Transcript Journalism and Literature” Lic. Patricia Nigro Facultad de

Artistic and Literature in Spanish
America
Jorge Luis Borges
Dra. Patricia Nigro
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.
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.
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
• Borges had a two years younger sister:
Norah.
• She was his companion and a very good
painter.
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.“
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.
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.
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”).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 maestría de 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.)
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
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.
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…
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
•
Barbarity against civilisation.
•
Story and history.
•
Identity.
•
Orthodoxy and heresy.
•
Ancestors.
•
Courage, Fear.
•
Truth, Dreams.
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.
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…
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.
José Hernández and Jorge Luis
Borges
• José Hernández (1834-1886) wrote Martín Fierro (1872) and La
vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879).
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.
Jorge Luis Borges