Buenos Aires (Argentina), 1889 – Geneva (Switzerland), 1986
By Flávio Aguiar
One of the foundational pillars of 20th-century Latin American literature, he ensured both the renewal and the re-engagement with Western cultural roots for the continent. He created the Martín Fierro group, a mouthpiece for the literary avant-garde in Argentina during the 1920s and 1930s, and dedicated himself to short stories, poetry, essays, literary criticism, novels, and translation.
Renowned for his extraordinary erudition, the Argentine writer maintained a conservative political stance toward his country’s political realities, a position that sparked controversies and criticisms among committed intellectuals. María Kodama offered some defense, stating: “Borges supported the dictatorship because he associated the military of the 1970s with those from 1810, the time of the independence wars.” On the other hand, he initiated an aesthetic transformation for which narrative will forever be grateful.
The complex universe he constructed around literature since adolescence—surrounded by the intimacy and closeness of books, libraries, and knowledge—was reflected in his entire literary journey. His early works were marked by melancholic lyricism and subjectivity, such as the poetry collections Luna de enfrente (1925), Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), and Cuaderno San Martín (1929). His publications in the 1930s and 1940s shifted towards narrative with Historia universal de la infamia (1935) and Ficciones (1944).
These fictional works are credited with pioneering new aesthetic forms, resulting in texts defined by the unexpected and the fantastic, a genre he helped found. These fictions developed within a unique, subjective, and metaphysical universe with strong symbolism, enabling the expression of his convictions and his denial of a single, stable reality. Such convictions justified his view of realist art as deception.
Bringing reality to its essence became the central motive of his writing, weaving knowledge with sentiment to form a vast tableau of themes where mysticism, philosophy, bestiaries, syllogisms, ethics, narrative, imaginary mathematics, thrillers, theology, geometries, myths, semiotics, alchemy, folklore, tango, historiography, and landscapes intersect. Metaphysics, what Julio Cortázar would later describe as the inexplicable, became the foundation of his works in the 1940s and 1950s, such as El Aleph (1949) and Cuentos fantásticos (1955), during which he also taught English at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and delivered lectures on literature.
He interacted with writers and critics like Adolfo Bioy Casares and Pedro Henríquez Ureña, publishing Antología clásica de la literatura argentina with them in 1937. He founded the magazine Prisma and contributed to Proa and Sur. His accolades include the National Literature Prize (1956), the International Formentor Prize for Literature (1961), the Cervantes Prize (1979), and an honorary doctorate from Oxford University (1971). Other works include El informe de Brodie (1970) and El libro de arena (1975).
