Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort argue that Borges "may have been the most important figure in Spanish-language literature since Cervantes. He was clearly of tremendous influence, writing intricate poems, short stories, and essays that instantiated concepts of dizzying power."[100] Borges's work has been compared to that of Homer and Milton.[101] Indeed, the critic Harold Bloom numbers Borges among the key figures of the Western literary canon.[102]
In addition to short stories for which he is most noted, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, screenplays, literary criticism, and edited numerous anthologies. His longest work of fiction is a fourteen-page story, "The Congress", first published in 1971.[10] His late-onset blindness strongly influenced his later writing. Borges wrote: "When I think of what I've lost, I ask, 'Who know themselves better than the blind?' – for every thought becomes a tool."[103]
Paramount among his intellectual interests are elements of mythology, mathematics, theology, integrating these through literature, sometimes playfully, sometimes with great seriousness.[104]
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), he increasingly focused on writing poetry, since he could memorize an entire work in progress.[105]
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. For example, his interest in idealism runs through his work, reflected in the fictional world of Tlön in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and in his essay "A New Refutation of Time".[106]
Borges was a notable translator. He translated works of literature in English, French, German, Old English, and Old Norse into Spanish. His first publication, for a Buenos Aires newspaper, was a translation of Oscar Wilde's story "The Happy Prince" into Spanish when he was nine.[107] At the end of his life he produced a Spanish-language version of a part of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda. He also translated (while simultaneously subtly transforming) the works of, among others, Ambrose Bierce, William Faulkner, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf.[Note 5] Borges wrote and lectured extensively on the art of translation, holding that a translation may improve upon the original, may even be unfaithful to it, and that alternative and potentially contradictory renderings of the same work can be equally valid.[108] Borges employed the devices of literary forgery and the review of an imaginary work, both forms of modern pseudo-epigrapha.
Discography
Borge’s recorded work includes readings of his poems, a collaboration with Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, and a series of lectures on a characteristically wide range of topics, from Buddhism to the nature of poetry. [109]
Music
- El Tango (1965) with Astor Piazzolla
Polydor – 20291
Poetry
- Por El Mismo Sus Poemas Y Su Voz (1967)
AMB Discografica – 123 - 1
- Jorge Luis Borges (1968)
Universidad Nacional Autonoma De Mexico – VVAL-13, UNAM-113/114
Lectures and Other Works
- La Divina Comedia (1978)
Microfon – SUP 955
- ¿Qué Es La Poesía? (1978)
Microfon – SUP 959
- El Budismo (1978)
Microfon – SUP 958
- La Cabala (1978)
Microfon – SUP 960
- El Libro De Las Mil Y Una Noches (1978)
Microfon – SUP 957
- Borges Para Millones. Banda Original De Sonido De La Pelicula (1978) with Luis Maria Serra
EMI – 8569/70
Hoaxes and forgeries
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, for example, in the style of Emanuel Swedenborg[Note 6] or One Thousand and One Nights, originally claiming them to be translations of works he had chanced upon. In another case, he added three short, falsely attributed pieces into his otherwise legitimate and carefully researched anthology El matrero.[Note 6] Several of these are gathered in the A Universal History of Infamy.
While Borges was the great popularizer of the review of an imaginary work, he had developed the idea from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a book-length review of a non-existent German transcendentalist work, and the biography of its equally non-existent author. In This Craft of Verse, Borges says that in 1916 in Geneva "[I] discovered, and was overwhelmed by, Thomas Carlyle. I read Sartor Resartus, and I can recall many of its pages; I know them by heart."[110]
In the introduction to his first published volume of fiction, The Garden of Forking Paths, Borges remarks, "It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books, setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them." He then cites both Sartor Resartus and Samuel Butler's The Fair Haven, remarking, however, that "those works suffer under the imperfection that they themselves are books, and not a whit less tautological than the others. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books."[111]
On the other hand, some works were wrongly attributed to Borges, like the poem "Instantes".[112][113]
Criticism of Borges's work
Monument in Buenos AiresBorges's change in style from regionalist criollismo to a more cosmopolitan style brought him much criticism from journals such as Contorno, a leftist, Sartre-influenced Argentine publication founded by David Viñas and his brother, along with other intellectuals such as Noé Jitrik and Adolfo Prieto. In the post-Peronist Argentina of the early 1960s, Contorno met with wide approval from the youth who challenged the authenticity of older writers such as Borges and questioned their legacy of experimentation. Magic realism and exploration of universal truths, they argued, had come at the cost of responsibility and seriousness in the face of society's problems.[114]
The Contorno writers acknowledged Borges and Eduardo Mallea for being "doctors of technique" but argued that their work lacked substance due to their lack of interaction with the reality that they inhabited, an existentialist critique of their refusal to embrace existence and reality in their artwork.[114]
Sexuality and perception of women
The story "The Sect of the Phoenix" is famously interpreted to allude to the ubiquity of sexual intercourse among humans[115] – a concept whose essential qualities the narrator of the story is not able to relate to.
With a few notable exceptions, women are almost entirely absent from Borges's fiction.[116] However, there are some instances in Borges's later writings of romantic love, for example the story "Ulrikke" from The Book of Sand. The protagonist of the story "El muerto" also lusts after the "splendid, contemptuous, red-haired woman" of Azevedo Bandeira[117]: 197 and later "sleeps with the woman with shining hair".[117]: 200 Although they do not appear in the stories, women are significantly discussed as objects of unrequited love in his short stories "The Zahir" and "The Aleph".[117] The plot of La Intrusa was based on a true story of two friends. Borges turned their fictional counterparts into brothers, excluding the possibility of a homosexual relationship.[118]
"Emma Zunz" is Borges's only story with a female protagonist.[119] Originally published in 1948, this work tells the tale of a young Jewish woman who kills a man in order to avenge the disgrace and suicide of her father. She carefully plans the crime, submitting to an unpleasant sexual encounter with a stranger in order to create the appearance of sexual impropriety in her intended victim. Despite the fact that she premeditates and executes a murder, the eponymous heroine of this story is surprisingly likable, both because of intrinsic qualities in the character (interestingly enough, she believes in nonviolence) and because the story is narrated from a "remote but sympathetic" point of view that highlights the poignancy of her situation.[120]
Nobel Prize omission
Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, something which continually distressed the writer.[10] He was one of several distinguished authors who never received the honour.[121] Borges commented, "Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition; since I was born they have not been granting it to me".[122]
Some observers speculated that Borges did not receive the award in his later life because of his conservative political views, or, more specifically, because he had accepted an honour from Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.[123][124]
Borges was however among the short-listed candidates several times. In 1965 he was considered along with Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Neruda and Mikhail Sholokhov, and in 1966 a shared prize to Borges and Miguel Ángel Asturias was proposed.[125] Borges was nominated again in 1967, and was among the final three choices considered by the committee, according to Nobel records unsealed on the 50th anniversary, in 2017. The committee considered Borges, Graham Greene and Miguel Ángel Asturias, choosing Asturias as the winner.[126]
