20th century Argentine writer, essayist, poet, and translator
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), one of the leading poets of Latin America, was born in Buenos Aires in 1899. His grandmother was English but otherwise the family was Argentine, of Spanish origin. Borges studied in Switzerland and later in Spain, where he became associated with the avant-garde movement. Returning to the Argentine, he was active in literary reviews which created a ferment in Argentinian poetry, stimulating young writers to new forms of expression. Besides poetry, he published criticism, stories, philosophical essays, translations (of such writers as André Gide, Kafka, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf), and edited anthologies of prose and verse. He passed away in 1986.
Everything And Nothing
Seven Nights
Labyrinths
“Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature.”
— David Foster Wallace on Jorge Luis Borges
“I could live under a table reading Borges.”
— Roberto Bolaño on Jorge Luis Borges
“The topics covered here will no doubt reverberate for any reader who has spent time in the company of Borges’s writing, because they are his most intimate themes, his personal obsessions.”
— The Quarterly Conversation on Jorge Luis Borges's Seven Nights
“Valéry is a symbol of infinite dexterities but, at the same time, of infinite scruples.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths on Paul Valery
