| |
Jorge Luis Borges Biography |
Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899 - June 14, 1986) was an Argentine writer who is considered to be one of the foremost South American writers of the 20th century. A poet and an essayist, Borges is generally best-known for his fictional short stories.
Life
Borges was born in Buenos Aires. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was a lawyer and a psychology teacher, who also had literary aspirations ("he tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt," Borges once said. "He composed some very good sonnets"). Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, was a translator. His father's family was part Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and British; his mother's Spanish, Catalan, and possibly Portuguese. At his home, both Spanish and English were spoken, so from earliest childhood Borges was effectively bilingual, and learned to read in English before Spanish. He grew up in the suburban neighborhood of Palermo in a large house with an extensive library.
The "full" form of Borges's name is Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo, but he never used this form.
Jorge Guillermo Borges was forced into early retirement from the legal profession owing to the same failing eyesight that would eventually afflict his son, and in 1914, the family moved to Geneva, where Borges senior was treated by a Geneva eye specialist while Borges and his sister Norah (born 1902) attended school. There Borges learned French and taught himself German, receiving his BA from the Collège of Geneva in 1918.
After World War I ended, three years took the Borges family to Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Sevilla, and Madrid. In Spain, Borges became a member of avant-garde Ultraist literary movement. His first poem, "Hymn to the Sea," written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published in the magazine Grecia (Spanish: Greece).
In 1921, Borges returned with his family to Buenos Aires where he imported the doctrine of Ultraism and launched his career as a writer by publishing poems and essays in literary journals. Borges's first collection of poetry was Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923). He contributed to the avant-garde review Martín Fierro (whose "art for art's sake" approach contrasted to that of the more politically-involved "Boedo Group" of Roberto Arlt), co-founded the journals Prisma (1921 - 1922, a broadsheet distributed largely by pasting copies to walls in Buenos Aires) and Proa (1922 - 1926). He was, from the first issue, a regular contributor to Sur, founded in 1931, by Victoria Ocampo, which became Argentina's most important literary journal. Ocampo herself introduced Borges to Adolfo Bioy Casares, who was to become Borges's frequent collaborator and Ocampo's brother-in-law, as well as a well-known Argentine writer of fiction in his own right.
In 1933 he was appointed editor of the literary supplement of the newspaper Crítica, and it was there that the pieces that would later be published in the grandly titled Historia universal de la infamia (Universal History of Infamy) appeared. These pieces laid somewhere between non-fictional essays and fictional short stories, using fictional techniques to tell essentially true stories, and literary forgeries, which typically claimed to be translations of passages from famous but seldom-read works. In the following years, he served as literary adviser for the publishing house Emecé Editores and wrote weekly columns for El Hogar, which appeared from 1936 to 1939.
Borges's father died in 1938, a great blow to him because the two had been unusually close. At New Year's 1939, Borges suffered a severe head wound in an accident; during treatment for that wound, he nearly died of blood poisoning. While he recovered from the accident, he started writing traditional fiction, and his first collection of short stories, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths) appeared in 1941. The book included 'El sur', a piece that incorporated some autobiographical elements, notably the accident, and which the writer regarded as his personal favorite. Though generally well received, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan failed to garner the literary prizes many in his circle expected for it. Ocampo dedicated a large portion of the July 1941 issue of Sur to a "Reparation for Borges"; numerous leading writers and critics from Argentina and throughout the Spanish-speaking world contributed writings to the project.
Starting in 1937, Borges had been working at the Miguel Cané branch of the Buenos Aires Municipal Library as the first assistant. When Juan Perón came to power in 1946 he was effectively fired, being "promoted" to the job of poultry and rabbit inspector for the Buenos Aires municipal market (which he immediately resigned). His offenses against the Peronistas up to that time had apparently consisted of little more than adding his signature to pro-democratic petitions, but shortly after his resignation he addressed the Argentine Society of Letters, saying, in his characteristic style, "Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy."
Left without a job, his vision beginning to fade, and not able to fully support himself as a writer, Borges began a new career as a public lecturer. Despite a certain amount of political persecution, he was reasonably successful in this, and became an increasingly public figure, obtaining appointments as President (1950 - 1953) of the Argentine Society of Writers and as Professor of English and American Literature (1950 - 1955) at the Argentine Association of English Culture. His short story Emma Zunz was turned into a film (under the name of Días de odio, which in English became Days of Wrath) in 1954 by Argentine director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson. Around this time, Borges began writing screenplays.
In 1955, and after the initiative of Ocampo, the new anti-Peronist military government appointed him head of the National Library. By that time, he had become fully blind. Sarcastically, he wrote,
Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche,
Esta demostración de la maestría,
De Dios, que con magnífica ironía,
Me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.
Nobody should think that I, by tear or reproach, make light
Of the mastery of God who,
With excellent irony,
Gave me at once both books and night.[1] (http://library.gmu.edu/mv/presentation.html)
The following year he received the National Prize for Literature and the first of many honorary doctorates, this one from the University of Cuyo (Argentina). From 1956 to 1970, Borges also held a position as a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires, while frequently holding temporary appointments at other universities.
Being unable to read and write, he relied on his mother, with whom he had always been personally close, and who began to work with him as his personal secretary.
Borges's international fame dates approximately from the early 1960s. In 1961, he received the Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett; the Italian government named him Commendatore; and the University of Texas at Austin appointed him for one year to the Tinker chair. This led to his first lecture tour of the United States. The first translations of his work into English were to follow in 1962, with lecture tours of Europe and the Andean region of South America in subsequent years. In 1965, the United Kingdom granted him an O.B.E. Dozens of other honors were to accumulate over the years.
In 1967, Borges began a five-year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, thanks to which became better known in the English-speaking world.
He also continued to publish books, among them El libro de los seres imaginarios(The Book of Imaginary Beings, 1967), El informe de brodie (Dr. Brodie's Report, 1970), and El libro de arena (The Book of Sand, 1975). He also lectured prolifically. Many of these lectures were gathered in volumes such as Siete noches (Seven Nights) and Nueve ensayos dantescos.
When Perón returned from exile and was re-elected president in 1973, Borges resigned as director of the National Library.
In 1975, after the death of his mother, Borges started his series of visits to countries all over the world, and continued traveling until his death.
Borges was married twice. In 1967 he married an old friend, the recently widowed Elsa Astete Millán. The marriage lasted three years. After the divorce, Borges moved back in with his mother. During his last years, Borges lived with María Kodama, with whom he had been studying Anglo-Saxon for a number of years, and who also served as his personal secretary. In 1984, they produced an account of their journeys in different places of the world under the name Atlas, with text by Borges and photographs by Kodama. They married in 1986, months before his death.
Borges died of liver cancer in Geneva in 1986, having chosen to return at the end of his life to the city in which he had studied as an undergraduate.
Work
In addition to his short stories for which he is most famous, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, several screenplays, and a considerable volume of literary criticism, prologues, and reviews, edited numerous anthologies, and was a prominent translator of English- and French- and German-language literature into Spanish (and of Old English and Norse works as well). His blindness (which, like his father's, developed in adulthood) strongly influenced his later writing. Paramount among his intellectual interests are elements of mythology, mathematics, theology, philosophy, and, as a personal integration of these, Borges' sense of literature as recreation — all of these disciplines are sometimes treated as a writer's playthings and at other times treated very seriously.
Borges lived through most of the twentieth century, and so was rooted in the Modernist period of culture and literature. His fiction is profoundly learned, and always concise. Like his contemporary Vladimir Nabokov and the somewhat older James Joyce, he combined an interest in his native land with far broader interests. He also shared their multilingualism and their playfulness with language, but while Nabokov and Joyce tended, as their lives went on, toward progressively larger works, Borges remained a miniaturist. Also in contrast to Joyce and Nabokov, Borges's work progressed away from what he referred to as "the baroque," while theirs moved towards it: Borges's later writing style is far more transparent and naturalistic than his early style.
Many of his most popular stories concern the nature of time, infinity, mirrors, labyrinths, reality, and identity. A number of stories focus on fantastic themes, such as a library containing every possible 410-page text ("The Library of Babel"), a man who forgets nothing he experiences ("Funes, the Memorious"), an artifact through which the user can see everything in the universe ("The Aleph"), and a year of time standing still, given to a man standing before a firing squad ("The Secret Miracle"). The same Borges told more and less realistic stories of South American life, stories of folk heroes, streetfighters, soldiers, gauchos, detectives, historical figures. He mixed the real and the fantastic and fact with fiction. On several occasions, especially early in his career, these mixtures sometimes crossed the line into the realm of hoax or literary forgery.
Borges's abundant nonfiction includes astute film and book reviews, short biographies, and longer philosophical musings on topics such as the nature of dialogue, language, and thought, and the relationships between them. His non-fiction also explores many of the themes that are found in his fiction. Essays such as "The History of the Tango" or his writings on the epic poem Martín Fierro explore specifically Argentine themes, such as the identity of the Argentinian people and of various Argentine subcultures. His interest in fantasy, philosophy, and the art of translation are evident in articles such as "The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights, while The Book of Imaginary Beings is a thoroughly and obscurely researched bestiary of mythical creatures, in the preface of which Borges wrote, "There is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition." Borges's interest in fantasy was shared by Bioy Casares, with whom Borges coauthored several collections of tales between 1942 and 1967.
Borges composed poetry throughout his life. As his eyesight waned (it came and went, with a struggle between advancing age and advances in eye surgery), Borges increasingly focused on writing poetry, because he could memorize an entire work in progress. His poems embrace the same wide range of interests as his fiction, along with issues that emerge in his critical works and translations, and from more personal musings. This breadth of interest can be found in his fiction, nonfiction, and poems. For example, his interest in philosophical idealism is reflected in the fictional world of Tlön in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius", in his essay "New Refutation of Time", and in his poem "Things." Similarly, a common thread runs through his story "The Circular Ruins" and his poem "The Golem."
As well as his own original work, Borges was notable as a translator into Spanish. At the age of ten, he translated a story by Oscar Wilde into Spanish. At the end of his life he produced a Spanish-language version of the Prose Edda. Borges also translated (whilst simultaneously subtly transforming) the works of, among others, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Rudyard Kipling, Herman Melville, André Gide, William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Sir Thomas Browne, and G. K. Chesterton. In a number of essays and lectures, Borges assessed the art of translation and articulated his own view of translation. Borges held the view that a translation may improve upon an original, and that alternative and potentially contradictory renderings of the same work can be equally valid, and further that an original or literal translation can be unfaithful to the original work.
Borges also wrote in two very unusual literary forms: the literary forgery and the review of an imaginary work; the latter, which may be his own invention, was later further developed by Stanislaw Lem in his Wielkosc Urojona (Warsaw, 1973, translated into English 1984 by Marc E. Heine under the title Imaginary Magnitude). Borges's best-known set of literary forgeries date from his early work as a translator and literary critic with a regular column in the Argentine magazine El Hogar. Along with publishing numerous legitimate translations, he also published original works after the style of the likes of Emanuel Swedenborg or The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, originally passing them off as translations of things he had come upon in his reading. Several of these are gathered in the Universal History of Infamy. He continued this pattern of literary forgery at several points his career, for example sneaking three short, falsely attributed, pieces into his otherwise legitimate and carefully researched anthology El matrero.
At times, confronted with an idea for a work that bordered on the conceptual, Borges chose, instead of following through the idea in the obvious way by writing a piece that fulfilled the concept, to write a review of a nonexistent work, writing as though this work had already been created by some other person. The most famous example of this is "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", which imagines a twentieth-century Frenchman who so immerses himself in the world of sixteenth-century Spain that he can sit down and create a large portion of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote — verbatim — not by having memorized Cervantes's work, but as an "original" work of his own mind. Borges's "review" of the work of the fictional Menard effectively discusses the resonances that Don Quixote has picked up over the centuries since it was written, by way of overtly discussing how much richer Menard's work is than Cervantes' (verbatim identical) work.
Borges as Argentine
Maintaining a universal perspective, Borges belittled the notion of race and derided nationalism, yet his writing often reflected the sensibilities of the particular multicultural environment from which he emerged. Argentina, despite its origin as a Spanish colony, is a very multi-ethnic country, and Buenos Aires, the capital, a very cosmopolitan city. This was even truer during the generally prosperous era of Borges's childhood and youth than in the early 21st Century, when the Argentine economy has suffered through several recent cycles of boom and bust.
At the time of Argentine independence in 1816, the Argentine population was predominantly criollo, which in Argentine usage generally means people of Spanish ancestry, although it can allow for a small admixture of other ancestry. The Argentine national identity formed over a period of decades after formal independence, and during that period there was substantial immigration from countries and regions as diverse as Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Russia, Turkey, Syria, the United Kingdom, Austria-Hungary, Portugal, Poland, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, North America, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and China, with the Italians and Spanish forming the largest influx. This was quite a melting pot, but with the indigenous Amerind population all but squeezed out. A multicultural Buenos Aires populates Borges' fiction, and ultimately inspires Borges' synthesis of diverse Asian, European, and Middle Eastern sources.
Borges himself had an English paternal grandmother who, around 1870, married the criollo Francisco Borges, a man with a military command and a historic role in the civil wars in what is now Argentina and Uruguay. Spurred by pride in his family's heritage, Borges often used those civil wars as settings in fiction and quasi-fiction (e.g. "The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz," "The Dead Man," "Avelino Arredondo") as well as poetry ("General Quiroga Rides to His Death in a Carriage"). Borges's maternal great-grandfather was another military hero, whom Borges immortalized in the poem "A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suarez, Victor at Junín."
Borges's first book, the poetry collection Fervor de Buenos Aires (Passion for Buenos Aires), appeared in 1923. Borges contributed to a few avant garde publications in the early 1920s, including one called Martín Fierro, named after the major work of nineteenth-century Argentine literature, Martín Fierro, a gauchesque poem by José Hernández, published in two parts, in 1872 and 1880.
Main article: Borges on Martín Fierro
The poem's central character, Martín Fierro, is a gaucho, a free, poor, pampas-dweller, who is illegally drafted to serve at a border fort to defend against the Indians; he ultimately deserts and becomes a gaucho matrero, the Argentinian equivalent of a North American western outlaw. Initially, along with other young writers of his generation, Borges rallied around the fictional Martín Fierro as the symbol of a characteristic Argentine sensibility, not tied to European values, but as Borges matured, he criticized nationalism in politics and literature and came to see the poem in a much more complex light. His 1953 book of essays on the poem, El "Martín Fierro", separates his great admiration for the aesthetic virtues of the work from his rather mixed opinion of the moral virtues of its protagonist. He uses the occasion to tweak the noses of arch-nationalist interpreters of the poem, but is utterly disdainful in his criticism of those such as Eleuterio Tiscornia who fail to understand its specifically Argentinian character.
Borges as World Citizen
Besides his Argentine roots, Borges's writing is steeped not only in European influences, but informed by scholarship and mysticism from Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and Jewish sources (albeit largely lacking in indigenous Amerind sources, owing to the near-destruction of that population and culture in the Southern Cone). Maintaining a universal perspective, Borges belittled the notion of race and derided nationalism.
Works
Quotations
"Mirrors and copulation are obscene, for they increase the numbers of mankind." - the dogma of a fictional religion in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
Original Book-length Publications
This list follows the chronology of original (typically Spanish-language) publication in books, based in part on the rather comprehensive (but incomplete) bibliography online at http://www.hum.au.dk/romansk/borges. The following list focuses on book-length publication of original work (including collaborative work): it does not include individual short stories, poems, and translations published in magazines, nor does it include books (such as anthologies of fantasy and of Argentine literature) that Borges edited or co-edited. It also excludes several chapbooks, privately printed editions, etc. of under 50 pages each and does not attempt to identify first publication dates of individual stories, poems, etc. ISBNs refer to recent editions, not original publications. (Many English-language titles and ISBNs still missing. Some of the volumes might be better classified in terms of genre; in particular, some of the later works lack classifications.)
Fervor de Buenos Aires, 1923, poetry.
Inquisiciones, 1925, essays. English title: Inquiries.
Luna de Enfrente, 1925, poetry.
El tamaño de mi esperanza, 1925, essays.
El idioma de los argentinos, 1928, essays.
Cuaderno San Martín, 1929, poetry.
Evaristo Carriego, 1930, a tightly linked collection of essays on the Argentine poet Evaristo Carriego. An expanded edition was published in 1955, with essays on other Argentine topics (ISBN 8420633453).
Discusión, 1932, essays and literary criticism. An expanded version was published in 1957.
Historia universal de la infamia, 1935, short non-fictional stories and literary forgeries (ISBN 8420633143). The edition of 1958 adds a prologue and several more literary forgeries. English title: A Universal History of Infamy, 1972, (ISBN 8420613096). Several web sources mis-attribute this as Historia universal de la infancia (which would be A Universal History of Childhood).
Historia de la eternidad, 1936, essays.
El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, 1941, short stories. English title: Garden of Forking Paths, published as a section of Ficciones.
Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi, 1942, comic detective fiction, written with Adolfo Bioy Casares, originally published under the name H. Bustos Domecq. English title: Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, 1981.
Poemas : 1922-1943, 1943, poetry. This was a complete republication of his three previous volumes of poetry, plus some additional poems. Some of the republished poems were modified for this edition.
Ficciones, 1944, short stories, an expanded version of El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, 1941. The 1956 edition adds 3 stories. US title Ficciones, 1962 (ISBN 0394172442). Also published in UK as "Fictions".
Un modelo para la muerte, 1946, detective fiction, written with Adolfo Bioy Casares, originally published under the name B. Suarez Lynch. The original publication was a private printing of only 300 copies. The first commercial printing was in 1970.
Dos fantasías memorables, 1946, two fantasy stories, written with Adolfo Bioy Casares. Like Un modelo para la muerte, the original publication was a private printing of 300 copies, with no commercial printing until 1970.
El Aleph, 1949, essays and short stories. A slightly expanded edition was published in 1957. English title: The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969. The English-language edition is an incomplete translation of the Spanish-language book, but contains an autobiographical essay originally written for The New Yorker. Borges's Spanish-language Autobiografía (2000) is simply a translation of this English-language essay into Spanish.
Aspectos de la poesía gauchesca, 1950, literary criticism.
Antiguas literaturas germánicas, 1951, literary criticism, written with Delia Ingenieros.
La muerte y la brújula, 1951, short stories selected from earlier published volumes.
Otras inquisiciones 1937-1952, 1952, essays and literary criticism. English title: Other Inquisitions 1937-1952, 1964 (ISBN 0292760027).
Historia de la eternidad, 1953, essays, short stories, and literary criticism.
El "Martín Fierro", 1953, essays on the epic Argentine poem Martín Fierro, written with Margarita Guerrero, ISBN 8420619337.
Poemas : 1923-1953, 1954, poetry. Essentially the same as Poemas : 1922-1943, but with the addition of a few newer poems.
Los orilleros; El paraíso de los creyentes, 1955, 2 screenplays, written with Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Leopoldo Lugones, 1955, literary criticism, written with Betina Edelborg.
La hermana de Eloísa, 1955, short stories. This slim book consists of two stories by Borges, two by Luisa Mercedes Levinson, and the title story, on which they colloborated.
Manual de zoología fantástica, 1957, short pieces about imaginary beings, written with Margarita Guerrero.
Libro del cielo y del infierno, 1960, essays and one poem, written with Adolfo Bioy Casares. Some of this material comes from Antiguas literaturas germánicas, 1951.
El Hacedor, 1960, poetry, first published as the ninth volume in his Obras completas (Complete Works), a project which had begun in 1953. English title: Dreamtigers, 1964.
Antología Personal, 1961, essays, poetry, literary criticism, some of it not previously published in book form. English title: A Personal Anthology, 1967 (ISBN 0330233459).
El lenguaje de Buenos Aires, 1963, long essays, written with José Edmundo Clemente. The 1968 edition adds several new essays by Clemente.
Introducción a la literatura inglesa, 1965, literary criticism, written with María Esther Vázquez.
Para las seis cuerdas, 1965, lyrics for tangos and milongas. An expanded edition came out in 1970, but all of the poems in either edition can also be found in El otro, el mismo, 1969. Astor Piazzolla composed the music for these tangos and milongas, the result of which was a record praised by Borges.
Literaturas germánicas medievales, 1966, literary criticism, written with María Esther Vázquez. This is a reworking of Antiguas literaturas germánicas, 1951.
Crónicas de Bustos Domecq, literary forgery/essays, 1967, written with Adolfo Bioy Casares. An odd book: deliberately pompous critical essays by an imaginary author. English title: Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, 1976.
Introducción a la literatura norteamericana, 1967, literary criticism, written with Esther Zemborain de Torres. English title: An Introduction to American Literature, 1971, (ISBN 0805204032).
El libro de los seres imaginarios, 1967, expansion of Manual de zoología fantástica, 1957, written with Marguerita Guerrero. English title: The Book of Imaginary Beings, 1969; the English-language volume is actually a further expansion of the work.
Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, 1968, with Richard Burgin, originally published in English.
Nueva Antología Personal, 1968, essays, poetry, literary criticism, some of it not previously published in book form. This includes quite a few previously unpublished poems, and has very little intersection with Antología Personal, 1961. English title New Personal Anthology.
Museo, 1969?, poetry (ISBN 9500424134).
Elogio de la Sombra, 1969, poetry. English title In Praise of Darkness, 1974.
El otro, el mismo, 1969, poetry, including a complete reprint of Para las seis cuerdas, 1965.
El informe de Brodie, short stories, 1970. English title: Dr. Brodie's Report, 1971.
El congreso, 1971, essays.
Nuevos Cuentos de Bustos Domecq, (1972? Borges, a Reader says 1977), written with Adolfo Bioy Casares.
El oro de los tigres, 1972, poetry. English title: The Gold of the Tigers, Selected Later Poems, 1977. The English-language volume also includes poems from La Rosa Profunda.
El libro de arena, 1975, short stories, English title: The Book of Sand, 1977.
La Rosa Profunda, 1975, poetry.
La moneda de hierro, 1976, poetry.
Diálogos, 1976, conversations between Borges and Ernesto Sabato, transcribed by Orlando Barone.
¿Que es el budismo?, 1976, lectures, written with Alicia Jurado, (ISBN 8420638749).
Historia de la noche, 1977, poetry.
Prólogos con un prólogo de prólogos, 1977, a collection of numerous book prologues Borges had written over the years.
Borges El Memorioso, 1977, conversations with Antonio Carrizo (ISBN 9681613511). The title is a play on Borges's story "Funes El Memorioso", known in English as "Funes, the Memorious".
Rosa y Azul: La rosa de Paracelso; Tigres azules, 1977, (genre?).
Borges, oral, 1979, lectures.
Siete noches, 1980, lectures. English title, Seven Nights.
La cifra, 1981, poetry.
Nueve ensayos dantescos, 1982, essays on Dante.
Un argumento, 1983, (genre?).
Veinticinco Agosto 1983 y otros cuentos, 1983, short stories
Altas, 1984, stories and essays, written with María Kodama.
Los conjurados, 1985, poetry.
Textos cautivos, 1986, literary criticism, book reviews, short biographies of authors, translations. This book collects the columns Borges wrote in the popular Buenos Aires magazine El Hogar 1936-1939.
This Craft of Verse, 2000, lectures, edited by Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu, a collection of six originally English-language lectures by Borges dating from 1967-1968, transcribed from recently discovered tapes. (ISBN 0674008200).
There are also 1953, 1974, 1984, and 1989 Obras completas (complete works) with varying degrees of completeness and a 1981 Obras completas en coloboración (complete collaborative works).
Several bibliographies also choose to include a collection of previously published essays, published in 1971 under the name Narraciones.
Some web-based lists misattribute El Caudillo, (1921 novel), to Borges. It was actually written by his father, also a Jorge Borges.
Book-length interviews in English
Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, 1969, by Richard Burgin
Borges on Writing, 1973, edited by Norman Thomas diGiovanni, Daniel Halpern, and Frank MacShane
Screenplays
Los Orilleros (The Hoodlums) (published in Spanish 1955) (with Adolfo Bioy Casares)
El Paraíso de los Creyentes ("The Paradise of Believers") (published in Spanish 1955) (with Adolfo Bioy Casares)
Invasión, 1968, directed by Hugo Santiago.
Other works of note
Los mejores cuentos policiales, 1943, with Adolfo Bioy Casares. Primarily translations of English-language detective fiction, plus one originally French-language piece and some Spanish-language pieces (including Borges's own "La muerte y la brújula").
El compadrito: su destino, sus barrios, su música 1945, anthology of Argentine writers, including articles and a prologue by Borges himself, and articles by Evaristo Carriego and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Edited with Silvina Bullrich.
Los mejores cuentos policiales; 2da serie, 1962, with Adolfo Bioy Casares. Primarily translations of English-language detective fiction, plus one of their own Bustos Domecq stories.
El matrero, 1970. This anthology of Argentine writers, edited by Borges, contains several pieces overtly by Borges, but also contains three short Borgesian literary forgeries, "Un hijo de Moreira", "Otra versión del Fausto", and "Las leyes del juego."
Libro de sueños, 1976, mostly translations and paraphrases of short excerpts from world literature. Some are narrations of dreams, some are about dreams, some merely dreamlike. There are a small number of original pieces and other Spanish-language pieces as well.
Poesía Juvenil de J.L. Borges, 1978, a collection of poems written 1919-1922, with an extensive introduction (rather longer than the poems) by Carlos Meneses.
Textos recobrados 1919 - 1929, 1997, previously unpublished early works, both prose (in a variety of genres) and poetry (ISBN 8478883371).
Textos recobrados 1931 - 1955, 2002, previously unpublished stories, essays, poems, newspaper articles, book and movie reviews, etc. (ISBN 950042326X).
[edit]
English-language publication
Borges's work was first published in book form in English in 1962, with the translation and publication of Ficciones (1944) and the collection known as Labyrinths.
In 1967, Borges began a five-year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, thanks to which became better known in the English-speaking world. Di Giovanni would continue to be his primary English-language translator from that time forward.
Collections originally in English
This is a listing of book-length English-language volumes that are not simply translations of entire Spanish-language books; those are listed above.
Labyrinths, 1962. This English-language anthology draws from numerous Spanish-language works.
Extraordinary Tales, 1967, with Adolfo Bioy Casares. (ISBN 0285647121).
Selected Poems 1923-1967, a bilingual edition.
Borges, a Reader, 1981.
Obras Completas, 1989.
Everything and Nothing, 1997, several stories from Ficciones combined with two lectures from Seven Nights.
Collected Fictions, 1998.
Short Stories
"The Chamber of Statues" (1933)
"The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morell" (1933)
"The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kotsuke no Suke" (1933)
"The Mirror of Ink" (1933)
"Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities" (1933)
"Streetcorner Man" (1933)
"Tom Castro, the Implausible Imposter" (1933)
"The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate" (1933)
"The Wizard Postponed" (1933)
"The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv" (1934)
"Tale of the Two Dreamers" (1934)
"A Theologian in Death" (1934)
"The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan" (1935)
"The Circular Ruins" (1941)
"The Lottery in Babylon" (1941)
"The Library of Babel" (1941)
"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1941)
"Funes the Memorious" (1944)
"Death and the Compass" (1944)
"The Aleph" (1945)
"A Double for Mohammed" (1946)
"The Generous Enemy" (1946)
"Of Exactitude in Science" (1946)
"Averroes's Search" (1949)
"The Zahir" (1949)
"The Immortal" (1949)
"The Intruder" (1966)
"The Meeting" (1969)
"Rosendo's Tale" (1969)
"Doctor Brodie's Report" (1970)
"The Duel" (1970)
"The Elder Lady" (1970)
"The End of the Duel" (1970)
"The Gospel According to Mark" (1970)
"Guayaquil" (1970)
"Juan Muraña" (1970)
"The Unworthy Friend" (1970)
"Utopia of a Tired Man" (1975) (Nebula award nominee)
"Avelino Arredondo" (1975)
"The Book of Sand" (1975)
"The Bribe" (1975)
"The Congress" (1975)
"The Disk" (1975)
"The Mirror and the Mask" (1975)
"The Night of the Gifts" (1975)
"Odin" (with Delia Ingenieros)
"The Other" (1975)
"The Sect of the Thirty" (1975)
"There Are More Things" (1975)
"Ulrikke" (1975)
"Undr" (1975)
"August 25, 1983" (1982)
"The Rose of Paracelsus" (1983)
"Shakespeare's Memory" (1983)
"Blue Tigers" (1983)
Quasi-Fiction
"Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote"
"The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz"
"The Dead Man"
"Avelino Arredondo"
"An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain"
Essays
"Partial Magic in the Quixote", Labyrinths |
| |
| Jorge Luis Borges Resources |
| |
|
|
|
