What is jorge luis borges most famous work

Nationality: Argentine. Born:Buenos Aires, 24 August 1899. Education: Collège de Genève, Switzerland; Cambridge University. Family: Married 1) Elsa Astete Millán in 1967 (divorced 1970); 2) María Kodama in 1986. Career: Lived in Europe with his family, 1914-21; cofounding editor, Proa, 1924-26, and Sur, 1931; also associated with Prisma; columnist, El Hogar weekly, Buenos Aires, 1936-39; literary adviser, Emecé Editores, Buenos Aires; municipal librarian, Buenos Aires, 1939-43; poultry inspector, 1944-54; became blind, 1955; director, National Library, 1955-73; professor of English literature, University of Buenos Aires, 1955-70; Norton Professor of poetry, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; visiting lecturer, University of Oklahoma, Norman, 1969. President, Argentine Writers Society, 1950-53. Awards: Buenos Aires Municipal prize, 1928; Argentine Writers Society prize, 1945; National Prize for Literature, 1957; Ingram Merrill award, 1966; Bienal Foundation Inter-American prize, 1970; Jerusalem prize, 1971; Alfonso Reyes prize, 1973; Cervantes prize, 1980; Yoliztli prize, 1981. Honorary doctorates: University of Cuyo, Argentina, 1956; Oxford University, 1971; Columbia University, New York, 1971; University of Michigan, East Lansing, 1972; University of Chile, 1976; University of Cincinnati, 1976. Honorary Fellow, Modern Language Association (U.S.), 1961. Order of Merit (Italy), 1968; Order of Merit (German Federal Republic), 1979. Icelandic Falcon Cross, 1979. Honorary K.B.E. (Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire). Member: Argentine National Academy; Uruguayan Academy of Letters. Died: 14 June 1986.

Publications

Short Stories

Historia universal de la infamia. 1935; as A Universal History of Infamy, 1971.

El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan. 1941.

Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi (with Adolfo Bioy Casares, as H. Bustos Domecq). 1942; as Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, 1981.

Ficciones (1935-1944). 1944; augmented edition, 1956; translated as Ficciones, 1962; as Fictions, 1965.

Dos fantasías memorables, with Adolfo Bioy Casares. 1946.

El Aleph. 1949; as The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969, 1970.

La muerte y la brújula. 1951.

La hermana de Elosía, with Luisa Mercedes Levinson. 1955.

Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, edited by DonaldA. Yates and James E. Irby. 1962; augmented edition, 1964.

Crónicas de Bustos Domecq, with Adolfo Bioy Casares. 1967; asChronicles of Bustos Domecq, 1979.

El informe de Brodie. 1970; as Dr. Brodie's Report, 1972.

El congreso. 1971; as The Congress, 1974.

El libro de arena. 1975; as The Book of Sand, 1977; with The Gold of the Tigers (verse), 1979.

Nuevos cuentos de Bustos Domecq, with Adolfo Bioy Casares. 1977.

Novel

Un modelo para la muerte, with Adolfo Bioy Casares. 1946.

Play

Screenplay:

Los orilleros; El paraíso de los creyentes, with Adolfo Bioy Casares, 1955.

Poetry

Fervor de Buenos Aires. 1923.

Luna de enfrente. 1925.

Cuaderno San Martín. 1929.

Poemas 1922-1943. 1943.

Poemas 1923-1958. 1958.

El hacedor. 1960; as Dreamtigers, 1963.

Obra poética 1923-1964. 1964.

Para las seis cuerdas. 1965; revised edition, 1970.

Obra poética 1923-1967. 1967.

Nueva antología personal. 1968.

Obra poética. 5 vols., 1969-72.

Elogio de la sombra. 1969; as In Praise of Darkness, 1974.

El otro, el mismo. 1969.

El oro de los tigres. 1972; as The Gold of the Tigers, with The Book of Sand, 1979.

Selected Poems 1923-1967, edited by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. 1972.

La rosa profundo. 1975.

La moneda de hierro. 1976.

Historia de la noche. 1977.

Poemas 1919-1922. 1978.

Obra poética 1923-1976. 1978.

La cifra. 1981.

Antología poética. 1981.

Uncollected Poetry

"Jorge Luis Borges: Seventeen Poems and Two Prefaces" inAmerican Poetry Review. January/February 1994.

Other

Inquisiciones (essays). 1925.

El tamaño de mi esperanza (essays). 1926.

El idioma de los Argentinos (essays). 1928; enlarged edition, as El lenguaje de Buenos Aires, with José Edmundo Clemente, 1963.

Evaristo Carriego (essays). 1930; as Evaristo Carriego, 1984.

Discusión. 1932.

Las Kennigar. 1933.

Historia de la eternidad (essays). 1936; enlarged edition, 1953.

Nueva refutación del tiempo. 1947.

Aspectos de la literatura gauchesca. 1950.

Antiguas literaturas germánicas, with Delia Ingenieros. 1951.

Otras inquisiciones 1937-1952. 1952; as Other Inquisitions 1937-1952, 1964.

El Martín Fierro, with Margarita Guerrero. 1953.

Obras completas, edited by José Edmundo Clemente. 10 vols., 1953-60; 1 vol., 1974.

Leopoldo Lugones, with Betina Edelberg. 1955.

Manual de zoología fantástica, with Margarita Guerrero. 1957; revised edition, as El libro de los seres imaginarios, 1967; as The Imaginary Zoo, 1969; revised edition, as The Book of Imaginary Beings, 1969.

Antología personal. 1961; as A Personal Anthology, edited by Anthony Kerrigan, 1968.

The Spanish Language in South America: A Literary Problem; El Gaucho Martín Fierro (lectures). 1964.

Introducción a la literatura inglesa, with María Esther Vázquez.1965; as An Introduction to English Literature, 1974.

Literaturas germánicas medievales, with María Esther Vázquez. 1966.

Introducción a la literatura norteamericana, with Esther Zemborain de Torres. 1967; as An Introduction to American Literature, 1971.

Nueva antología personal. 1968.

Conversations with Borges, by Richard Burgin. 1968.

Borges on Writing, edited by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Daniel Halpern, and Frank MacShane. 1973.

Obras completas: 1923-1972, edited by Carlos V. Frías. 1974.

Prólogos. 1975.

Qué es el budismo?, with Alicia Jurado. 1976.

Libros de sueños. 1976.

Adrogué (verse and prose; privately printed). 1977.

Borges oral (lectures). 1979.

Prosa completa. 2 vols., 1980.

Siete noches (essays). 1980; as Seven Nights, 1984.

A Reader, edited by Alastair Reid and Emir Rodríguez Monegal. 1981.

Nueve ensayos dantescos. 1982.

Atlas, with María Komada. 1985; as Atlas, 1985.

Los conjurados. 1985.

Conversaciones con Alicia Moreau de Justo y Borges. 1985.

Borges en dialogo, with Osvaldo Ferrari. 1985.

Conversaciones con Borges, with Roberto Alifano. 1986.

Conversaciones con Borges, with Francisco Tokos. 1986.

Textos Cautivos: Ensayos y reseñas en El Hogar (1936-1939), edited by Enrique Sacerio-Gari and Emir Rodríguez Monegal. 1987.

Paginas escogidas, edited by Roberto Fernandez Retamar. 1988.

Biblioteca personal: Prólogos. 1988.

Ultimas conversaciones con Borges, with Roberto Alifano. 1988.

Editor, with Pedro Henriques Urena, Antología clasica de la literatura argentina. 1937.

Editor, with Silvina Ocampo and Adolfo Bioy Casares, Antología de la literatura fantástica. 1940; as The Book of Fantasy, 1988.

Editor, with Silvina Ocampo and Adolfo Bioy Casares, Antología poética argentina. 1941.

Editor, with Adolfo Bioy Casares, Los mejores cuentos policiales.2 vols., 1943-51.

Editor, with Silvina Bullrich Palenque, El Campadrito: Su destino, sus barrios, su música. 1945.

Editor, with Adolfo Bioy Casares, Prosa y verso, by Francisco de Quevedo. 1948.

Editor and translator, with Adolfo Bioy Casares, Poesía gauchesca. 2 vols., 1955.

Editor, with Adolfo Bioy Casares, Cuentos breves y extraordinarios.1955; as Extraordinary Tales, 1971.

Editor, with Adolfo Bioy Casares, Libro del cielo y del infierno. 1960.

Editor, Paulino Lucero, Aniceto y gallo, Santos Vega, by Hilario Ascasubi. 1960.

Editor, Macedonia Fernández (selection). 1961.

Editor, Páginas de historia y de autobiografía, by Edward Gibbon. 1961.

Editor, Prosa y poesía, by Almafuerte. 1962.

Editor, Versos, by Evaristo Carriego. 1963.

Editor, with María Komada, Breve antología anglosajona. 1978.

Editor, Micromegas, by Voltaire. 1979.

Editor, Cuentistas y pintores argentinos. 1985.

Translator, La metamorfosis, by Kafka. 1938.

Translator, Bartleby, by Herman Melville. 1944.

Translator, De los héroes; Hombres representativos, by Carlyle and Emerson. 1949.

Bibliography:

Borges: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography by David William Foster, 1984; The Literary Universe of Borges: An Index to References and Illusions to Persons, Titles, and Places in His Writings by Daniel Balderston, 1986.

Critical Studies:

Borges, The Labyrinth Maker by Ana María Barrenchea, edited and translated by Robert Lima, 1965; The Narrow Act: Borges' Art of Illusion by Ronald J. Christ, 1969; The Mythmaker: A Study of Motif and Symbol in the Short Stories of Borges by Carter Wheelock, 1969; Borges, 1970, and Borges Revisted, 1991, both by Martin S. Stabb; The Cardinal Points of Borges edited Lowell Dunham and Ivor Ivask, 1971; Borges by J.M. Cohen, 1973; Prose for Borges edited by Charles Newman and Mary Kinzie, 1974; Tongues of Fallen Angels: Conversations with Borges by Selden Roman, 1974; The Literature of Exhaustion: Borges, Nabokov and Barth by John O. Stark, 1974; Borges: Ficciones by Donald Leslie Shaw, 1976; Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges by John Dominic Crossan, 1976; Paper Tigers: The Ideal Fictions of Borges by John Sturrock, 1977; Borges: Sources and Illumination by Giovanna De Garayalde, 1978; Borges: A Literary Biography by Emir Rodríguez Monegal, 1978; Borges by George R. McMurray, 1980; Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art by Gene H. Bell-Villada, 1981; The German Response to Latin American Literature, And the Reception of Borges and Pablo Neruda by Yolanda Julia Broyles, 1981; Borges at Eighty: Conversations edited by William Barnstone, 1982; The Prose of Borges: Existentialism and the Dynamics of Surprise, 1984, and The Meaning of Experience in the Prose of Borges, 1988, both by Ion Tudro Agheana; Borges edited by Harold Bloom, 1986; The Poetry and Poetics of Borges by Paul Cheselka, 1987; The Emperor's Kites: A Morphology of Borges's Tales by Mary Lusky Friedman, 1987; Critical Essays on Borges edited by Jaime Alazraki, 1987, and Borges and the Kaballah by Alazraki, 1988; In Memory of Borges edited by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, 1988; Borges and His Successors: The Borges Impact on Literature and the Arts edited by Edna Aizenberg, 1990; Borges: A Study of the Short Fiction by Naomi Lindstrom, 1990; A Dictionary of Borges by Evelyn Fishburne, 1990; Borges and Artificial Intelligence: An Analysis in the Style of Pierre Menard by Ema Lapidot, 1991; The Contemporary Praxis of the Fantastic: Borges and Cortázar by Julio Rodríquez-Luis, 1991; Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge by Beatriz Sarlo Sabajanes, 1993; Jorge Luis Borges and Dino Buzzati: In the Context of Fantastic Literature by Susan Cook-Abdallah, 1993; Readers and Labyrinths: Detective Fiction in Borges, Bustos Domecq, and Eco by Jorge Hernández Martín, 1995; The Narrow Act: Borges' Art of Allusion by Ronald J. Christ, 1995; The Man in the Mirror of the Book: A Life of Jorge Borges by James Woodall, 1996; The Critical Poem: Borges, Paz, and Other Language-Centered Poets in Latin America by Thorpe Running, 1996.

In the Spanish-speaking world Jorge Luis Borges is almost as well known for his highly evocative verse and essays as he is for his fantastical short stories. Indeed, he began as a poet in the 1920s when he set out to be the Walt Whitman of Buenos Aires. The rise of local fascists during the 1930s, however, soured him on nationalism of any stripe. He thereafter assumed a cosmopolitan stance and turned to writing narratives instead. It is these brief fictions that eventually gained Borges his international reputation. Verbally dense and often bookish, his stories can put off a casual browser, though their erudite, otherworldly atmosphere is often commingled with touches of nostalgic warmth and a wry, subtle humor.

Borges's three dozen best stories all date from the period 1939 to 1955, a time of personal and political torment for the author. They first appeared in the relatively slim volumes Ficciones and El Aleph. And yet the artistic power, originality, and influence of these two books vastly exceeds their physical meagerness. Their terse, restrained prose style constitutes a distinct break from three centuries of Hispanic rhetoric and bombast. More important for writers of fiction the world over, the stories present alternatives both to traditional realism and to Modernist psychologism and "inwardness." What Borges does, in brief, is to emphasize the fantastical and imaginary, to foreground unreality itself as the essential stuff of storytelling, thereby making these traits prime movers of plot and character. The intrusion of the unreal into our everyday existence is precisely what Borges's fiction is about.

Hence, in several Borges stories, dreams and visions can occupy center stage. To the writer-protagonist of "The Secret Miracle," time seems to have stopped for exactly a year, though it may well be a vivid last-minute hallucination occurring within his head. Similarly, the jailed Mayan priest in "The God's Script" believes he has unlocked the divine secret of the universe; yet he could also be experiencing a classically religious-mystical seizure. By contrast, in "The Other Death" a one-time military coward's deathbed fantasies of battlefield courage somehow succeed in altering the historical record; and in "The Aleph" the narrator descends into a seedy basement, where he really does contemplate a wondrous one-inch square containing everything on planet Earth.

In the same way that it finds its way into daily life, the fantastical in Borges can intrude upon and affect our very sense of self, our personal identity. His protagonists are frequently depicted as finding out that they are actually somebody else ("The Theologians"). Or conversely, two seemingly separate life-stories become fused and, through Borgesian artifice, are shown to be just one, as in "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" and "Story of the Warrior and the Captive," titles whose dual referents are then psychologically subverted in the ensuing narrative.

Another special side of Borges is his detective stories and crime fiction, a genre he raised to the level of a high art. "The Dead Man," "The Waiting," and "Emma Zunz" are hauntingly beautiful narratives of crime in which the author brings into play his suggestive, fanciful notions concerning the role of mind and the nature of truth. On the other hand, "Death and the Compass"—one of Borges's greatest single pieces—is itself a dazzling spoof of the detective-story formula, depicting a world in which everything is upsidedown: the criminal captures the detective and preempts the latter's final role, and a bureaucratic "dumb cop" is proved right every time while a bookish, would-be Sherlock is proved sadly wrong.

Borges also can be credited with having invented an entire new genre: what we might call "essay-fiction," combining aspects of both. Many of Borges's best stories look like and have the feel of essays—yet are complete fictions. The narrator of "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" actually refers to its text as an "article," and its mixture of "hard" fact with unsettling fantasy serves to reinforce the essayistic impression. "Three Versions of Judas" presents itself as a learned article on theological disputes, with footnotes and all. Similarly, "The Sect of the Phoenix" seems to be an ethnographic account of an elusive tribe; it turns out to be a cosmic riddle and an elaborate sex joke.

Many of Borges's inventions have become standard items in our cultural lexicon. "Funes the Memorious" is now an obligatory reference in any psychological disquisition on the problem of absolute memory. The vast and bewildering information systems of our time are often likened to "The Library of Babel," and the notion of identical texts somehow possessing different meanings inevitably conjures up "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." Borges's influence has also been felt in the arts worldwide. Bernardo Bertolucci and Nicholas Roeg both have feature films based on his stories, and Jean-Luc Godard in his more visionary movies quotes lines from Borges's essays. Short novels like John Gardner's Grendel and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 take their cues directly from the Argentine master, and the works of Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover are in part the U.S. literary offspring of Borges's high artifice.

Borges in the 1960s became a world-renowned public figure, giving lectures and receiving accolades across the globe. One unfortunate result was that he lost much of his critical edge and started to repeat himself. Hence the narratives in the subsequent El informe de Brodie (Doctor Brodie's Report) and El libro de arena (The Book of Sand) are mostly pale imitations of the great writings from his middle period. So long as readers of short stories exist, however, the tales from Ficciones, El Aleph, and the English-language anthology Labyrinths will remain part of our literary repertoire.

—Gene H. Bell-Villada

See the essays on "The Circular Ruins," "The Library of Babel," and "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote."