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BEFORE READING Background Argentinean poet and short story writer Jorge Luis Borges was the principal leader of the highly influential and transforming avant-garde period in Argentinean literature that began in the 1920s. By the 1960s, Borges had achieved fame throughout the world. Borges and other writers of the European-inspired ultraísmo movement encouraged the liberal and non-formulaic use of language to heighten its suggestive power in writing. The poetry of Argentina underwent revolutionary changes, particularly in the simple and surreal uses of metaphor and the merging of verse and prose. Borges's fiction-informal, fantastical, experimental, imaginative innovative in theme-rebelled against realism and modernism, the literary movements that dominated Latin American literature at the time. His essays and short stories radiated a wholly unique aesthetic interpretation and philosophical stand on life and society. Few other modern writers can claim to have so influenced the nature and evolution of Latin American literature. Mexican author Carlos Fuentes claimed that there would be no Spanish American novel without him. His Argentine disciple, fiction writer Julio Cortázar, like many others, gave Borges credit for initiating the 1960s' "boom" in Latin American literature. He said, "Borges taught me to eliminate all the flowery phrases, the repetitions, ellipses, useless exclamation marks and the habit which is still found in much bad literature and which consists of saying on one page what can be said in one line." In this selection, Borges lucidly suggests the limitless possibilities of time-from the perspective of a Jewish writer in 1939 who has been caught by the Gestapo. About the Author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentine poet, short story writer, and founder of the ultraist movement in Argentina, is one of the world's greatest short story writers and, to many, the most important Latin American writer of the twentieth century. Born and reared in Buenos Aires, Borges had British as well as Argentine ancestors. He grew up in a bilingual household. As a child he was fascinated by street life and read voraciously, later describing himself as a reader rather than a writer. When he was 15, the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland. In 1918, after completing his secondary education, Borges traveled through Europe; learned Latin, German, and French; and eventually settled in Spain, where he took an active part in the ultraist movement and published his first poetry. Seeking to spread the ultraísmo message throughout his native Argentina, Borges returned there in 1921 and co-founded two literary magazines, Prisma and Proa, and published his first book, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923). By the 1930s and 1940s, however, Borges's consciousness evolved away from the ultraist movement-first toward one that promoted Argentinean nationalism and then one that embraced universal themes of time, knowledge, solitude, life, love, and death. His importance and acclaim as a international literary figure grew as this progression played itself out through imaginative, dynamic, and skeptical stories collected in A Universal History of Infamy (1935; tr. 1971), Fictions (1944; tr. 1962) and The Aleph and Other Stories (1949; tr. 1970). Fictions, in particular, had enormous impact on later writers and on world literature. By the mid-1950s, when Borges was working at the Argentinean National Library and slowly growing blind, his poetry and prose took on a more pronounced, metaphysical slant. Moreover, many of his brilliant stories began taking place in surreal dream worlds that involved their own unique and profound paradoxical realities. Among the most celebrated of these efforts are The Imaginary Zoo (1957; tr. 1969), Dreamtigers (1960; tr. 1963), In Praise of Darkness (1969; tr. 1974), and The Book of Sand (1975; tr. 1977). Borges spent the remainder of his career writing and serving as professor of English literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He guest lectured at Harvard University and others and received such distinguished literary awards as the Argentinean National Prize for Literature in 1957 and the Prix Formentor in 1961 (with Samuel Beckett). Though he was never granted the Nobel Prize, many believed Borges deserved this acknowledgment, since he had so greatly affected, reshaped, and reinvigorated Latin American fiction and brought it to a world audience. Vocabulary
DURING READING Use the STUDY GUIDE below as a way to work through the selection and improve your comprehension of the essay. AFTER READING Answer the Questions to Consider in the book as a way to deepen your interpretation of the selection. 1. Who is Jaromir Hladik? Why is he arrested? 2. Why doesn't Hladik imagine all of the ways he may be killed? 3. What is Hladik's play, The Enemies, about? Why is its content significant to this story? 4. Why does Hladik's miracle have to be a secret? Bibliography Jorge Luis Borges
Latin American Writers Isabel Allende. House of the Spirits (1982; tr. 1985). Best-selling first novel by a famed Chilean writer of magic realism, describing three generations of a Chilean family. Germán Arciniegas. Latin America: A Cultural History (1967). Analysis of Latin American peoples, culture, and history. Miguel Ángel Asturias. The President (1964; tr. 1972). The Nobel-Prize-winning Guatemalan novelist's forceful portrait of a brutal dictator and his effects on human life. Jorge Luis Borges. Fictions (1944; tr. 1962). A highly influential short story collection by the world-famous Argentinean prose master. Julio Cortázar. Hopscotch (1963; tr. 1966). A challenging and structurally innovative Argentine novel, depicting urban life in twentieth-century Buenos Aires. Gabriel García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). A best-selling, internationally acclaimed work by the Colombian Nobel Prize winner, which portrays a century in the lives of a family and a town. Rita Guibert. Seven Voices (1973). Conversations with major Latin American authors such as Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Octavio Paz, Gabriel García Márquez, and more. João Guimarães Rosa. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (1956; tr. 1963). A brilliant prose epic of the Brazilian backlands. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. A Woman of Genius: The Intellectual Autobiography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1691; tr. 1982). A brilliant seventeenth-century Mexican nun's defense of her rights to education and an intellectual life. John King, ed. On Modern Latin American Fiction (1987). Interviews, essays, and more relating to important Latin American writers, such as Borges, Fuentes, García Márquez, and others. Pablo Neruda. Five Decades: Poems 1925-1970 (1974; ed. Ben Belitt). A representative collection of poetry by the beloved Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner. Octavio Paz. The Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A rich collection from Mexico's greatest modern poet, winner of 1990's Nobel Prize for Literature. |
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