Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine prose writer, poet, and publicist.

Borges was born in 1899 in Buenos Aires. His full name was Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo, although, according to Argentine custom, he never used it. On his father’s side, Borges had Spanish and Irish roots. Borges’s mother apparently came from a family of Portuguese Jews; her parents’ surnames—Acevedo and Pinedo—belonged to some of the best-known Jewish families of Portuguese origin in Buenos Aires. Borges himself stated that Basque, Andalusian, Jewish, English, Portuguese, and Norman blood flowed in him. Spanish and English were spoken in the home. At the age of ten, Borges translated Oscar Wilde’s famous fairy tale “The Happy Prince.”

Borges himself described his introduction to literature as follows: From my earliest childhood, when my father was struck by blindness, it was silently assumed in our family that I was to accomplish in literature what circumstances had prevented my father from accomplishing. This was taken for granted (and such a conviction is far stronger than merely expressed wishes). It was expected that I would be a writer. I began writing at the age of six or seven.

In 1914 the family went on vacation to Europe. However, because of the First World War, their return to Argentina was postponed. In 1918 Jorge moved to Spain, where he joined the Ultraists, an avant-garde group of poets. On December 31, 1919, Jorge Luis’s first poem appeared in the Spanish magazine Grecia. After returning to Argentina in 1921, Borges applied Ultraism in unrhymed poems about Buenos Aires. Even in his early works he displayed erudition, knowledge of languages and philosophy, and masterful command of words. Over time Borges moved away from poetry and began writing “fantasy” prose. Many of his best stories were included in the collections Ficciones (1944), Labyrinths (1960), and El Informe de Brodie (1971). In the story “Death and the Compass,” the struggle of the human intellect with chaos is presented as a criminal investigation; the story “Funes, the Memorious” portrays a man literally inundated by memory.

From 1937 to 1946 Borges worked as a librarian; he later called