge Luis Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals.
3.
Jorge Luis Borges worked as a librarian and public lecturer.
4.
Jorge Luis Borges became completely blind by the age of 55.
5.
Jorge Luis Borges dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland.
6.
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was born into an educated middle-class family on 24 August 1899.
7.
Jorge Luis Borges's 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.
8.
Borges's own father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was a lawyer, and wrote the novel El caudillo in 1921.
9.
Jorge Luis Borges Haslam was born in Entre Rios of Spanish, Portuguese, and English descent, the son of Francisco Jorge Luis Borges Lafinur, a colonel, and Frances Ann Haslam, an Englishwoman.
10.
Aged ten, Jorge Luis Borges translated Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince into Spanish.
11.
Jorge Luis Borges Haslam was a lawyer and psychology teacher who harboured literary aspirations.
12.
Jorge Luis Borges said his father "tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt", despite the 1921 opus El caudillo.
13.
Jorge Luis Borges was taught at home until the age of 11, was bilingual in Spanish and English, reading Shakespeare in the latter at the age of twelve.
14.
Jorge Luis Borges's father gave up practicing law due to the failing eyesight that would eventually afflict his son.
15.
In Geneva, Jorge Luis Borges Haslam was treated by an eye specialist, while his son and daughter attended school.
16.
Jorge Luis learned French, read Thomas Carlyle in English, and began to read philosophy in German.
17.
Jorge Luis Borges received his baccalaureat from the College de Geneve in 1918.
18.
The Jorge Luis Borges family decided that, due to political unrest in Argentina, they would remain in Switzerland during the war.
19.
At that time, Jorge Luis Borges discovered the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and Gustav Meyrink's The Golem which became influential to his work.
20.
In Spain, Jorge Luis Borges fell in with and became a member of the avant-garde, anti-Modernismo Ultraist literary movement, inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, close to the Imagists.
21.
In 1921, Jorge Luis Borges returned with his family to Buenos Aires.
22.
Jorge Luis Borges had little formal education, no qualifications and few friends.
23.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote to a friend that Buenos Aires was now "overrun by arrivistes, by correct youths lacking any mental equipment, and decorative young ladies".
24.
Jorge Luis Borges brought with him the doctrine of Ultraism and launched his career, publishing surreal poems and essays in literary journals.
25.
In 1923, Jorge Luis Borges first published his poetry, a collection called Fervor de Buenos Aires and contributed to the avant-garde review Martin Fierro.
26.
Jorge Luis Borges co-founded the journals Prisma, a broadsheet distributed largely by pasting copies to walls in Buenos Aires, and Proa.
27.
Later in life, Jorge Luis Borges regretted some of these early publications, attempting to purchase all known copies to ensure their destruction.
28.
Jorge Luis Borges appears by name in Borges's Dialogue about a Dialogue, in which the two discuss the immortality of the soul.
29.
In 1933, Jorge Luis Borges gained an editorial appointment at Revista Multicolor de los Sabados, where he first published the pieces collected as Historia universal de la infamia in 1935.
30.
The second consists of literary forgeries, which Jorge Luis Borges initially passed off as translations of passages from famous but seldom-read works.
31.
In 1938, Jorge Luis Borges found work as the first assistant at the Miguel Cane Municipal Library.
32.
Jorge Luis Borges's father died in 1938, shortly before his 64th birthday.
33.
On Christmas Eve that year, Jorge Luis Borges had a severe head injury; during treatment, he nearly died of sepsis.
34.
Jorge Luis Borges 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.
35.
From 1956 to 1970, Jorge Luis Borges held a position as a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires and other temporary appointments at other universities.
36.
Jorge Luis Borges was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1964.
37.
When Peron returned from exile and was re-elected president in 1973, Jorge Luis Borges immediately resigned as director of the National Library.
38.
In 1961, Jorge Luis Borges received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett.
39.
In 1962, two major anthologies of Jorge Luis Borges's writings were published in English by New York presses: Ficciones and Labyrinths.
40.
In 1967, Jorge Luis 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.
41.
Di Giovanni contended that Jorge Luis 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.
42.
Jorge Luis Borges continued to publish books, among them El libro de los seres imaginarios, El informe de Brodie, and El libro de arena.
43.
In 1967, Jorge Luis Borges married the recently widowed Elsa Astete Millan.
44.
Jorge Luis Borges was often accompanied in these travels by his personal assistant Maria Kodama, an Argentine woman of Japanese and German ancestry.
45.
Jorge Luis Borges died in the presence of a priest.
46.
Jorge Luis Borges was visited first by Father Pierre Jacquet and by Pastor Edouard de Montmollin.
47.
Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer on 14 June 1986, aged 86, in Geneva.
48.
Jorge Luis Borges's grave, marked by a rough-hewn headstone, is adorned with carvings derived from Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse art and literature.
49.
Kodama rescinded all publishing rights for existing collections of his work in English, including the translations by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in which Jorge Luis Borges himself collaborated, and from which di Giovanni would have received an unusually high fifty percent of the royalties.
50.
In 1945, Jorge Luis Borges signed a manifesto calling for an end to military rule and the establishment of political liberty and democratic elections.
51.
Jorge Luis Borges recurrently declared himself a "Spencerian anarchist who believes in the individual and not in the State" due to his father's influence.
52.
Jorge Luis Borges was enraged that the Communist Party of Argentina opposed these measures and sharply criticized them in lectures and in print.
53.
In later years, Jorge Luis Borges frequently expressed contempt for Marxist and Communist authors, poets, and intellectuals.
54.
In 1934, Argentine ultra-nationalists, sympathetic to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, asserted Jorge Luis Borges was secretly Jewish, and by implication, not truly Argentinian.
55.
Jorge Luis Borges responded with the essay "Yo, Judio", a reference to the old phrase "Yo, Argentino" uttered by potential victims during pogroms against Argentine Jews, to signify one was not Jewish.
56.
Jorge Luis Borges's outrage was fueled by his deep love for German literature.
57.
Jorge Luis Borges was disgusted by what he described as Germany's "chaotic descent into darkness" and the attendant rewriting of history.
58.
Jorge Luis Borges argued that such books sacrificed the German people's culture, history and integrity in the name of restoring their national honour.
59.
In 1946, Jorge Luis Borges published the short story "Deutsches Requiem", which masquerades as the last testament of a condemned Nazi war criminal named Otto Dietrich zur Linde.
60.
Peron's treatment of Jorge Luis Borges became a cause celebre for the Argentine intelligentsia.
61.
At the dinner, a speech was read which Jorge Luis Borges had written for the occasion.
62.
Jorge Luis Borges, then having depression caused by a failed romance, reluctantly accepted.
63.
Jorge Luis Borges later recalled that he would awake every morning and remember that Peron was president and feel deeply depressed and ashamed.
64.
Jorge Luis Borges had agreed to stand for the presidency of the SADE in order [to] fight for intellectual freedom, but he wanted to avenge the humiliation he believed he had suffered in 1946, when the Peronists had proposed to make him an inspector of chickens.
65.
In protest against their support of the regime, Jorge Luis Borges ceased publishing in the newspaper La Nacion.
66.
Jorge Luis Borges believed that indigenous peoples in what is called Argentina had no traditions:.
67.
Jorge Luis Borges was clearly of tremendous influence, writing intricate poems, short stories, and essays that instantiated concepts of dizzying power.
68.
Jorge Luis Borges's longest work of fiction is a fourteen-page story, "The Congress", first published in 1971.
69.
Jorge Luis Borges translated works of literature in English, French, German, Old English, and Old Norse into Spanish.
70.
Jorge Luis Borges's first publication, for a Buenos Aires newspaper, was a translation of Oscar Wilde's story "The Happy Prince" into Spanish when he was nine.
71.
Jorge Luis Borges translated the works of, among others, Ambrose Bierce, William Faulkner, Andre Gide, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf.
72.
Jorge Luis Borges employed the devices of literary forgery and the review of an imaginary work, both forms of modern pseudo-epigrapha.
73.
Jorge Luis 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.
74.
Jorge Luis Borges turned their fictional counterparts into brothers, excluding the possibility of a homosexual relationship.
75.
Jorge Luis Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, something which continually distressed the writer.
76.
Jorge Luis Borges was one of several distinguished authors who never received the honour.
77.
Jorge Luis 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".
78.
Jorge Luis 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.
79.
Jorge Luis Borges told realistic stories of South American life, of folk heroes, streetfighters, soldiers, gauchos, detectives, and historical figures.
80.
Jorge Luis 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.
81.
Jorge Luis Borges examined the themes of universal randomness and madness.
82.
Jorge Luis Borges contributed keenly to the avant garde Martin Fierro magazine in the early 1920s.
83.
Jorge Luis Borges denies that Argentine literature should distinguish itself by limiting itself to "local colour", which he equates with cultural nationalism.
84.
Jorge Luis Borges asserts that Argentine writers need to be free to define Argentine literature anew, writing about Argentina and the world from the point of view of those who have inherited the whole of world literature.
85.
Jorge Luis Borges focused on universal themes, but composed a substantial body of literature on themes from Argentine folklore and history.
86.
Jorge Luis Borges had an English paternal grandmother who, around 1870, married the criollo Francisco Jorge Luis Borges, a man with a military command and a historic role in the Argentine Civil Wars in what are now Argentina and Uruguay.
87.
Jorge Luis Borges's nonfiction explores many of the themes found in his fiction.
88.
Jorge Luis Borges suggested that only someone trying to write an "Arab" work would purposefully include a camel.
89.
Jorge Luis Borges uses this example to illustrate how his dialogue with universal existential concerns was just as Argentine as writing about gauchos and tangos.
90.
Jorge Luis Borges was writing in a strongly European literary context, immersed in Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature.
91.
Jorge Luis Borges read translations of Near Eastern and Far Eastern works.
92.
Jorge Luis Borges's writing is informed by scholarship of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, including prominent religious figures, heretics, and mystics.
93.
Jorge Luis 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.
94.
Jorge Luis Borges lived and studied in Switzerland and Spain as a young student.
95.
However, Jorge Luis Borges scorned his own Basque ancestry and criticised the abolition of slavery in America because he believed black people were happier remaining uneducated and without freedom.
96.
Jorge Luis Borges was rooted in the Modernism predominant in its early years and was influenced by Symbolism.
97.
However, while Nabokov and Joyce tended toward progressively larger works, Jorge Luis Borges remained a miniaturist.
98.
Jorge Luis Borges's work progressed away from what he referred to as "the baroque": his later style is far more transparent and naturalistic than his earlier works.
99.
Jorge Luis Borges represented the humanist view of media that stressed the social aspect of art driven by emotion.
100.
Martinez states that Jorge Luis 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".
101.
The first time that Jorge Luis Borges mentioned Mauthner was in 1928 in his book The language of the Argentines.
102.
Jorge Luis Borges was influenced by Spinoza, about whom Borges wrote a famous poem.