92 Facts About Luis Borges

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.

On his return to Argentina in 1921, Luis Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals.

Luis Borges dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland.

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was born into an educated middle-class family on 24 August 1899.

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.

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Luis Borges's own father, Jorge Guillermo Luis Borges Haslam, was a lawyer, and wrote the novel El caudillo in 1921.

Luis Borges Haslam was born in Entre Rios of Spanish, Portuguese, and English descent, the son of Francisco Luis Borges Lafinur, a colonel, and Frances Ann Haslam, an Englishwoman.

At age of nine, Jorge Luis Borges translated Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince into Spanish.

Luis Borges Haslam was a lawyer and psychology teacher who harboured literary aspirations.

Luis Borges said his father "tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt", despite the 1921 opus El caudillo.

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.

Luis Borges's father gave up practicing law due to the failing eyesight that would eventually afflict his son.

In Geneva, Luis Borges Haslam was treated by an eye specialist, while his son and daughter attended school.

Jorge Luis Borges learned French, read Thomas Carlyle in English, and began to read philosophy in German.

Luis Borges received his baccalaureat from the College de Geneve in 1918.

The Luis Borges family decided that, due to political unrest in Argentina, they would remain in Switzerland during the war.

At that time, Luis Borges discovered the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and Gustav Meyrink's The Golem which became influential to his work.

In Spain, 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.

Luis Borges had little formal education, no qualifications and few friends.

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".

Luis Borges brought with him the doctrine of Ultraism and launched his career, publishing surreal poems and essays in literary journals.

In 1923, Luis Borges first published his poetry, a collection called Fervor de Buenos Aires and contributed to the avant-garde review Martin Fierro.

Luis Borges co-founded the journals Prisma, a broadsheet distributed largely by pasting copies to walls in Buenos Aires, and Proa.

Later in life, Luis Borges regretted some of these early publications, attempting to purchase all known copies to ensure their destruction.

Luis Borges appears by name in Borges's Dialogue about a Dialogue, in which the two discuss the immortality of the soul.

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In 1933, 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.

The second consists of literary forgeries, which Luis Borges initially passed off as translations of passages from famous but seldom-read works.

In 1938, Luis Borges found work as the first assistant at the Miguel Cane Municipal Library.

Luis Borges's father died in 1938, shortly before his 64th birthday.

On Christmas Eve that year, Luis Borges had a severe head injury; during treatment, he nearly died of sepsis.

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.

From 1956 to 1970, Luis Borges held a position as a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires and other temporary appointments at other universities.

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

In 1961, Luis Borges received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett.

In 1962, two major anthologies of Luis Borges's writings were published in English by New York presses: Ficciones and Labyrinths.

In 1967, 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.

Di Giovanni contended that 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.

Luis Borges continued to publish books, among them El libro de los seres imaginarios, El informe de Brodie, and El libro de arena.

Luis Borges was often accompanied in these travels by his personal assistant Maria Kodama, an Argentine woman of Japanese and German ancestry.

Luis Borges was visited first by Father Pierre Jacquet and by Pastor Edouard de Montmollin.

Luis Borges died of liver cancer on 14 June 1986, aged 86, in Geneva.

Luis Borges's grave, marked by a rough-hewn headstone, is adorned with carvings derived from Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse art and literature.

Kodama rescinded all publishing rights for existing collections of his work in English, including the translations by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in which Luis Borges himself collaborated, and from which di Giovanni would have received an unusually high fifty percent of the royalties.

In 1945, Luis Borges signed a manifesto calling for an end to military rule and the establishment of political liberty and democratic elections.

Luis Borges recurrently declared himself a "Spencerian anarchist who believes in the individual and not in the State" due to his father's influence.

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Luis Borges was enraged that the Communist Party of Argentina opposed these measures and sharply criticized them in lectures and in print.

In later years, Luis Borges frequently expressed contempt for Marxist and Communist authors, poets, and intellectuals.

In 1934, Argentine ultra-nationalists, sympathetic to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, asserted Luis Borges was secretly Jewish, and by implication, not truly Argentinian.

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.

Luis Borges's outrage was fueled by his deep love for German literature.

Luis Borges was disgusted by what he described as Germany's "chaotic descent into darkness" and the attendant rewriting of history.

Luis Borges argued that such books sacrificed the German people's culture, history and integrity in the name of restoring their national honour.

In 1946, 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.

Peron's treatment of Luis Borges became a cause celebre for the Argentine intelligentsia.

Luis Borges, then having depression caused by a failed romance, reluctantly accepted.

Luis Borges later recalled that he would awake every morning and remember that Peron was president and feel deeply depressed and ashamed.

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.

Luis Borges was clearly of tremendous influence, writing intricate poems, short stories, and essays that instantiated concepts of dizzying power.

Luis Borges's longest work of fiction is a fourteen-page story, "The Congress", first published in 1971.

Luis Borges translated works of literature in English, French, German, Old English, and Old Norse into Spanish.

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.

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.

Luis Borges employed the devices of literary forgery and the review of an imaginary work, both forms of modern pseudo-epigrapha.

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.

Luis Borges turned their fictional counterparts into brothers, excluding the possibility of a homosexual relationship.

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Luis Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, something which continually distressed the writer.

Luis Borges was one of several distinguished authors who never received the honour.

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".

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.

Luis Borges told realistic stories of South American life, of folk heroes, streetfighters, soldiers, gauchos, detectives, and historical figures.

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.

Luis Borges examined the themes of universal randomness and madness.

Luis Borges contributed keenly to the avant garde Martin Fierro magazine in the early 1920s.

Luis Borges denies that Argentine literature should distinguish itself by limiting itself to "local colour", which he equates with cultural nationalism.

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.

Luis Borges focused on universal themes, but composed a substantial body of literature on themes from Argentine folklore and history.

Luis Borges had an English paternal grandmother who, around 1870, married the criollo Francisco Luis Borges, a man with a military command and a historic role in the Argentine Civil Wars in what are now Argentina and Uruguay.

Luis Borges's nonfiction explores many of the themes found in his fiction.

Luis Borges suggested that only someone trying to write an "Arab" work would purposefully include a camel.

Luis Borges uses this example to illustrate how his dialogue with universal existential concerns was just as Argentine as writing about gauchos and tangos.

Luis Borges was writing in a strongly European literary context, immersed in Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature.

Luis Borges read translations of Near Eastern and Far Eastern works.

Luis Borges's writing is informed by scholarship of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, including prominent religious figures, heretics, and mystics.

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.

Luis Borges lived and studied in Switzerland and Spain as a young student.

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However, 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.

Luis Borges was rooted in the Modernism predominant in its early years and was influenced by Symbolism.

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.

Luis Borges represented the humanist view of media that stressed the social aspect of art driven by emotion.

Martinez states that 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".

The first time that Luis Borges mentioned Mauthner was in 1928 in his book The language of the Argentines.

Luis Borges was influenced by Spinoza, about whom Borges wrote a famous poem.