El veinticuatro de agosto/August 24th
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| Photo from The Paris Review, 1967. Click HERE. |
A short story writer, essayist, poet, and translator from Argentina whose work explored existential questions with dreams, labyrinths, philosophy, libraries, mirrors, and mythology, Borges is often credited with beginning the magic realist movement in Latin American literature in the 20th century. His best known books are Ficciones and El Aleph, both published in the 40s. Born in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, he moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where they stayed until 1921. Raised speaking both Spanish and English (he was reading the works of Shakespeare, in English, at the age of 12), Borges eventually became fluent in many languages. He served as a Professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires for many years, as well as the Director of the National Library. When Perón returned from exile and was re-elected in 1973, Borges immediately resigned. He was in deep opposition to the one party state that Perón and his wife Evita had created. He also opposed communism and fascism. In 1934 when ultra-conservative Argentines sympathetic to Hitler and the Nazi party asserted that Borges was secretly Jewish, he published the essay Yo, Judío, in which he asserted that he would be proud to be Jewish. During the 1970s, he at first supported the military junta, but he became scandalized by their actions during the Dirty War and withdrew that support. A few months before his death in 1986 Borges married María Kodoma, his personal assistant of the last 10 years who often accompanied him on his international travels. She was an Argentine of Japanese and German descent, and as he approached his death Borges, an agnostic, became curious about the Shinto and Catholic beliefs of her parents. Kodoma, like Borges, was an agnostic. As Borges explained, "Being agnostic means that all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen." At his funeral the Protestant minister Pastor de Montmollin read the First Chapter of St John's Gospel and then preached, "Borges was a man who had unceasingly searched for the right word, the term that could sum up the whole, the final meaning of things. [In the end] it is not man who discovers the word, it is the Word that comes to him."
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