Who is Jorge Luis Borges?

Who was Jorge Luis Borges? To understand someone, you must first know some background of their life, as well as where and when they lived their life. You can also learn a lot from Borges’ writing style. First of all, Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on August 24, 1899. Borges’s father was a lawyer and professor of psychology, his mother was the descendant of many soldiers and freedom fighters. Borges and his younger sister Norah, his only real childhood friend, would act out scenes from books and spend their time wandering through the library, the labyrinth, and the garden. His lack of friends founded a friendship with a local poet, Evaristo Carriego, an intrepid man of Argentine tradition who became something of a minor idol for the young Borges.

Young Jorge grew up in Palermo, a suburb on the northern outskirts of Buenos Aires. At the time it was a lower-class suburb known for its brothels, cabarets, and knife fights. Most of the people went to these places to dance tango and tell stories in front of the fire. Gauchos got into knife fights to show their courage, settle disputes, and earn respect for the way they handled a knife. Much of Borges’ earlier work was drenched in Palermo thoughts, even though he grew up primarily in a garden or library of unlimited English books. In 1908 Borges started going to school, but soon came to hate school for the other students, even though he excelled academically. In 1914 the family moved to Geneva, where Borges would attend four years of high school at Calvin College. The following years were spent mainly traveling in Spain. In 1921 the family returned to Buenos Aires where Borges published his first collection of poems. In 1938 his father died. That Christmas Eve, Borges himself had an accident that had him hallucinating in bed for a week, and after being operated he contracted septicemia that kept him between life and death for a month. Although there are many interesting facts about his life, what happened in the world at that time affected his daily life. Just as our world affects us, your world affected your thinking, your jobs over the years, and almost every other facet of life.

When the Borges family first moved to Geneva, a war broke out and they were forced to stay. After the war, they moved to Spain. The 1920s brought a certain political consciousness to Borges. He supported the campaign of former President Hipólito Yrigoyen, who served as president from 1916 to 1922. But he proved too far removed from the times to be an effective ruler. Borges was disheartened when Yrigoyen was overthrown by a military junta, which would turn out to be just the first of many more repressive governments. Borges’s dislike for politics became complete. Ironically, he garnered more recognition for his political articles than for his fictions. This caused him problems when the fascists came to power in the mid-1940s. In 1946 Juan Perón was elected president, and due to his political affiliation, Borges was “promoted” to “Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits in Public Markets”. He immediately resigned saying that “dictatorships promote servility, dictatorships promote cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they promote stupidity.”

The Perón regime, although it did not arrest him personally, made life more difficult for him and his family. After participating in a protest, her mother and Norah were arrested in 1948; her mother was placed under house arrest, but Norah was sent to a jail reserved primarily for prostitutes. In 1950 Borges was elected president of the Argentine Society of Writers. SADE had mainly political thoughts and was under investigation by the government. A typical meeting would start with complex literature and philosophy until the police officers got bored sleeping or went home, then the real political discussions would take place. Although cautious, the SADE was eventually closed. In 1955 the “Liberating Revolution” took place. Although the government was still military in nature, SADE was reopened and Borges was appointed Director of the National Library. But it turned out that the new government was as abusive of power as any other traditional Argentine junta. Borges began to criticize his policies, until the “absurd war” over the Falkland Islands caused Borges, in disgust, to withdraw from the world of politics. By then, Borges was going completely blind. There is no doubt that all of this had its own influence on Borges’s writing, but it all came together in his own style.

Borges had his own writing style from a mixture of styles of many people and somehow made it exclusively his own. It seemed that anyone who had an impact on Borges’ life also influenced part of his literature. He began writing at the age of six, mostly stories inspired by Cervantes. When he was nine years old, he translated Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” into Spanish, which appeared in a local newspaper called El País. As it was only signed “Jorge Borges”, all assumed that it was the work of his father, and also pointed out how close his writing was to that of his parents. Borges has also mentioned that his grandmother’s dry English wit was the origin of his concise style. It was at College Calvin that Borges discovered a completely new way of relating to the world through abstract literature through the work of Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. It was also in Geneva that he first acquired his love for Schopenhauer, his favorite of all philosophers, and Walt Whitman, whom for a time he considered the culmination of all the subtle ends of poetry. According to John Updike, “” Despite his modesty and reasonableness of tone, he proposes some kind of essential revision in the literature itself, ” and says that Borges’s ” drier paragraph is somehow compelling. ” historian and philosopher George Steiner wrote: “ When he cites fictional titles, imaginary cross-references, folios, and writers who have never existed, Borges is simply regrouping the counters of reality in the form of other possible worlds. kaleidoscope, shedding light in another patch on the wall. ” For all the different aspects of Jorge Luis Borges, being who he was, living when he did, writing in the way that only he could, I chose to evaluate one of his many works.

Reading his first story, Streetcorner Man, allows you to capture all that Borges is. The story was inspired by a local ‘compadrito’ who died. The story was never dry or dull. The story was made all the more real by the setting that could have been a local cabaret where Borges grew up. Although written under the pseudonym “Francisco Bustos” and obtaining great success, Borges did not want to be known as a mother writer of populist dramas. Its mix of reality and fiction made the story flow into an unexpected twist at the end. Seeing how his past is vividly recounted and described through his work is one of the joys of reading Borges. It was fascinating to see how well he portrayed all aspects of the story. The mood that he set matched the story, how someone from that time period would have told it, even how people would have reacted to each stimulus in the story. The characters were so real that it is difficult to tell if it really is not fiction. Through this story, as with many of his stories, it begins to become clear as it progresses, that is, until the twist at the end. It was at this point that I knew it was not the same, Borges simply has more elements in his stories than most writers. Even in such a short story, Borges found a way to include so many details. In fact, there are so many details that you pick up on things by reading the story for the third and fourth times. Hopefully you understand Borges a bit now, if not, read some of his works and you will see what differentiates him from other writers.