Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges was an Argentine writer of short fiction, essays, and poetry, as well as a translator, whose work became central to both Spanish-language and global literature. He is best remembered for two collections of short stories published in the 1940s, *Ficciones* and *El Aleph*, which weave together recurring themes like dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional authors, and mythology. His writing contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and it strongly influenced the magical realist movement that emerged in 20th-century Latin American letters. Borges was born on 24 August 1899 in Buenos Aires, into an educated middle-class family living in the then-poor Palermo neighborhood. His mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, was a translator from a criollo family with a history in South America’s European settlement and the Argentine War of Independence; she often recounted their heroic deeds. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was a lawyer who wrote the novel *El caudillo* in 1921. Borges Haslam had Spanish, Portuguese, and English ancestry, and grew up speaking English at home. The family included Borges’s sister, the painter Norah Borges. At age ten, Borges translated Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” into Spanish, though friends attributed the work to his father. Borges later noted that his father “tried to become a writer and failed,” and that he himself felt early shame at being bookish rather than a man of action, as most of his relatives had been soldiers. Borges was homeschooled until age eleven and became bilingual in Spanish and English, reading Shakespeare in English at twelve. The family home contained an English library of over a thousand volumes; Borges later called his father’s library the chief event of his life. His father stopped practicing law due to failing eyesight, a condition that would later affect Borges. In 1914, the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, where Borges Haslam saw an eye specialist and the children attended school. There, Borges learned French, read Thomas Carlyle in English, and began studying philosophy in German. At eighteen, he met writer Maurice Abramowicz, beginning a lifelong literary friendship. He earned his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. Because of political unrest in Argentina, the family remained in Europe after World War I, spending three years in Lugano, Barcelona, Mallorca, Seville, and Madrid, before returning to Argentina in 1921. Back in Buenos Aires, Borges began publishing poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. By age 55, he was completely blind. Scholars have suggested that his progressive loss of sight pushed him to develop innovative literary symbols through imaginative techniques. By the 1960s, his work had been translated and widely published in the United States and Europe. Borges was fluent in several languages. His international breakthrough came in 1961, when he shared the first International Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett. His reputation grew throughout the 1960s, helped by increasing English translations, the Latin American Boom, and the success of Gabriel García Márquez’s *One Hundred Years of Solitude*. His final work, *The Conspirators*, was dedicated to Geneva, Switzerland. Writer J. M.