Words then hide their duplicity behind a facade of neutrality and objectivity. Words do not cut the world at its joints but separate off bits of reality arbitrarily with bloody and ragged edges that look different from every angle. Words cannot reveal but oh how they direct one’s attention, often to opposing points of the compass.

They can lie beautifully and even beneficially, but they nevertheless lie. And that fact, inadequately but accurately put, is that words lie. What educated person could live without his factional fiction? Borges created a genre which itself is now a fact in Western culture. Coetzee said of Borges: 'He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.' His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. In 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first International Publishers' Prize Prix Formentor. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library (Biblioteca Nacional) and professor of Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He was a target of political persecution during the Peron regime, and supported the military juntas that overthrew it.ĭue to a hereditary condition, Borges became blind in his late fifties. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in Surrealist literary journals. In 1914, his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school and traveled to Spain. Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo, usually referred to as Jorge Luis Borges (Spanish pronunciation: ), was an Argentine writer and poet born in Buenos Aires.

Jorge luis borges ficciones english