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Date of Birth
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24-August-1899
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Place of Birth
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Buenos Aires
(Argentina, South America, Greater Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires Province)
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Nationality
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Argentina
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Also know as
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Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo, Jorge LuÃs Borges, J.L. Borges, Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges, Alex Ander, BenjamÃn Beltran, Andrés Corthis, Pascual Güida, Bernardo Haedo, José Tuntar, Junto a Bioy Casares, Honorio Bustos Domecq, Benito Suárez Lynch, Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo, H. Bustos Domecq
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Profession
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Critic, Poet, Writer, Librarian, Novelist, Screenwriter, Essayist, Translator, Author
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Quotes
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- Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
- Life itself is a quotation.
- The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
- One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.
- Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.
- Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
- Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
- The original is unfaithful to the translation.
- To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
- I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
- The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.
- Democracy is an abuse of statistics.
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Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. His work embraces the "character of unreality in all literature". His best-known books, Ficciones and The Aleph, published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion.
Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and also to the fantasy genre. Critic Ãngel Flores, the first to use the term magical realism to define a genre that reacted against the dominant realism and naturalism of the 19th century, considers the beginning of the movement to be the release of Borges's A Universal History of Infamy. However, some critics would consider Borges to be a predecessor and not actually a magical realist. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil.
In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including stays in Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind at the age of 55; as he never learned braille, he became unable to read. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland.
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