Jorge Luis Borges

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

Borges was born in 1899 in Buenos Aires. His full name was Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo, but in accordance with Argentine tradition, 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, belong to the most well-known Jewish families of Portuguese origin in Buenos Aires). Borges himself claimed that Basque, Andalusian, Jewish, English, Portuguese, and Norman blood flowed in his veins. Spanish and English were spoken in the home. At the age of ten, Borges translated Oscar Wilde's well-known fairy tale "The Happy Prince."

Borges himself described his entry into 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 not allowed my father to achieve. This was taken for granted (and such a conviction is much stronger than merely expressed wishes). It was expected that I would be a writer. I began writing at six or seven.

In 1914, the family went to Europe for the holidays. However, because of the First World War, their return to Argentina was delayed. 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 embodied Ultraism in unrhymed poems about Buenos Aires. Even in his early works, he displayed erudition, knowledge of languages and philosophy, and a masterful command of words. Over time, Borges moved away from poetry and began writing “fantastic” prose. Many of his best stories were included in the collections Ficciones (1944), Labyrinths (1960), and The Book of Sand? No, The Brodie Report (El Informe de Brodie, 1971). In "Death and the Compass," the struggle of the human intellect against chaos is presented as a criminal investigation; "Funes, the Memorious" portrays a man literally flooded by memories.

From 1937 to 194