Jorge Luis Borges

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges

http://www.enotes.com/twentieth-century-criticism/borges-jorge-luis

Borges produced major works in three genres—poetry, essays, and short fiction. He also translated works by (among others) Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Carlyle. His first major books of poetry, Fervor de Buenos Aires and Luna de enfrente, are avant-garde collections influenced by the Ultraist movement. The young Borges wrote a baroque verse free of rhyme, surrealistic, even brutal, in imagery and metaphor, dedicated to the incorporation of Argentinian locations, locutions and themes, and establishing the poet as the soul of his subject.

By the end of the thirties, however, Borges repudiated his early verse, revised it and worked, until his death, with traditional devices: rhyme, meter, elucidation, and time-honored metaphors. He utilized traditional forms such as the sonnet and haiku, aiming at simplicity of expression through the use of common language and colloquial word order. His work projects a tone of tranquil irony, and a wisdom concerned with, but tempered by an indifference to, time, desire, and mortality.

Borges's works of fiction and nonfiction, critics have noted, are often difficult to distinguish from one another. Many of the short stories are written in essay form; the essays often treat subject matter that might be dealt with in fiction. The very short pieces, the “parables,” share the qualities of poetry, essay, and short story. Borges's essay collections—including Inquisiciones, Discusión (1932), andOtras Inquisiciones, 1937-1952 [1952; Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952] address a wide variety of issues, and represent a diversity of styles. Discusión, for example, contains film reviews, essays on metaphysical and aesthetic topics, and includes “Narrative Art and Magic,” in which Borges asserts the capacity of fantasy literature to address realistic concerns. As well as his philosophical suppleness, his essays also reveal the depth of his scholarship, as in a monograph on ancient Germanic and Anglo-Saxon literatures he wrote in 1951 in collaboration with Delia Ingenieros.

Please leave your comment here