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Jorge Luis Borges

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Jorge Luis Borges (Buenos Aires August 24, 1899 - Geneva June 14, 1986) was an Argentinian writer, known primarily for his short stories; he also wrote poetry and a considerable amount of literary criticism. Some consider him one of the founders of the Latin-American school of Magic Realism. He is considered, together with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, another Magic Realist, to be one of the foremost South American writers of fiction of the 20th century. His blindness (which, like his father's, developed in adulthood) strongly influenced his later writing.

His fiction is profoundly learned, and always concise. Many of his most popular stories concern the nature of time, infinity, mirrors, labyrinths, reality and identity. A number of stories focus on fantastic themes, such as a library containing every possible 410-page text, a man who forgets nothing he experiences, an artifact through which the user can see everything in the universe, and a year of time standing still, given to a man standing before a firing squad. The same Borges told more and less realistic stories of South American life, stories of folk heroes, streetfighters, soldiers, gauchos, detectives, historical figures. He mixed the real and the fantastic, and fact with fiction. In his early career these mixtures sometimes bordered on hoax—and perhaps once or twice crossed that line.

His nonfiction is abundant and worthwhile, including astute film and book reviews, short biographies, longer philosophical musings on topics such as the nature of dialogue, language, and thought, and the relationships between. He also explores empirically or rationally many of the themes that are found in his fiction, such as the identity of the Argentinian people. In articles such as "The History of the Tango" and "The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights," he writes lucidly on things that surely held a place in his own life. The Book of Imaginary Beings is an thoroughly and obscurely researched modern bestiary of mythical creatures, in the preface of which Borges wrote that "there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition".

Borges composed poetry throughout his life. As his eyesight waned, Borges increasingly relied on the medium of poetry to make it easier to remember his work in progress. Many of his poems concern the same wide range of possibilities as his fiction, along with issues that emerge in his critical works and translations, as well as more personal musings. The same continuity that extends across his fiction and nonfiction. For example, the idealism of the fictional "Tlön" that's common to his essay "New Refutation of Time" reaches as well to his poem "Things". Similarly, a common thread runs through his story "The Circular Ruins" and his poem "The Golem". Thus readers who appreciate his fiction and nonfiction may find his poetry especially accessible.

Borges as Translator

As well as his own work, Borges was notable as a translator into Spanish. At the age of ten, he translated Oscar Wilde into Spanish. At the end of his life he produced a Spanish version of the Prose Edda. Borges also translated (whilst simultaneously subtly transforming) the works of, amongst others, Edgar Alan Poe, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Rudyard Kipling, Herman Melville, André Gide, William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, G. K. Chesterton. In a number of essays and lectures Borges assessed the art of translation and articulated his own view of translation. Borges held the view that a translation may improve upon an original, and that alternative and potentially contradictory renderings of the same work can be equally valid, and further that an original or literal translation can be unfaithful to a translation.

Quotations

  • "Mirrors and copulation are obscene, for they increase the numbers of mankind." - the dogma of a fictional religion in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"

Collections in English

* The collaborators originally published this using the pen name H Bustos Domecq)

Short Stories

  • "The Chamber of Statues" (1933)
  • "The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morell" (1933)
  • "The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kotsuke no Suke" (1933)
  • "The Mirror of Ink" (1933)
  • "Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities" (1933)
  • "Streetcorner Man" (1933)
  • "Tom Castro, the Implausible Imposter" (1933)
  • "The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate" (1933)
  • "The Wizard Postponed" (1933)
  • "The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv" (1934)
  • "Tale of the Two Dreamers" (1934)
  • "A Theologian in Death" (1934)
  • "The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan" (1935)
  • "The Library of Babel" (1941)
  • "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1941)
  • "The Aleph" (1945)
  • "A Double for Mohammed" (1946)
  • "The Generous Enemy" (1946)
  • "Of Exactitude in Science" (1946)
  • "Funes the Memorious" (1962)
  • "The Immortal" (1962)
  • "The Lottery in Babylon" (1962)
  • "The Intruder" (1966)
  • "Death and the Compass" (1968)
  • "The Meeting" (1969)
  • "Rosendo's Tale" (1969)
  • "Doctor Brodie's Report" (1970)
  • "The Duel" (1970)
  • "The Elder Lady" (1970)
  • "The End of the Duel" (1970)
  • "The Gospel According to Mark" (1970)
  • "Guayaquil" (1970)
  • "Juan Murana" (1970)
  • "The Unworthy Friend" (1970)
  • "Utopia of a Tired Man" (1975) (Nebula award nominee)
  • "August 25, 1983" (1982)
  • "The Rose of Paracelsus" (1998)
  • "Avelino Arredondo"
  • "The Book of Sand"
  • "The Bribe"
  • "The Circular Ruins"
  • "The Congress"
  • "The Disk"
  • "The Mirror and the Mask"
  • "The Night of the Gifts"
  • "Odin" (with Delia Ingenieros)
  • "The Other"
  • "The Sect of the Thirty"
  • "There Are More Things"
  • "Ulrike"
  • "Undr"
  • "The Zahir"
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