This touchy poem earned a lot of fame to the great Argentine poet, essayist, and short-story writer, whose tales of fantasy and dream worlds are classics of the 20th-century world literature. He was profoundly influenced by European culture, English literature, and thinkers such as Berkeley, who argued that there is no material substance; the sensible world consists only of ideas, which exist for so long as they are perceived. Most of his tales embrace universal themes – the often recurring circular labyrinth can be seen as a metaphor of life or a riddle which theme is time. Although Borges’s name was mentioned in speculations about Nobel Prize, he never became one.
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Jorge Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires. A few years later, his family moved to the northern suburb of Palermo, which he was to celebrate in prose and verse. He received his earliest education at home, where he learned English and read widely in his father’s library of English books. When Borges was nine years of age, he began his public schooling in Palermo, and in the same year, published his first literary undertaking, which was a translation into Spanish of Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince.”
In 1914 the Borges family traveled to Europe. When World War I broke out, they settled for the duration in Switzerland, where young Borges finished his formal education at the College in Geneva. By 1919, when the family moved on to Spain, Borges had learned several languages and had begun to write and translate poetry (Liukkonen and Pesonen, “Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986))”.
In Seville and Madrid, he frequented literary gatherings absorbing the lessons of new poetical theorists of the time-especially those of Rafael Cansinos Asséns, who headed a group of writers who came to be known as “ultraists.” When the family returned to Argentina in 1921, Borges rediscovered his native Buenos Aires and began to write poems dealing with his intimate feelings for the city, its past, and certain fading features of its quiet suburbs. His early poetry was reflective in tone; metaphors dominated, usual linking words were suppressed, and the humble, tranquil aspects of the city that he evoked seemed somehow contaminated by eternity.
With other young Argentine writers, Borges collaborated in the founding of new publications, in which the ultraist mode was cultivated in the New World. In 1923, his first volume of poetry, Fervor of Buenos Aires, was published, and it also made somewhat of a name for him in Spain. In 1925, his second book of poetry, Moon across the Way, appeared, which was followed in 1929 by San Martin Notebook -the last new collection of his verse to appear for three decades. Borges gradually developed a keen interest in literary criticism. His critical and philosophical essays began to fill most of the volumes he published during the period 1925-1940: Inquisitions (1925), The Dimensions of My Hope (1926), The Language of the Argentines (1928), Evaristo Carriego (1930), Discussion (1932), and History of Eternity (1938).
Change in Style
In 1938, with his father gravely ill from a heart ailment, Borges obtained an appointment in a municipal library in Buenos Aires. Before year’s end, his father died. Borges, himself, came close to death from septicemia, the complication of an infected head injury. This period of crisis produced an important change in Borges. He began to write prose fiction tales of a curious and highly original character. These pieces seemed to be philosophical essays invested with narrative qualities and tensions. Others were short stories infused with metaphorical concepts. Ten of these concise, well-executed stories were collected in Ficciones (1944). A second volume of similar tales, entitled ‘The Aleph’, was published in 1949. Borges’s fame as a writer firmly rests on the narratives contained in these two books, to which other stories were added in later editions.
After The Aleph, he published an important collection of essays, Other Inquisitions (1952); several collections of poetry and prose sketches, Dreamtigers (1960), In Praise of Darkness (1969), The Deep Rose (1975), and The Iron Coin (1976); and two collections of new short stories, Dr. Brodie’s Report (1970) and The Book of Sand (1975). Aside from these works, Borges wrote over a dozen books in collaboration with other persons. Foremost among his collaborators was Adolfo Bioy Casares, an Argentine novelist and short-story writer, who was Borges’s closest literary associate for nearly 40 years.
In 1961 Borges shared with Samuel Beckett the $10,000 International Publishers Prize, and world recognition at last began to come his way. He received countless honors and prizes. In 1970, he was the first recipient of the $25,000 Matarazzo Sobrinho Inter-American Literary Prize.
Borges, who had long suffered from eye problems, was totally blind in his last decades. He had a congenital defect that had afflicted several generations on his father’s side of the family. However, he continued to publish several books, among them EL LIBRO DE LOS SERES IMAGINARIOS (1967), EL INFORME DE BRODIE (1970), and EL LIBRO DE ARENA (1975). To him, books meant everything.
Philosophy and Theology
Borges’s fictional universe was born from his vast and esoteric readings in literature, philosophy, and theology. He saw man’s search for meaning in an infinite universe as a fruitless effort. In the universe of energy, mass, and speed of light, Borges considered the central riddle time, and not space. “He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or was unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time” (Hoffmann, pp 316). The theological speculations of Gnosticism and the Cabala gave ideas for many of his plots. Borges revealed in an interview that when he was a boy, he found an engraving of the Seven Wonders of the World, one of which portrayed a circular labyrinth. It frightened him and the maze has been one of his recurrent nightmares. “Almost instantly, I understood: ‘The garden of forking paths’ was the chaotic novel; the phrase ‘the various futures (not to all)’ suggested to me the forking in time, not in space” (Yates, “The Garden of Forking Paths”).
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Borges, who was a deep philosopher of poetry, presented each of his writings as an ontological enigma. Similarly, a borgesian story or poem would often assume the patterns of a treatise. The writings of Borges are full of emotions or are simply entertaining, also often characterized by fantastic ontologies, synchronic genealogies, utopian grammars, fictional geographies. In addition, he conceived philosophy has perplexity and poetry as the deepest form of rationality. The beauty of his poetry and the depth of his knowledge do great justice to the Spanish language and universal mind (University of Pittsburgh, .
Conclusion
Borges married Elsa Astete Millan in 1967, but was divorced in 1970. He married Maria Kodama in 1986, shortly before his death on June 14, in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1985, he moved permanently to Geneva, Switzerland. There he died of liver cancer on June 14, 1986, and was buried at the old Plainpalais Cemetery. The intellectual style of Borges presents each of his writings as an ontological riddle. His works offer exposure to interdisciplinary research and provide a treat to both the academic scholar and the ordinary reader.
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