Limited jose luis borges biography en ingles

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986)

Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine writer of poems, translations, essays, literary criticism and, what he is best known for, short fiction.

It would be impossible even for the greatest fans of this Argentine writer to describe or explain his writing. The most one can say is that his work has inspired countless writers, none of whom have come close to capturing the magic of his work. He wrote poems but is famous for, and remembered for, his prose – short pieces, what one may call short stories but which he called ‘fictions.’

His fictions have been labelled ‘postmodern,’ because they depart from the conventions of modern short fiction forms. For example, Borges almost completely eliminates narrative. He generally dispenses with plot unless he wants to exploit the actual concept of plot for the purpose of doing something unconventional with it. He omits such features of fiction as sequence, causation and character relationships, thereby challenging our expectations of a story as we read his stories, and our expectations of fiction generally. At the same time the fictions are fascinating, interesting to read and attention grabbing. The uniqueness of his fictions and the influence they had on the work of subsequent writers places him squarely in this category of the world’s greatest all time writers. The philosophical term ‘Borgesian conundrum’ is named after him. The term refers to whether the writer writes the story, or the story writes him.

Borges published his masterpiece, Ficciones, in 1944: it comprises seventeen short stories that explore the labyrinthine nature of reality. Labyrinths are a major theme in his work, the idea that life is made up of recurring, inexplicable, repetitive versions of our perception of reality. There are many stories about the way in which the imaginary world impacts on what we think of as the real world – such as reviews of imaginary books written by imag

Family

I cannot tell whether my first memories go back to the eastern or to the western bank of the muddy, slow-moving Rio de la Plata—to Montevideo, where we spent long, lazy holidays in the villa of my uncle Francisco Haedo, or to Buenos Aires. I was born there, in the very heart of that city, in 1899, on Tucumán Street, between Suipacha and Esmeralda, in a small, unassuming house belonging to my maternal grandparents. Like most of the houses of that day, it had a flat roof; a long, arched entrance way, called a zaguán; a cistern, where we got our water; and two patios. We must have moved out to the suburb of Palermo quite soon, because there I have my first memories of another house with two patios, a garden with a tall windmill pump, and, on the other side of the garden, an empty lot. Palermo at that time—the Palermo where we lived, at Serrano and Guatemala streets—was on the shabby northern outskirts of town, and many people, ashamed of saying they lived there, spoke in a dim way of living on the Northside. We lived in one of the few two-story homes on our street; the rest of the neighborhood was made up of low houses and vacant lots. I have often spoken of this area as a slum, but I do not quite mean that in the American sense of the word. In Palermo lived shabby-genteel people as well as more undesirable sorts. There was also a Palermo of hoodlums, called compadritos, famed for their knife fights, but this Palermo was only later to capture my imagination, since we did our best—our successful best—to ignore it. Unlike our neighbor Evaristo Carriego, however, who was the first Argentine poet to explore the literary possibilities that lay there at hand. As for myself, I was hardly aware of the existence of compadritos, since I lived essentially indoors.

My father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, worked as a lawyer. He was a philosophical anarchist—a disciple of Spencer—and also a teacher of psychology at the Normal School for Modern Languages, where he gave h