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SOPHIA OF WISDOM III - JORGE LUIS BORGES
SOPHIA OF WISDOM III
THE SOPHIA OF ALL SOPHIA OF WISDOMS
AKA CAROLINE E. KENNEDY, JR.________________________
NOVEMBER 17, 2006
JORGE LUIS BORGES
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Jorge Luis Borges
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"Borges" redirects here. For other uses, see Borges (disambiguation).
Jorge Luis Borges
Borges in Paris, 1969
Born August 24, 1899
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Died June 14, 1986
Geneva, Switzerland
Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899 – June 14, 1986), was an Argentine writer who is considered one of the foremost literary figures of the 20th century. Best-known in the English speaking world for his short stories and fictive essays, Borges was also a poet, critic, translator and man of letters.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Life
o 1.1 Youth
o 1.2 Early writing career
o 1.3 Maturity
o 1.4 International recognition
o 1.5 Later personal life
* 2 Work
o 2.1 Borges as Argentine and as world citizen
o 2.2 Multicultural influences on Borges's writing
o 2.3 Borges as specialist in the history, culture, and literature of Argentina
o 2.4 Borges, Martín Fierro, and tradition
o 2.5 Limits to universalism
o 2.6 Sexuality and sexual orientation
o 2.7 International themes in Borges
o 2.8 Religious themes in Borges: Mainline, heretical, and mystical
* 3 Quotations
* 4 Critical bibliography
* 5 References
* 6 See also
* 7 External links
[edit] Life
[edit] Youth
Borges was born in Buenos Aires. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was a lawyer and psychology teacher, who also had literary aspirations ("he tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt", Borges once said. "He composed some very good sonnets"). Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from an old Uruguayan family. His father was part Spanish, part Portuguese, and half British; his mother Spanish, and possibly Portuguese. At his home, both Spanish and English were spoken and from earliest childhood Borges was effectively bilingual. It is said that he was reading Shakespeare, in English, at the age of 12. He grew up in the then-distant and not very prosperous neighborhood of Palermo, in a large house with an extensive English library.
Borges's full name was Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo but, following Argentine custom, he never used the entire name.
Jorge Guillermo Borges was forced into early retirement from the legal profession owing to the same failing eyesight that would eventually afflict his son, and in 1914, the family moved to Geneva, where Borges senior was treated by a Geneva eye specialist while Borges and his sister Norah (1901-1998) attended school. There Borges learned French, which he apparently had initial difficulties with, and taught himself German, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève 1918.
After World War I ended, the Borges family spent three years variously in Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid. In Spain, Borges became a member of the avant-garde Ultraist literary movement. His first poem, "Hymn to the Sea," written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published in the magazine Grecia ("Greece", in Spanish). There he frequented such notable Spanish writers as Rafael Cansinos Assens and Ramón Gómez de la Serna.
[edit] Early writing career
In 1921, Borges returned with his family to Buenos Aires where he imported the doctrine of Ultraism and launched his career as a writer by publishing poems and essays in literary journals. Borges's first collection of poetry was Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923). He contributed to the avant-garde review Martín Fierro (whose "art for art's sake" approach contrasted to that of the more politically-involved Boedo group), co-founded the journals Prisma (1921–1922, a broadsheet distributed largely by pasting copies to walls in Buenos Aires) and Proa (1922–1926). He was, from the first issue, a regular contributor to Sur, founded in 1931, by Victoria Ocampo, which became Argentina's most important literary journal. Ocampo herself introduced Borges to Adolfo Bioy Casares, who was to become Borges's frequent collaborator and Ocampo's brother-in-law, and another well-known figure of Argentine literature.
In 1933 Borges was appointed editor of the literary supplement of the newspaper Crítica, and it was there that the pieces later published in Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy) appeared. These pieces lay somewhere between non-fictional essays and fictional short stories, using fictional techniques to tell essentially true stories, and literary forgeries, which typically claimed to be translations of passages from famous but seldom read works. In the following years, he served as a literary adviser for the publishing house Emecé Editores and wrote weekly columns for El Hogar, which appeared from 1936 to 1939.
Starting in 1937, friends of Borges found him work at the Miguel Cané branch of the Buenos Aires Municipal Library as a first assistant. The other employees immediately forbade Borges from cataloging more than 100 books each day, a task which would take him about one hour. The rest of his days he would spend in the basement of the library, writing articles and short stories. When Juan Perón came to power in 1946, Borges was effectively fired; "promoted" to the position of poultry inspector for the Buenos Aires municipal market (from which he immediately resigned; when he told this story, he would always embellish this to "Poultry and Rabbit Inspector"). His offenses against the Peronistas up to that time had apparently consisted of little more than adding his signature to pro-democratic petitions, but shortly after his resignation he addressed the Argentine Society of Letters saying, in his characteristic style, "Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy."
Borges's father died in 1938, a great blow because the two were very close. On Christmas Eve 1938, Borges suffered a severe head wound in an accident; during treatment for that wound, he nearly died of septicemia. (He based his 1944 short story "The South" on this event.) While recovering from the accident, he began writing in a style he became famous for, and his first collection of short stories, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths) appeared in 1941. The book included El sur, a piece that incorporated some autobiographical elements, notably the accident, and which Borges later called "perhaps my best story." Though generally well received, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan failed to garner the literary prizes many in his circle expected for it. Ocampo dedicated a large portion of the July 1941 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 project.
[edit] Maturity
Left without a job, his vision beginning to fade due to glaucoma, and unable to fully support himself as a writer, Borges began a new career as a public lecturer. Despite a certain amount of political persecution, he was reasonably successful, and became an increasingly public figure, obtaining appointments as President of the Argentine Society of Writers (1950–1953) and as Professor of English and American Literature (1950–1955) at the Argentine Association of English Culture. His short story Emma Zunz was turned into a film (under the name of Días de odio, which in English became Days of Wrath) in 1954 by Argentine director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson. Around this time, Borges also began writing screenplays.
In 1955, and after the initiative of Ocampo, the new anti-Peronist military government appointed him head of the National Library.[1] By that time, he had become fully blind, like one of his best known predecessors, Paul Groussac (for whom Borges wrote an obituary). Neither coincidence nor the irony escaped Borges and he commented on them in his work:
Borges at the Hotel Beaux, 1969.
Enlarge
Borges at the Hotel Beaux, 1969.
Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche
esta declaración de la maestría
de Dios, que con magnífica ironía
me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.
Let neither tear or reproach
besmirch this declaration
of the mastery of God
who, with magnificent irony,
granted me both the gift of books
and the night.
The following year he received the National Prize for Literature and the first of many honorary doctorates, this one from the University of Cuyo. From 1956 to 1970, Borges also held a position as a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires, while frequently holding temporary appointments at other universities.
Being unable to read and write (he never learned the Braille system), he relied on his mother, with whom he had always been personally close, and who began to work with him as his personal secretary.
[edit] International recognition
His international fame dates from the early 1960s. In 1961, he received the Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. As Beckett was well-known and respected in the English-speaking world, while Borges at this time remained unknown and untranslated, English-speakers became curious about who the person was who shared the prize. The Italian government named him Commendatore; and the University of Texas at Austin appointed him for one year to the Tinker chair. This led to his first lecture tour of the United States. The first translations of his work into English were to follow in 1962, with lecture tours of Europe and the Andean region of South America in subsequent years. In 1965, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom appointed him O.B.E.[citation needed]. In 1980 he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca and numerous other honors were to accumulate over the years, such as the French Legion of Honour in 1983, the Cervantes Prize, and even a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America, "for distinguished contribution to the mystery genre". [1]
In 1967, Borges began a five-year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, thanks to whom he became better known in the English-speaking world. He also continued to publish books, among them El libro de los seres imaginarios (The 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). He also lectured prolifically. Many of these lectures were anthologized in volumes such as Siete noches (Seven Nights) and Nueve ensayos dantescos.
Though a contender since at least the late 1960s, Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Especially in the late 1980s, when Borges was clearly growing old and infirm, the failure to grant him the prize became a glaring omission. It was speculated that Borges was considered unfit to receive the award because of his tacit support of, or unwillingness to condemn, the military dictatorships that were being installed in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and elsewhere. Although this political stance stemmed from his self-described "Anarcho-Pacifism," it forced Borges to join the distinguished company of Nobel Prize in Literature non-winners, a group including, among others, Graham Greene, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy and Alfonso Reyes (Borges said of Reyes: "the best prose-writer in the Spanish language of any time"). He did, however, receive the Jerusalem Prize in 1971, awarded to writers who deal with themes of human freedom and society.
[edit] Later personal life
When Perón returned from exile and was re-elected president in 1973, Borges immediately resigned as director of the National Library.
Borges was forced to marry, first in 1967 by his mother, who at over 90 years old and anticipating her own death, wanted to find someone to care for her blind son. Thus she and his sister Norah arranged for Borges to marry the recently widowed Elsa Astete Millán. It is said that Borges never consummated the marriage. He and his wife slept in separate bedrooms and the marriage lasted less than three years. After the legal separation, Borges moved back in with his mother, with whom he lived until her death at 99 (see the book The Lessons of the Master by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni). Thereafter he lived alone in the small flat he had shared with her and was cared for by their housekeeper of many decades (see the book El Señor Borges by “Fanny”).
After 1975, the year his mother died, Borges commenced a series of extensive visits to countries all over the world, that continued until the time of his death. He was often accompanied in these travels by an assistant, Miss María Kodama, an Argentine woman of Japanese and German ancestry.
Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer in Geneva and is buried in the Cimetière des Rois (Plainpalais), where to the dismay of his close lifelong friends, such as Adolfo Bioy Casares, he was married in extremis to Maria Kodama. She also obtained the absolute control of his works, estimated to generate an annual income of many millions of dollars. Kodama was denounced by the prestigious French editor Gallimard and by intellectuals of renown, such as Beatriz Sarlo, as the obstacle to the serious reading of Borges works (see articles in Le Nouvel Observateur, diario El País and diario La Nación among others international media).
[edit] Work
In addition to his short stories for which he is most famous, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, several screenplays, and a considerable volume of literary criticism, prologues, and reviews, edited numerous anthologies, and was a prominent translator of English-, French- and German-language literature into Spanish (and of Old English and Norse works as well). His blindness (which, like his father's, developed in adulthood) strongly influenced his later writing. Paramount among his intellectual interests are elements of mythology, mathematics, theology, and, as a personal integration of these, Borges's sense of literature as recreation — all of these disciplines are sometimes treated as a writer's playthings and at other times treated very seriously.
Borges lived through most of the twentieth century, and so was rooted in the Modernist period of culture and literature, especially Symbolism. His fiction is profoundly learned, and always concise. Like his contemporary Vladimir Nabokov and the somewhat older James Joyce, he co
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