Artistic and Literature in Spanish America Jorge Luis Borges Dra. Patricia Nigro

1. Artistic and Literature in Spanish AmericaJorge Luis BorgesDra. Patricia Nigro

2. Jorge Luis Borges • Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo: born August 24, 1899, Buenos Aires, Argentina—died June 14, 1986, Geneva, Switzerland. • Argentine poet, essayist, and short-story writer whose works have become classics of 20th-century world literature. • Borges was reared in the then-shabby Palermo district of Buenos Aires, the setting of some of his works. His family, which had been notable in Argentine history, included British ancestry, and he learned English before Spanish.

3. Jorge Luis Borges • Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from a traditional Uruguayan family of "pure" criollo, (Spanish) descent. Her family had been much involved in the European settling of South America and she spoke often of their heroic actions.Borges's 1929 book Cuaderno San Martín includes the poem "Isidoro Acevedo," commemorating his grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier of the Buenos Aires Army. Acevedo fought in the battles of Cepeda in 1859, Pavón in 1861, and Los Corrales in 1880. Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida died of pulmonary congestion in the house where his grandson Jorge Luis Borges was born. Borges grew up hearing about the faded family glory.

4. Jorge Luis Borges • Borges's father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was part Spanish, part Portuguese, and half English, also the son of a colonel. Haslam, whose mother Fanny was English, grew up speaking English at home, and took his own family frequently to Europe. England and English pervaded the family home. • Fanny married Colonel Francisco Borges.

5. Jorge Luis Borges • Borges had a two years younger sister: Norah. • She was his companion and a very good painter.

6. Jorge Luis Borges • Borges was taught at home until the age of 11, bilingual, reading Shakespeare in English at the age of twelve. The family lived in a large house with an English library of over one thousand volumes; Borges would later remark that "if I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library.“

7. Jorge Luis Borges • The first books that he read—from the library of his father, a man of wide-ranging intellect who taught at an English school—included The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the novels of H.G.Wells, The Thousand and One Nights, and Don Quixote, all in English. • Under the constant stimulus and example of his father, the young Borges from his earliest years recognized that he was destined for a literary career.

8. Jorge Luis Borges • In 1914, on the eve of World War I Borges was taken by his family to Geneva, where he learned French and German and received his B.A. from the Collège de Genève. • Leaving there in 1919, the family spent a year on Majorca and a year in mainland Spain, where Borges joined the young writers of the Ultraist movement, a group that rebelled against what it considered the decadence of the established writers of the Generation of 1898.

9. Jorge Luis Borges • Returning to Buenos Aires in 1921, Borges rediscovered his native city and began to sing of its beauty in poems that imaginatively reconstructed its past and present. • His first published book was a volume of poems, Fervor de Buenos Aires, (1923; “Fervour of Buenos Aires, Poems”).

10. Jorge Luis Borges • He is also credited with establishing the Ultraist movement in South America, though he later repudiated it. This period of his career, which included the authorship of several volumes of essays and poems and the founding of three literary journals, ended with a biography, Evaristo Carriego(1930). • During his next phase, Borges gradually overcame his shyness in creating pure fiction. At first he preferred to retell the lives of more or less infamous men, as in the sketches of his Historia universal de la infamia (1935; A Universal History of Infamy). To earn his living, he took a major post in 1938 at a Buenos Aires municipal library, Biblioteca Miguel Cané. He remained there for nine unhappy years.

11. Jorge Luis Borges • In 1938, the year his father died, Borges suffered a severe head wound and subsequent blood poisoning, which left him near death, bereft of speech, and fearing for his sanity. He nearly died of septicemia. This experience appears to have freed in him the deepest forces of creation. In the next eight years he produced his best fantastic stories, those later collected in Ficciones (“Fictions”) and the volume of English translations titled The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933–69.

12. Jorge Luis Borges • During this time, he and another writer, Adolfo Bioy Casares, jointly wrote detective stories under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq (combining ancestral names of the two writers’ families), which were published in 1942 as Seis problemas para Don Isidro Parodi(Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi). The works of this period revealed for the first time Borges’s entire dreamworld, an ironical or paradoxical version of the real one, with its own language and systems of symbols.

13. Jorge Luis Borges • When the dictatorship of Juan Perón came to power in 1946, Borges was dismissed from his library position for having expressed support of the Allies in World War II. With the help of friends, he earned his way by lecturing, editing, and writing. A 1952 collection of essays, Otras inquisiciones (1937–1952) (Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952), revealed him at his analytic best. • When Perón was deposed in 1955, Borges became director of the National Public Library (1955-1973), an honorific position, and also professor of English and American literature at the University of Buenos Aires (1956-1970).

14. Jorge Luis Borges • By this time, Borges suffered from total blindness, a hereditary affliction that had also attacked his father and had progressively diminished his own eyesight from the 1920s onward. It had forced him to abandon the writing of long texts and to begin dictating to his mother or to secretaries or friends.

15. Jorge Luis Borges By the late 1950s, he had become completely blind, as had one of his best known predecessors, Paul Groussac, for whom Borges wrote an obituary. Neither the coincidence nor the irony of his blindness as a writer escaped Borges: Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche esta declaración de la maestríade Dios, que con magnífica ironía me dio a la vez los libros y la noche. (Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch this declaration of the mastery of God who, with magnificent irony, granted me both the gift of books and the night.)

16. Jorge Luis Borges • The works that date from this late period, such as El hacedor(1960; “The Doer,” Eng. trans. Dreamtigers) and El libro de los seres imaginarios (1967; The Book of Imaginary Beings), almost erase the distinctions between the genres of prose and poetry.

17. Jorge Luis Borges • His later collections of stories include El informe de Brodie (1970; Dr. Brodie’s Report), which deals with revenge, murder, and horror, and El libro de arena(1975; The Book of Sand), both of which are allegories combining the simplicity of a folk storyteller with the complex vision of a man who has explored the labyrinths of his own being to its core.

18. Jorge Luis Borges • After 1961, when he and Samuel Beckett shared the Formentor Prize, an international award given for unpublished manuscripts, Borges’s tales and poems were increasingly acclaimed as classics of 20th-century world literature. • The Italian government named Borges Commendatore and the University of Texas at Austin appointed him for one year to the Tinker Chair. • In 1962, Borges began lecture tours of Europe. In 1980, he was awarded the Balzan Prize (for Philology, Linguistics and literary Criticism) and the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca; numerous other honors were to accumulate over the years, such as the French Legion of Honour in 1983, the Cervantes Prize, and a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America, "for distinguished contribution to the mystery genre".

19. Jorge Luis Borges • In 1967, Borges married the recently widowed Elsa Astete Millán. Friends believed that his mother, who was 90 and anticipating her own death, wanted to find someone to care for her blind son. The marriage lasted less than three years. After a legal separation, Borges moved back in with his mother, with whom he lived until her death at age 99. Thereafter, he lived alone in the small flat he had shared with her, cared for by Fanny, their housekeeper of many decades.

20. Jorge Luis Borges • From 1975 until the time of his death, Borges traveled internationally. He was often accompanied in these travels by his personal assistant María Kodama, an Argentine woman of Japanese and German ancestry. In April 1986, a few months before his death, he married her via an attorney in Paraguay.

21. Jorge Luis Borges • He died of liver cancer in 1986 in Geneva and was buried there in the Cimetière des Rois. After years of legal wrangling about the legality of the marriage, Kodama, as sole inheritor of a significant annual income, gained control over his works.

22. Jorge Luis Borges • By the time of his death, the nightmare world of his “fictions” had come to be compared to the world of Franz Kafka and to be praised for concentrating common language into its most enduring form. Through his work, Latin American literature emerged from the academic realm into the realm of generally educated readers.

23. Jorge Luis Borges • Borges became a journalist. He wrote about art, literature, movies, books reviews. He worked for different newspapers and magazines: • Revista Multicolor de los Sábados (Crítica). • Revista El Hogar. • Revista Sur. • La Nación; Clarín.

24. Jorge Luis Borges • In 1933, he gained an editorial appointment at the literary supplement Crítica. He wrote essays, literary forgeries, translations of famous works, and served as a literary adviser. • He wrote weekly columns for El Hogar, which appeared from1936 to 1939.

25. Jorge Luis Borges

26. Jorge Luis Borges: his writing style • Use of symbols: the tiger, the rose, the knife, the mirror, the labyrinth, the face, the circle, the libraries, monster, a pact, the shadow, an oxymoron, fallacies.

27. Jorge Luis Borges: his huge knowledge • Borges had a huge knowledge of many different topics and languages: Literature, Philosophy, Theology, Ancient Cultures, Languages, Geography, Mithologies, History…

28. Jorge Luis Borges • Some ideas obsessed him: • Destiny, Hope. • The existence of God, Redemption. • A man life reflected in other man’s life. • Writing, Paradoxes, Conjectures. • Universe, Randomness. • Kabaláh, Guilt.

29. Jorge Luis Borges • Barbarity against civilisation. • Story and history. • Identity. • Orthodoxy and heresy. • Ancestors. • Courage, Fear. • Truth, Dreams.

30. Jorge Luis Borges • Games with the idea of time and place. • Fiction and non ficition: books that not exist. • Use of parentheses for important facts. • Quotes from actual books or imaginary books. • Use reflections in the middle of the telling of the story.

31. Jorge Luis Borges: his writing style • Narrator: he as a character, stories first told by other people, different versions of the fact. • A very accurate use of adjectives: vast, infinite, dark, obscure, fantastic, real, intimate, true, false, blind, antique, unique, courageous, coward, brave, fundamental, eternal, silent, immortal, secret, taciturn, infinite, vain, last, black, vague, happy, inscrutable, wide, vast, persistent, trivial, cruel…

32. Jorge Luis Borges • Frequently used verbs: • To remember, to know. • To believe, to trust. • To dream, to hate. • To surprise, to wonder. • To see, to tire. • To forget, to frequent. • To define, to be reflected.

33. José Hernández and Jorge Luis Borges • José Hernández (1834-1886) wrote Martín Fierro (1872) and La vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879).

34. José Hernández and Jorge Luis Borges • Borges’ 1953 book of essays about the poem and its critical and popular reception – “El Martín Fierro” (written with Margarita Guerrero) – shows Borges's identity as an Argentine. • Borges has nothing but praise for the aesthetic merit of Martín Fierro, but refuses to project that as indicating moral merit for its protagonist.

35. Jorge Luis Borges