On this day in 1899, Jorge Luis Borges, one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, entered the world. He was a man of complicated descent: His father had English roots, which didn't sit well with the Argentine populace during the década infame and the anglophobia which gripped the nation afterwards. His mother was a Suárez and a Laprida, from the lineage of a criollo and an independence fighter who signed the Declaration of Independence at the Congress of Tucumán in 1816, which launched Argentina's independence, and alerted the world to its presence as a new nation.
Borges was to be the man who, from the library in his father's study on calle Tucumán, was to announce to the world that Argentina had arrived in a literary sense, and the Latin American authors who cite him as a hugely important influence include Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, the list goes on, and is astoundingly impressive. His father's library was the place where Borges first fell in love with books, where he first read Martín Fierro and realised the potential of the gaucho figure, the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights (Alf Layla wa Layla) and became fascinated by its circular structure, similar to Hamlet. These were to become reference points in his works, which he drew upon time and time again. His summers were spent with his family in Adrogué, a city in the Greater Buenos Aires province, to escape the heat of the city. There, the Hotel Las Delicias became a symbol also, appearing in his "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" years later, as well as being the basis for the Hotel Triste-le-Roy in "Death and the Compass". Argentina, the land of his birth, influenced and shaped his works.
In Europe where the Borges clan moved to in 1914, a young Jorge Luis attended school in Geneva, where his name was pronounced so that he couldn't understand it, and was nudged by a classmate when he needed to give a response. Moving to Spain in 1919, Borges was beginning to formulate his desires to write, although he hadn't yet found his voice. He returned to Argentina a dedicated surrealist poet, only to shun that image. Later, the family moved back to Europe for a second time, but not before Fervor de Buenos Aires, his collection of poems, had been published in 1923, by his own hand, and distributed to those who he thought would best be able to review it. Upon his return to Argentina, the critical reaction to it was, for Borges, surprisingly mild. No one had panned it. But he still hadn't fully formulated the mixture of the Old World literary canon and the mystery and myth which the New World presented in the way he had hoped.
He worked in the National Library, he opposed Perón bitterly, which was to cost him his job at the library, and he continued to write. Essays, poems, eventually short stories. In his "Approach to Al-Mu'tasim", the extent of his imagination, guile, trickery, and mischievous attitude was seen, as he created an imaginary book and wrote about it in a pseudo-essay and hoax, which sent literati to the book shops of Buenos Aires searching for a new addition to their library which didn't exist.
Fictions (a collection which comprised Artifices and The Garden of Forking Paths) was to be Borges' breakthrough, and contains some of the best short stories in the Spanish language, or any language for that matter. The story of a new world which usurps our reality in Tlön, the story of the famous library of Babel, Funes the man who cannot forget anything, the ending of the vuelta of Martín Fierro in which the brother of the gaucho killed by the eponymous protagonist exacts his revenge, only to realise he and Fierro are the same, all of them place Borges firmly and squarely on the literary map. His location on that map was Argentina. The Aleph, his next collection, solidified his reputation, a collection which includes detective stories, stories of the infinite and the immortal, stories of the finite and the obsessive, it was all in one, the Aleph.
Borges' life continued apace from those outings, and he began to move outwards, showing that literature need not abound in the local colour of guapos and knife fights to be national. He gave lectures in the United States where, along with France, the reputation afforded him was befitting of the stature of the works which he produced. Affected by the blindness which had been part of his father's legacy, Borges was writing in the dark, and began to use the structure of poetry as a framework on which to hang the issues which had always preoccupied him: immortality, mirrors, myth, time, reality, folklore, a list which could not all be enumerated in the space of a blog post. He died in Geneva in 1986, having married Maria Kodama earlier that year, and no one from the Peronist party attended his funeral due to, it is claimed, certain declarations he had made about the country. The only declarations which matter are the ones he made in his literary works, the ones which claim that the literary efforts of the Argentine mind could not be limited to "algunos pobres temas locales, como si los argentinos sólo pudiéramos hablar de orillas y estancias y no del universo”. From the city of Buenos Aires, a metropolis of intertwining cultures and checkered city grids, Borges took the first step on the path to the Latin American Literary Boom which brought the world's attention to a people and a place that the West thought they had invented, but were being forced to realised existed independently of them. Who was dreaming who?
Today's Google doodle depicts Borges looking out on a Boschian world of strange architecture, which underlines Borges' incredible ability to describe spaces, something which has given his work the longevity which it still enjoys. No two readings are ever the same, where something jumps out at you which you didn't notice before. Like Fermat and his infinite descent, who Google chose to honour with a doodle recently also, Borges is a man whose work also provides an infinite number of possibilities. A fact which would please the Argentine maestro (and something which he knew, seeing as he references Fermat in Ibn-Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth) is that an infinite descent's purpose is to prove, through contradiction that there is no possible end, because if there is infinite descent, then the smallest number must have a number smaller than it, otherwise infinite descent does not exist. A suitably Borgesian paradox.
Today's Google doodle depicts Borges looking out on a Boschian world of strange architecture, which underlines Borges' incredible ability to describe spaces, something which has given his work the longevity which it still enjoys. No two readings are ever the same, where something jumps out at you which you didn't notice before. Like Fermat and his infinite descent, who Google chose to honour with a doodle recently also, Borges is a man whose work also provides an infinite number of possibilities. A fact which would please the Argentine maestro (and something which he knew, seeing as he references Fermat in Ibn-Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth) is that an infinite descent's purpose is to prove, through contradiction that there is no possible end, because if there is infinite descent, then the smallest number must have a number smaller than it, otherwise infinite descent does not exist. A suitably Borgesian paradox.
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