One of the most significant of the 20th century. author, the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, has become an inspiration to more than one modern creator, and not only to the writer. In a clean, graceful style, Borges plays with irony and paradox, telling stories about time, infinity and literature. Titled world classics, prose texts invite you to get lost in the realm of imagination and rethink the relationship between fiction and reality.
The Lithuanian edition of the Argentinian’s collection of short stories “Fictions” published this year is the second, prepared by Valdas V.Petrauskas (published by “Rara” publishing house). In the book, 4 texts previously translated by Petrauskas have been updated – “The Lottery in Babylonia”, “Babel’s Library”, “Mirtis ir kompasas”, “Pietūs”, and in the first edition the short stories translated by other translators have been newly translated.
In this text, we introduce not only the biography of the author, but also the experiences that inspired the short stories in this collection.
Anglophile since childhood
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1899. August 24 Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (pronounced Chorche Luis Borches in Lithuanian) grew up in a family that was no stranger to literature. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, who had English roots – a lawyer and psychology teacher – had no shortage of literary ambitions and was a great admirer of Shelley, Keats, and Swinburne. It was to him that his son was grateful for his first acquaintance with poetry and philosophy. Jorgė has repeatedly mentioned that the most important thing in his childhood was his father’s library:
“I can still picture her. It was in a separate room with glass shelves and must have contained several thousand books. Being myopic since childhood, I have forgotten most of the faces of that time (perhaps even when I think of Grandpa Aceveda I remember not him, but his picture), but I vividly remember the many engravings in Chambers’ Encyclopaedia and Britannica. The first novel I read was “Huckleberry Finn”.
His mother, Leonora Acevedo Suárez, is a translator from a Uruguayan military family, who translated the texts of DHLawrence and William Faulkner. True, these translations are often mistakenly attributed to her son. Jorgė himself has expressed his gratitude to his mother, who, especially for the writer, who is blind (and he never learned Braille in his entire life), remained an understanding and faithful friend until his death, at the age of 99, who completed his secretarial tasks, read and wrote down this , which was dictated. According to the author himself, she was the patron of his literary career.
Raised in a partly English-speaking family, Jorge and his sister Norah Borges (later a famous painter and wife of the Spanish literary critic Guillermo de Torre) spent their early childhood in the Palermo area, where their father befriended philosophers, writers and poets. Constantly surrounded by texts, at the age of six, Borges declared that he wanted to become a writer. At the age of nine, his Spanish translation of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince appeared in a newspaper for the first time, although he did not start school until that year. At twelve he was reading Shakespeare in English.
From Argentina to Switzerland, Spain and back: the beginning of the work of the poet Borges
in 1914 The Borges family moved to Europe, Switzerland. Due to the deterioration of the father’s eyesight and the outbreak of the First World War, they remained living in Geneva. So Jorgė started to attend the Collège Calvin, where she studied French, German and Latin together with forty other young people. Later he continued his studies at the University of Geneva and in 1918 earned a Bachelor of Arts degree. Here he got acquainted not only with various literary traditions, but also extended his acquaintance with philosophy. He considered Arthur Schopenhauer to be the most important thinker: “If the riddle of the universe could be put into words, I think these words would be in his writings.”
After graduating, Borges realized that he had to devote himself to writing: “I wanted to show my manuscripts to my father, but he told me that he did not believe in advice and that I had to work on everything myself, by trial and error. I wrote sonnets in English and French. The English sonnets were poor imitations of Wordsworth, and the French – in their own way, a watery imitation of Symbolist poetry.” The family lived in Switzerland until 1919, then moved to Spain, where father Borges finished his novel (he took five hundred copies back to Buenos Aires and distributed them to friends) , and the son published his first poem, entitled “Hymn to the Sea” in the magazine “Grecia”. According to the author, he was trying his best to be Walt Whitman with these lines.
Photo of the publisher/Cover of the book “Fiction”, design author Linas Spurga jr.
After returning to Buenos Aires, Jorge got involved in the literary life of the city, wrote for avant-garde magazines and in 1923. published the first collection of poems “The Passion of Buenos Aires” (“Fervor de Buenos Aires”). His early work was characterized by the exploration of the urban landscape, while the depiction of everyday life was imbued with a sense of mysticism and eternity. Over the next two decades, Borges published several collections of poetry and essays, placing himself among the most important Spanish speakers of the 20th century. poets. Inherited poor eyesight, and later blindness, was one of the reasons why he kept coming back to poetry throughout his life – it is easier to create it only in the head and store it in the memory.
Besides publishing poems and poetry reviews in various newspapers, Borges worked in a library for nine years. Due to the excess of employees at that time, the institution followed an unwritten rule not to do all the work at once. In order to protect their jobs, librarians cataloged books much more slowly – just to keep fifty people busy all year round. So Borges, who was passionate about literature, would work for several hours and, withdrawing from everyone, write secretly. Ironically, it was in the library, where the staff were only interested in horse races or football matches, that he was not known, although at that time he was already quite famous as a writer: “I remember how once a colleague noticed the name of a certain Jorge Luis Borges in the encyclopedia – it made him think about our identical names and dates of birth.”
Blindness and the road to prose
For Borges, 1938 is considered to be the fateful year of his life, when his father died and he himself barely survived after contracting sepsis after an accident. Lying in his sick bed, not knowing if he would get out of it, Jorgė wondered if he would be able to continue writing. He experienced that he might no longer be able to compose verses and write essays, which would demotivate him intellectually. He decided that it might be worth trying new genres – after all, he wouldn’t lose anything. This is how the short story “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” was born, one of Borges’ most famous works.
This short story brilliantly and extremely innovatively for the time raises the questions of the authenticity of the text, and Borges mentions his father’s old library and the English edition of the canonical Cervantes novel that he read earlier than the original as inspirations for the text: “When I later read Don Quixote in the original language, it resonated with me like a poor translation. I still remember those red Garnier edition volumes with gold lettering. <...> [K]ai I read another edition of Don Quixote, I felt that it was not the real Don Quixote. A friend later provided me with a Garnier edition with the same engravings, the same footnotes, and the same errors. All these things, in my mind, make up the book; all this I consider the real Don Quixote.”
“Working” in the library – writing in the basement or on the flat roof in warm weather – other extremely important works were born. One of them is another famous short story “The Library of Babel”, which the author himself describes as a highly Kafkaesque hyperbole of the nightmarish library where he worked. In this text, the writer imagines an infinite library with all possible books – this is a metaphor for the unsuccessful search for the meaning of the universe and man. Both of the above-mentioned short stories appeared in one of Borges’ most valued collections of short stories, Fictions (1944), which explores various paradoxes, themes of time, eternity, and infinity.
Another book by the Argentinian writer that influenced world literature is “El Aleph” (1949). As in Fictions, the texts in this collection are also kind of puzzles about infinite time and the supernatural of the world, literary imagination and personal identity. With his short prose works, the Argentinian author introduced readers to a unique combination of philosophical quests and experimental narratives. Borges’s prose often plays with different genres – the tropes of fiction or detective stories – and alongside the questionable themes of infinity, time or authorship, fictional reality and identity, recurring images of mirrors and labyrinths are used.
The writer against the regime. International recognition
Borges was quite liberal, but like his father, he considered himself an anarchist. In the press, he strongly criticized the president-elect Juan Peron and his fascist regime, so in 1946 was transferred from the library and “promoted” to inspector of poultry and rabbits at the local market. “Dictatorships promote slavery, dictatorships promote cruelty; even worse, they encourage stupidity. To fight against these sad monotonies is one of the duties of many writers,” said Borges at a dinner held in his honor by the Union of Argentine Writers. After refusing a “promotion” and resigning as a librarian, he became a literature teacher.
After the political situation changed again, in 1955 Borges was appointed director of the National Library, and the following year became professor of English and American literature at the University of Buenos Aires. In the following years, the Argentinian author went completely blind. Despite this, his work remained highly imaginative, his dictated texts continued to be written by his mother, friends and assistants. It seems that blindness did not hinder his creativity. True, the writer could not help but laugh at the irony of life that when he became the director of the library (like his two predecessors, who also lost their sight) he was left with eight hundred thousand books, but in the dark.
Borges became a global literary star in 1961, when he shared the Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett, and since then his work has attracted the interest of many international publishers. This allowed the writer to travel around the United States and Europe. However, even after receiving unexpected fame, he continued to teach at the university and published texts in which he explored the connections between fiction and reality.
in 1973 with Peron’s return to power, Argentina became uncomfortable for Borges again. The political situation and the loss of his mother led him to travel again and spend the rest of his life abroad. During his visits to the USA and Europe, he was accompanied by his personal literary assistant Marija Kodama. She also helped the blind Borges to write down the texts he dictated, together they prepared the “Brief Anglo-Saxon Anthology”, the Atlas book of their travel experiences. A few months before his death, he married Kodama through a lawyer in Paraguay, and in 1986 On June 14, at the age of 86, he died in Geneva of liver cancer.
Jorge Luis Borges’ legacy lives on today, not only because of his great innovation in storytelling, but also because of his influence on countless writers and thinkers. The Argentinian’s work invites readers to travel through the labyrinths of thought and narrative, transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries, offering timeless reflections on human existence through the prism of literature, philosophy and imagination. Conveyed in a poetic but extremely clean language, his reflections on the nature of texts and humanity continue to inspire and challenge, thus ensuring his status as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. writers title.
#Literary #legend #Borges #blind #remembered #books #faces #relatives #Culture
2024-10-04 00:47:58
