“The renown Borges enjoyed during his lifetime, documented by a slew of monographs and controversies, still astonishes us today. We know that he himself was astonished, and that he always feared being declared an impostor or a bungler or a peculiar mixture of both.” Thus reads the entry devoted to Jorge Luis Borges in an Enciclopedia Sudamericana dated 2074. With irony, typographical errors and anachronism, it was written, of course, by Borges himself, a century before its hypothetical publication. Forty years after the death of the author of Ficciones and El Aleph, which occurred on June 14, 1986, that fear — if it ever existed, if it was not pure imposture or shy modesty or a blend of both — could be declared abolished. The passage of time has raised his stature even higher and enriched both his figure and his work: Borges has long been ranked among the greatest authors of world literature, and undisputedly occupies the throne of Argentina’s greatest writer.
It was not always so, at least in his own country. In fact, until his death, when he was 86 and living in Geneva, a significant number of his fellow Argentines, especially within the cultural community, resisted accepting the place already occupied by his stories, poems and essays — largely because they rejected his conservative, “foreign‑looking” imaginary universe and the public persona Borges constructed in interviews and other appearances.
“While alive, Borges was an enemy to debate with, an adversary to refute. After his death, Borges becomes a writer to be won over,” and an ally courted across the political and cultural spectrum, summarizes the literary scholar Lucas Adur at one of the many tributes being held in Argentina, in this case organized by the Argentine Association of Hispanists (AAH). For Adur, that shift in Borges’s reception was completed in 1999, on the centennial of his birth, when “a kind of ecumenical consecration” took place.
The four decades since his death have illuminated different facets of Borges, complicating the image of the blind, wise and venerable old man who seemed to have read every existing book. As Adur, author of a Borges biography, explains, a series of shifts broadened the public view of the writer. These included restoration of the contemporary political context of his activity, a context obscured by Borges himself, and the ideological positions he took (his brief enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution or for nationalism, his antifascist activism, his fervent anti‑Peronism).
Other factors were the emergence of manuscripts, letters and documents, and even the books he read, underlined and annotated while he ran the National Library, which provide a material basis for Borges studies. Also revealing were intimate disclosures in the diaries of his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares, where everything from jokes and gibes to concerns about literary politics emerge. And there was the transformation of a writer and a body of work once seen as elitist into a pop figure through adaptations and appropriations in books, comics, films and even memes.
In a similar way, Borges’ work itself transformed. During the author’s lifetime he often introduced changes with each new edition. Even after his death new material kept cropping up. In the 1990s early books he had disowned were republished, as were the essays from Inquiries, El tamaño de mi esperanza (or The size of my hope) and El idioma de los argentinos (or The language of Argentines). Later, numerous articles, reviews and profiles he had written for magazines such as Sur and El hogar — which he had never collected — were assembled. And during this century another central strand of his production began to be investigated and recovered.
“Not everyone has read Borges. Everyone, however, has heard him. Everyone knows how he spoke; everyone would recognize his voice,” observed Alan Pauls in his book The Borges Factor. “By a curious paradox,” he added, “the most ‘bookish’ writer in Argentine literature, the one most wedded to the protocols of the written word, is also the writer who best exploited the possibilities of the spoken record — the most oral, most spoken writer in Argentine literature.”
The research, part archaeological dig and part detective work, conducted by scholars has made it possible to locate and publish the literature classes that Borges taught at different universities, as well as the lectures that took him around Argentina and to other countries. At the same time, it has revealed another side of the writer: the man who, after losing his job as a librarian amid Peronism’s rise in the mid‑1940s, was forced to work as a public lecturer to support himself. “He prepared his classes and lectures obsessively, with huge amounts of research and reading,” noted Dr. Mariela Blanco, compiler of the 2025 El habla de Borges. Access to Borges’s notebooks, she added, shows “how he moved from writing to orality and from orality to writing.” For example, his lectures on Franz Kafka contain the seed of a key essay for the renewal of literary criticism, Kafka y sus precursores.
An author of the future
The 40th anniversary of Borges’s death has been commemorated in Argentina over the past weeks with a range of cultural activities: tributes, courses, debates, performances and exhibitions that will continue through the end of the month. In Buenos Aires, the program titled Borges. Echoes of a Name is being hosted by the Centro Cultural Recoleta, co‑organized with the Jorge Luis Borges International Foundation, where manuscripts, personal items, first editions of his books, photographs, a hologram reproducing his phrasing and a recreation of the austere room in which he lived for most of his life are on display. At the Mariano Moreno National Library there will be a series of talks and readings dedicated to the author of El hacedor (or The maker) in the coming days, as well as programming this weekend at the Casa del Bicentenario, among many other options.
One recurring theme in the commemorative events is the particular resonance of Borges’s work with the 21st century — its capacity to address an era so different from his own, a present shaped by information technologies and artificial intelligences. Perhaps because of the fragmentary character of many of his texts, perhaps because of the unsettling interplay of reality and fiction his stories and essays propose.
The tension between national literature and world literature in Borges also crops up repeatedly in debates. “One of Borges’s distinguishing traits is that he places Argentine literature on a world stage. His ambition is to build a mythology of the pampas and the suburbs that stands alongside the Iliad, the Odyssey or the Icelandic or Anglo‑Saxon sagas he so admired. And he succeeded,” writer Carlos Gamerro said at an event organized by the Centro Cultural Borges under the title Borges, author of the future.
What Borges did with the Spanish language,” Gamerro added, “was something totally new and foundational,” and with that tool he built “a place of literary centrality.” He even allowed himself to dispense with the major genre of his time, the novel. “If you think of world literature as a building,” he added, “Borges is one of the pillars and, if you remove Borges, world literature collapses. Nothing like this can be said of any other Argentine author, and I don’t know about Latin American authors either.”
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