Jorge Luis Borges

Borges was born in 1899 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Growing up, his family resided in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. His mother, Leonor, came from a Uruguayan family of Spanish origin. Borges’s father, also named Jorge, was a lawyer and a novelist. The young Borges was raised bilingual in Spanish and English, and even translated an Oscar Wilde play from English to Spanish for a local publication at age 10. As his father’s eyesight began to decline, he left his law practice and moved the family to Geneva, Switzerland in 1814 to seek treatment. There, Jorge Luis learned French and German. Borges’s family stayed in Europe until 1921, when they returned to Buenos Aires. There, Borges began his literary career with a poetry collection called Fervor de Buenos Aires and with literary reviews. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he began to explore existential themes in his writing and dabbled in many genres. In the late 1930s, Borges began working as a library assistant, a position that would influence some of his most famous works. In his early 30s, Borges’s vision began to decline and, unable to spend all his time writing, he began working as a lecturer to support himself. In 1955, he became the director of the Argentine National Library. His vision continued to decline, and by the late 1950s, he was almost completely blind. He continued to write with his mother’s help as his personal secretary. In 1967, Borges married Elsa Astete Millán. However, the marriage lasted only 3 years. Afterwards, he continued to live with his mother until she died at 99. In his later years, he traveled internationally with his personal assistant María Kodama, whom he married in 1986. Borges died later in 1986, in Geneva.