Jorge Luis Borges

Dimitris Stamatios | November 14, 2022

Summary

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (born August 24, 1899 in Buenos Aires, died June 14, 1986 in Geneva) is an Argentine writer, poet and essayist. He published short essays, short stories and poetry. His works have become the object of insightful analyses and ambiguous interpretations.

Borges claimed to be the heir of two traditions of his ancestors: military and literary. His family tree is linked to well-known Argentine, Anglo-Saxon and Portuguese families. He was linked to some military men who took an active part in Argentina”s liberation struggles, such as Francisco Narciso de Laprida, who led the Assembly in Tucuman and signed Argentina”s Act of Independence; Francisco Borges Lafinur – grandfather on his father”s side – was a Uruguayan colonel; Edward Young Haslam – great-grandfather on his father”s side – was a Romantic poet who published one of the first English-language titles in the Río de Plata, the Southern Cross; Manuel Isidoro Suárez – great-grandfather on his mother”s side – was a colonel who fought in the wars of independence; Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur – uncle of his grandfather on his father”s side – was an Argentine poet, author of numerous romantic and patriotic works and a professor of philosophy; Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida – grandfather on his mother”s side – was a military man who fought against Juan Manuele de Rosas.

The writer”s father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, a lawyer, also decided to pursue psychology. He was an avid reader and had literary aspirations, which he concretized in the novella El caudillo and several poems; in addition, he translated Omar Khayyam into English. Borges often quoted his father”s words: “He showed me the power of poetry: the fact that words are not only a means of communication, but also magic symbols and music.” His mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, was Uruguayan. She learned English from her husband and translated several works in that language into Spanish. The writer”s family had Spanish, Portuguese and English roots; while his mother”s family had Spanish and possibly Portuguese roots. Not only was Spanish spoken in the Borges family home, but also English.

Borges was born on August 24, 1899, at eight months pregnant, in a typical late 19th century porteño house with a courtyard and water tank. The house was located at 840 Tucumán Street, but the artist”s childhood was further north, at 2135 Serrano Street in the Palermo neighborhood. He read and wrote from the age of four. As both Spanish and English were spoken in his home, Borges was bilingual from the beginning.

In 1905, he began home schooling with a British governess. A year later, he wrote his first short story, La visera fatal (The Fatal Visor), based on Don Quixote. He also sketched a short essay on Greek mythology. At the age of nine, he translated Oscar Wilde”s short story The Happy Prince from English, a text that was published in El País newspaper and signed with Borges” father”s name. In the Palermo neighborhood, which at the time was a poor neighborhood populated by immigrants and troublemakers, he learned the fate of his fellow residents, who later populated his short stories.

Borges began his school education directly from the fourth grade. He began compulsory education at the age of nine. Public school was a traumatic experience for Borges: classmates mocked the smug, glasses-wearing and panic-dressed boy, who, in addition, had no interest in sports and stuttered. In the four years he attended the institution, Borges learned little more than the jargon of the Buenos Aires suburbs and various strategies on how to pass unnoticed.

In 1914, Borges” father was forced to end his career and retire due to progressive blindness, which also affected his son a few years later. He and his family moved to Europe to undergo specialized eye surgery. Fleeing World War I, they settled in Geneva, where young Borges and his sister Norah (b. 1902) attended school. Borges prepared for matriculation at the French-language Jean Calvin Lyceum. The new environment, which was Protestant in spirit, was quite different from that at his earlier school in Palermo; his new classmates, often foreigners as well, appreciated his experience and intelligence and did not scoff at his speech defect.

In those days, Borges read mainly French Realist novelists and Expressionist poets and Symbolists, especially Rimbaud. Eventually he discovered Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Carlyle and Chesterton. Using only a dictionary, he learned German and wrote his first sentences in French.

Thanks to the end of hostilities and already after the death of her grandmother on her mother”s side, Leonor Suárez, the Borges family moved to Spain in 1919. Initially they lived in Barcelona, but eventually settled in Palma de Mallorca. In the latter city, Borges wrote two books that he did not publish: Los ritmos rojos, a poem praising the October Revolution, and Los naipes del tahúr, a collection of short stories. In Madrid and Seville, he participated in the ultraist literary movement, which he later led in Argentina and which significantly influenced his first lyrical works. He collaborated in the poetry and literary criticism sections of magazines: Ultra, Grecia, Cervantes, Hélices and Cosmópolis. He published his first poem, Himno al mar, written in the style of Walt Whitman, in Grecia on December 31, 1919.

During this time he met his future brother-in-law, Guillermo de Torre, and some of the most important Spanish writers of the era, such as Rafael Cansinos-Assens, who was a regular at the famed Café Colonial and whose mastery he always admired, Ramon Gómez de la Serna, Ramon del Valle-Inclán and Gerardo Diego.

Also read, history – Surrealism

The beginnings of a literary career

On March 4, 1921, together with his grandmother on his father”s side, Frances Haslam Arnett, who had joined the family in Geneva in 1916, with his parents and sister, Borges returned to Buenos Aires aboard the Reina Victoria Eugenia. The writer, paradox philosopher and comedian-surrealist Macedonio Fernández, an old family friend, was waiting for them at the port. The renewed contact with Buenos Aires awakened in the poet a desire full of sincere passion to once again “discover” his hometown. Thus began the mythicization of suburban neighborhoods on which his idealization of reality is invariably based. Back in Buenos Aires, he published in the Spanish magazine Cosmópolis, founded the wall magazine Prisma (only two issues were published) and wrote for Nosotros, headed by Alfredo Bianchi. It was also during this time that he met sixteen-year-old Concepción Guerrero, with whom he fell in love. In 1922, together with Eduardo González Lanuza, he visited Leopoldo Lugonesa to deliver him the current issue of Prisma. In August 1924, with the help of Ricardo Güiraldes, author of Don Segundo Sombra, Alfredo Brandán Caraffa and Pablo Rojas Paz (although they were slow to move away from this aesthetic), he founded the ultra-ist magazine Proa.

In 1923, on the eve of his second trip to Europe, Borges published his first collection of poetry, Fervor de Buenos Aires, in which, the author himself claimed, all his later work was outlined. This edition was prepared hastily: a lot of printing errors crept into it and, what”s more, the prologue was missing. The cover was created by his sister, Norah. It was published in an edition of about three hundred copies; the few pieces that have survived to this day are considered a treasure by bibliophiles, especially since some copies show handwritten corrections made by Borges himself. It is in Fervor de Buenos Aires that the writer emotionally confesses that, after all, “las calles de Buenos Aires

After another year in Spain, Borges settled in his hometown in 1924, where he collaborated with various literary magazines and worked on two additions to his books Luna de enfrente and Inquisiciones (which were never republished), to earn his reputation as a leader of the youngest avant-garde as early as 1925. Over the next thirty years, Borges became a recognized and also one of South America”s most widely polemicized writers. Tired of ultraism, he decided to create a new type of particularism, rooted in a metaphysical perspective of reality. He wrote stories and poems about the porteños of the Buenos Aires suburbs, the hot tango, and fatal brawls between adventurers, such as Man from the Suburbs (Hombre de la esquina rosada) and El puñal. He quickly grew tired of this as well and began to consider writing something fantastic or “magical,” until he produced some of his best-known at the turn of the decade (1930-1950): A Universal History of Wickedness (Historia universal de la infamia, 1935), Fictions (Ficciones, 1944), and Aleph (El Aleph, 1949).

Later, he also collaborated with Martín Fierro, one of the most important magazines for Argentine literature in the first half of the 20th century. He persistently pursued his Argentine roots, particularly those of the porteños, in poems such as Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), Luna de enfrente (1925) and Cuaderno de San Martín (1929). He created the words to numerous tango and milonga melodies, but was ashamed of “la sensiblería del inconsolable tango-canción (the cloyingness of the inconsolable tango-songs)” and the systematic treatment of lunfardo, which “infunde un aire artificioso a las sencillas coplas (breathed an artificial air into the simple songs).” In his writings and some of his novellas, Borges recounts the dubious “heroic” deeds of adventurers and their comrades, often portraying their primitive brutality in a tragic if not downright epic climate.

In 1930, Borges published an essay by Evaristo Carri and opened an exhibition by Uruguayan painter Pedro Figari. He also met a young writer, only seventeen years old, Adolfo Bioy Casares, who soon became his warm friend, and with whom he published numerous works.

In the first issue of the magazine Sur, edited by Victoria Ocampo, Borges included an article dedicated to “Colonel” Ascasubi. In addition to him, in the first issue, published in 1931, Victoria Ocampo herself, Waldo Frank, Alfonso Reyes Ochoa, Jules Supervielle, Ernest Ansermet, Walter Gropius, Ricardo Güiraldes and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle also published their works.

Two years later, Borges published a collection of essays and critical literary sketches called Discusión, in which he tackled subjects as diverse as la poesía gauchesca, the Kabbalah, philosophical topics, on the art of narration or even included his own impressions on the classics of cinema. On August 12, 1933, together with Ulyses Petit de Murat, he began publishing the magazine Revista Multicolor de los Sábados, a color supplement to the populist daily Crítica, which ran until October 1934.

In 1935 he published A Universal History of Wickedness, a series of short stories, among them Hombre de la esquina rosada. This book continues Borges” interest in the mythical side of Buenos Aires, which began with Evaristo Carri. A year later, another collection of essays, History of Eternity (Historia de la eternidad), was published, dealing with the subject of metaphor. By 1939 he was running his own column on literary criticism, primarily of foreign writers, in the biweekly El Hogar. There he posted biweekly book reviews, biographies of writers and essays on creativity. He also collaborated with Destiempo magazine, published by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Manuel Peyrou, and illustrated by Xul Solar. He translated Virginia Woolf”s A Room of One”s Own for Sur Publishing House and, a year later, Orlando by the same author. In 1937, he published Antología clásica de la literatura argentina.

Borges the avant-gardist, then terruñero (“full of love for his own land”), gave way in the 1930s to Borges of Sur – along with his cosmopolitanism; Borges the metaphysician, who spun musings on time, space, infinity, life and death and human destiny. One can also notice a change in style: he reduced his long and prosaic works to a more classical size.

The last years of this decade were bad for Borges: first his grandmother died, then, after a serious illness, his father (1938). Borges considered himself brave, but not brave enough to immediately enter the world of adult responsibility. Suddenly he had to start doing what others were already doing at a much earlier age: working, earning money for his family. Borges was lucky: with the help of poet Francisco Luis Bernárdez, he got a job in 1938 at the Miguel Cané municipal library in the Almagro port district. In this little-used library he was able to do what he was accustomed to – spend his days among books, writing and reading. Later, Borges himself suffered an accident (he hit his head on a window) that nearly led to his death from septicemia. He described his experience in the short story “South.” During his convalescence, he wrote a novella by Pierre Menard, author of “Don Quixote.” These experiences helped him when writing the following pages. Borges survived the critical moment thanks to questions he had been pondering for some time: Is empirical reality as illusory as the world of fantasy?

In 1940 he published Antología de literatura fantástica, written in collaboration with Bioy Casares y Silvina Ocampo, who married that same year, choosing Borges as their witness. He also wrote the prologue to Bioy Casares” book La invención de Morel. In 1941, he published Antología Poética Argentina and compiled a volume of short stories, The Garden of Forking Paths (El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan), which earned him the National Prize for Literature. A year later, Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi, a book of short stories written with Bioy Casares, was published. They signed it with the pseudonym “H. Bustos Domecq,” consisting of “Bustos,” the name of Borges” great-grandfather, and “Domecq,” the name of Casares” great-grandfather. Under the title Poemas (1923-1943), a poetic work on Borges” three earlier books was published in 1943, enriched with poems that had previously appeared in the daily La Nación and the magazine Sur. Again, together with Bioy Casares, he published the collection Los mejores cuentos policiales. By that time, Borges had already found his rightful place among the dwindling circle of the Argentine literary avant-garde. He received an honorary award from the Argentine Society of Writers (SADE) for his work Fictions.

During a meeting in August 1944 at the home of Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, Borges met Estela Canto, a young, attractive girl whose intelligence, background (from a farming family) and unconventionality caught the attention of the writer, who was used to upper middle-class women. Borges, despite the inappropriateness of the situation, fell in love. Estela was a vain and conceited woman – until her death she boasted that she had won the love and later the friendship of the writer, including boasting about her collection of love letters. These letters perfectly showed how emotional in life a man who hated sentimentalism in literature could be.

The character of Estela influenced certain aspects of the work Alef, one of Borges” best short stories. It was to her that he dedicated the short story, and even donated the original manuscript, which forty years later Estela sold at auction at Sotheby”s for $25,000 to the Spanish National Library. Causing disappointment to his mother, for whom Estela was someone of a lower class, Borges proposed marriage to her. He was met with rejection. The couple separated in 1952.

In collaboration with Silvina Bullrich, he published El compadrito in 1945, and a year later, with Bioy Casares, Un modelo para la muerte using the pseudonym “B. Suárez Lynch” and, as H. Bustos Domecq, Dos fantasías memorables, a collection of detective stories. Borges later explained that “Suárez” came from his grandfather”s name and “Lynch” represented the Irish branch of the Bioy family. He founded and headed the journal Los Anales de Buenos Aires (which ceased publication in December 1948, with the publication of its 23rd issue). Borges and Bioy continued to work together under a new pseudonym: “B. Lynch Davis.” Between 1947 and 1948, he wrote the essay The New Refutation of Time and published Obras Escogidas. In 1949 he completed a collection of short stories called Alef, a fantasy book that critics almost unanimously considered Borges” best collection of short stories.

In 1946, Juan Domingo Perón was elected president, defeating the Democratic Union. Borges, who supported the latter option, openly criticized the new government. His fame as an anti-Perónist followed him throughout his life. He manifested his attitude toward this government, which he considered a dictatorship, with these words, among others:

Borges was forced to give up his job at the library and was appointed Inspector of Fowl Markets by the government. His mother and sister, also anti-Peronists, were detained by the police. As a result of the situation, Borges began traveling around Argentina and Uruguay, giving lectures in various places. Because of this, he had to overcome his shyness and stammering with medical help. Necessity also forced him to take on the hard work of teaching English literature at the Instituto Libre de Segunda Enseñanza (the equivalent of a high school), and later also at the Catholic University.

Also read, biographies – Senapati of Mataram

Maturity

The early 1950s were marked by Borges” growing recognition in Argentina and abroad. The Association of Argentine Writers elected him president in 1950, a position he resigned three years later. He lectured at the University of the Republic in Uruguay, where he also published the essay Aspectos de la literatura gauchesca. In Mexico, he published Antiguas literaturas germánicas, written with Delia Ingenieros. That same year, the first French translation of Borges” short stories (Fictions) was published in Paris, and in Buenos Aires, a series of stories, Death and the Busole (La muerte y la brújula). In 1952, essays from the collection Otras inquisiciones were written, and a revised version of an essay on the language of the porteños, entitled El idioma de los argentinos, was published, along with José Edmundo Clemente”s El idioma de Buenos Aires. A second edition of Alef also appeared, enriched with new short stories and an essay by El Martín Fierro, which was reissued later that year. Under the supervision of José Edmundo Clemente, the Emecé publishing house began publishing collected works (Obras Completas). In 1954, director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson made the film Days of Hate, based on Borges” short story Emma Zunz.

After the military coup – dubbed the Liberal Revolution – that overthrew the Peronist government, Borges was appointed director of the National Library in 1955, a position he held for 18 years. In December of the same year, he was elected a member of the Argentine Academy of Literature. He published Los orilleros, El paraíso de los creyentes, Cuentos breves y extraordinarios, Poesía gauchesca, La hermana Eloísa and Leopoldo Lugones. He became a lecturer in the Department of German Literature and later also director of the Institute of German Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the University of Buenos Aires. Ciudad magazine dedicated an issue to Borges dedicated to his work. Fictions in Italian was published, under the title La Biblioteca di Babele, containing a description of an infinitely large hexagonal library. Through various accidents and several surgeries, the ophthalmologist forbade the writer to read and write. Borges was slowly losing his eyesight as a result of a hereditary disease that had previously afflicted his father. However, it was not a violent event, but a process. However, it did not prevent him from pursuing a career as a writer, essayist and lecturer, nor did it force him to give up reading or learning foreign languages – he was read aloud. Borges considered his appointment as director of the National Library and his diagnosis of eye disease that same year ironic.

In 1956, Borges taught a class on English literature at the University of Buenos Aires – he was appointed a professor at the university and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Cuyo. He was also elected president of the Association of Argentine Writers. From Montevideo, he severely criticized the deposed Peronist government and defended the Liberal Revolution. Through his support for the new government, he was condemned by Ernesto Sábato and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, among others. Sabato and Borges persisted in their polemic until 1973, although not through mutual hostility, but because of political motives. Thanks to a chance meeting in a library, Orlando Barone organized a series of meetings in which the two writers discussed literature, philosophy, cinema, linguistics and similar topics. The result was the book Diálogos: Borges-Sabato.

Between 1957 and 1960, Borges published Manual de zoología fantástica and The Creator (El Hacedor), collections of short texts and poems dedicated to Leopoldo Lugones. He has also updated a volume of Poemas and published the journal La Nación. In collaboration with Bioy Casares, he compiled the anthology Libro del cielo y del infierno. Under his leadership, a new chapter in the history of the journal La Biblioteca begins. Borges” works continued to be translated into various languages. In 1976, Borges gave an interview to Joaquín Soler Sorrano, in which he talked about the influence that foreign languages had on his entire life; raised in Spanish and English, he decided to explore French, German or Scandinavian languages as well. During this period, Otras inquisiciones (as Enquétes) was translated into French, Aleph into German as Labyrinthe, and a selection of short stories from the collections Aleph and Fictions into Italian as L”Aleph. Volumes 6 through 9 of Obras Completas also appeared at that time. By 1960, Borges is associated with the Conservative Party. In 1961, along with Samuel Beckett, he received the International Prize for Literature (in the amount of $10,000), awarded by the International Congress of Publishers in Formentor, Mallorca. This important award helped Borges rise to international prominence, giving him the opportunity to translate his works into numerous languages (English, French, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Greek, Slovak or Arabic). His Antología personal, published by Sur, also appeared. Together with his mother, he traveled to the United States, to Austin at the invitation of the University of Texas and the Tinker Foundation. Over the course of six months there, he gave a series of lectures on Argentine literature. A collection of short stories entitled Labyrinths was published in New York and Historia universal de la infamia was translated into German. In 1962, a film of the same title was made based on the short story Man from the Suburbs. It was directed by René Mugica. Borges also completed work on a biography of the poet Almafuerte. In 1963, again with his mother, he traveled to Europe, also to give numerous lectures. Upon his return to Buenos Aires, he completed work on an anthology of the poet Evaristo Carri.

In collaboration with María Esther Vázquez, he published Introducción a la literatura inglesa in 1965 and, in 1966, Literaturas germánicas medievales. A year later, he published Introducción a la literatura norteamericana, written with Esther Zemborain, and Chronicles of Bustos Domecq (Crónicas de Bustos Domecq), with Bioy Casares. In addition, Borges” texts written to milonga and tango melodies were published in a book version. The volume was titled Para las seis cuerdas, and the illustrations were done by Héctor Basaldúa. The short story The Bone of Discord (La intrusa) was also published.

On September 21, 1967, at the age of 68, Borges married his 57-year-old widow, Elsa Astete Millán. For the first few years, the couple lived in the writer”s home with his mother, Leonor Acevedo. In Elsa”s memoirs, her husband”s mother appears as a quiet person who never intervened in her son”s relationship and never wanted to harm him. Nevertheless, Borges” friends maintain that Mrs. Leonora”s jealousy was unbearable. A few months after their marriage, the couple moved into their own apartment, where they were able to taste life together for the first time without constant supervision. It was then that the rivalry between the writer”s mother and wife became more fierce, filled with venom, so that Borges had to secretly visit Leonora. It was these experiences that forced the couple to confront reality: further cohabitation was impossible. In a 1993 interview, Elsa admitted that she was not happy with Borges: “He was an introvert, petty and not very romantic. He was ethereal, unpredictable. He didn”t live in the real world.” In October 1970, the marriage finally broke up.

In 1968, together with Margarita Guerrero, he published an addendum to Manual de zoología fantástica under the title Book of Imaginary Creatures (El libro de los seres imaginarios). That year he also published his New Personal Anthology (Nueva antología personal). He traveled to Santiago to attend the Congress of Anti-Racist Intellectuals, and to Europe and Israel, where he participated in several conferences. Director Hugo Santiago made the film Invasión, based on a work by Bioy and Borges. In 1969 he collected and compiled two volumes of poetry, El otro, el mismo and Praise of the Shadow (Elogio de la sombra), which lived to see two editions one year. He also published a Walt Whitman anthology of his own translation, with the title Hojas de hierba and illustrations by painter Antonio Berni. After several years without publishing the stories, he collected them into a volume called Brodie”s Report (El informe de Brodie), published in August 1970.

Also read, biographies – Robert Altman

Recent years

In 1971, in Buenos Aires, Borges published a long short story entitled Congress (El congreso). A year later, he traveled to the United States, where he received numerous awards and gave lectures at various American universities. Upon his return to Buenos Aires, he published a volume of poetry titled Gold of the Tigers (El oro de los tigres), and on August 24, his birthday, he received a special tribute – one of his short stories, That One (El otro), was published in exactly the form the writer wished. In 1973, he was elected Ciudadano Ilustre de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (Honorary Citizen of Buenos Aires), at the same time he asked to retire from his position as director of the National Library. Later that year, Borges” collected works were first published in a single volume by the Emecé publishing house.

In Milan, Franco Maria Ricci published a deluxe edition of the story Congress, printing it in gold letters. A volume of poetry, La rosa profunda, and a collection of stories, The Book of Sand, were published in 1975, along with a compilation of Prólogos. There was also the premiere of El muerto, a film directed by Héctor Oliver and based on Borges” short story of the same title (in the Polish version, The Dead Man).

In 1975, the writer”s mother died, at the age of 99. From that moment on, Borges decided to carry out his traveling plans. He was accompanied by his former student, then secretary and eventually his second wife, María Kodama.

In 1986, he moved to Geneva, a city that endowed him with deep affection and which Borges considered one of his homelands. On April 26, he married María Kodama. The wedding took place by proxy under a proper Act issued in Colonia Rojas Silva, Paraguay. He died on June 14, 1986 as a result of liver cancer. In accordance with Borges” last will, his mortal remains were laid to rest in Plain Palais Cemetery. The tombstone, created by Argentine sculptor Eduardo Longato, was made of rough white stone. At the top you can read Jorge Luis Borges, and below that “And ne forhtedon na,” along with an engraved circle featuring seven soldiers, a small Gallic cross and the dates “1899

In February 2009, there were plans to move Borges” remains to the Cementerio de la Recoleta port cemetery in Buenos Aires, a move that sparked controversy. The writer”s widow, María Kodama, was particularly opposed to the idea. In the end, the idea was abandoned and Borges still rests in Geneva.

Umberto Eco makes no secret of the fact that both the person of Borges and his work were among his sources of inspiration when writing The Name of the Rose. The concept of a labyrinth and a library at the same time is taken directly from Borges” writing. The character of the gloomy monk Jorge overtly refers to the Argentine writer (just as Borges is a blind librarian).

In Trans-Atlantic there is a duel of words between literary figure Witold Gombrowicz and “Argentina”s most outstanding writer.” Gombrowicz appreciated Borges” talent, but accused him of relying on a European tradition that had gone bankrupt as a result of World War II.

Jorge Luis Borges was one of the favorite writers of the Dutch writer of Jewish origin Harry Mulisch.

Also read, biographies – Uthong

Studies in Polish and English

Sources

1. Jorge Luis Borges
2. Jorge Luis Borges
3. ^ In short, Borges”s blindness led him to favour poetry and shorter narratives over novels. Ferriera, Eliane Fernanda C. “O (In) visível imaginado em Borges”. In: Pedro Pires Bessa (ed.). Riqueza Cultural Ibero-Americana. Campus de Divinópolis-UEMG, 1996, pp. 313–14.
4. ^ Edwin Williamson suggests in Borges (Viking, 2004) that Borges did not finish his baccalauréat (pp. 79–80): “he cannot have been too bothered about his baccalauréat, not least because he loathed and feared examination. (He was never to finish his high school education, in fact).”
5. Guiñazú, C. 1999. Prólogo al Congreso Internacional Il secolo di Borges. Letteratura, scienza, filosofía que fue realizado en Venecia del 25 al 27 de marzo de 1999 por Il Dipartimento di Studi Anglo-Americani e Ibero-Americani y la Universidad Ca’Foscari de Venecia, en ocasión del centenario del nacimiento del escritor argentino. [1].
6. Vlady Kocianich. 2001. Jorge Luis Borges. Opublikowany w Antroposmoderno, 2001-10-23. [2].
7. 2,0 2,1 2,2 (Ισπανικά, Αγγλικά, Γερμανικά, Πορτογαλικά) todotango.com. 842. Ανακτήθηκε στις 9  Οκτωβρίου 2017.
8. Εθνική Βιβλιοθήκη της Γερμανίας, Κρατική Βιβλιοθήκη του Βερολίνου, Βαυαρική Κρατική Βιβλιοθήκη, Εθνική Βιβλιοθήκη της Αυστρίας: (Γερμανικά, Αγγλικά) Gemeinsame Normdatei. Ανακτήθηκε στις 10  Δεκεμβρίου 2014.
9. ^ Theo L. D”Haen, “Magical Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centers, 1995.
10. ^ a b Louis P. Zamora, Wendy B. Faris, Magical Realism: Theory, History and Community, London, Duke University Press, pp. 191–208.
11. ^ Claudio Magris, Dietro le parole, Garzanti, Milano 1978, pag.136
12. ^ (EN) Jorge Guillermo Borges (1874-1938): Two Notes, su business.highbeam.com, 1º luglio 2011. URL consultato il 27 dicembre 2014 (archiviato dall”url originale il 27 dicembre 2014).