This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Unlike birth, in which there can be no geographical choice, death may offer us some succour in a final act of discrimination. Twelve days before Jorge Luis Borges died on 14 June 1986, the New Yorker published his poem “The Web”, which opened with the anxiety of destination: “Which of my cities/am I doomed to die in?”
Ever the Weltbürger, the Argentinian man of letters went on to list his favoured cities — Geneva, Montevideo, Nara, Buenos Aires (“where I verge on being a foreigner”) and Austin — before repeating the poignant half-line demand, this time for “what language”: the Spanish of his ancestors or the English of his grandmother’s Bible?
Diagnosed with terminal cancer, Borges had been taken to Geneva by his ex-student and partner, María Kodama, the previous November. It was here that he married her (divorce being illegal in Argentina) and decided to stay rather than return to Buenos Aires, where he had been expected to die.
For many of his fellow Argentines, death in a Swiss canton was seen as unpatriotic, an act of betrayal. Though a closer reading of Argentine history would have revealed that some of its national heroes had ended their days abroad: San Martín, Sarmiento, Gardel, “Che” Guevara, Cortázar. Perhaps in a European death there was a fulfilment of Argentinidad (“Argentine-ness”), a reversal of having lived on the peripheries.
For Borges, Geneva had purpose — the “most propitious [city] for happiness” — even though he had been homesick here as an adolescent. The family had come to Europe in 1914, for an operation to rescue his father’s failing eyesight, only to be trapped in Switzerland by the Great War. He would not return to his native Argentina for another seven years — by then he was 21 and Europeanised.
In Buenos Aires, Borges was brought up in a bilingual household and called “Georgie”. His paternal grandmother, Fanny Haslam, had been born in Staffordshire of Northumbrian lineage. She remained a reticent Victorian who, on her deathbed, whispered in English, as opposed to her poor Spanish, “I am only an old woman dying very, very slowly. There is nothing remarkable or interesting about this.” His English governess was the wonderfully named Miss Tink, whose cousin was a local hoodlum.
From an early age Borges was able to read both in English and Spanish. His inherited near-sightedness and an inherent frailty pushed him into the comforting embrace of a library of “unlimited English books”. It was only late in life that he admitted its early marking of him: “If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library.”
He retreated first into the pages of Chambers’s Encyclopædia and the Britannica, followed by the Anglo canon. (Even Don Quixote was read in English; when he finally read it in the original, it sounded to him like a bad translation.)
In interviews, Borges liked to cite Wells, Stevenson and Kipling as his favourite authors “from the first”. This would invariably initiate some patriotic discourse on Spanish letters from his Hispanic inquisitors. Borges believed that Spanish literature had started “admirably” with Don Quixote and the early romanceros (romances) only to have its decline mirror that of the Spanish Empire.
Geneva proved to be yet another library for the young Borges, one in which French, Latin and German literatures were revealed to him, as were Occidental and Oriental philosophies. It was also where, set against this damp city, the nostalgia of a Buenos Aires of the imagination, of “adventurous streets and visible sunsets”, took hold.
His discovery of Thomas De Quincey (rewriting the universe), Thomas Carlyle (blurring of fiction and philosophy) and, especially, G.K. Chesterton (employing paradox and humour) became lifelong influences. And yet, Borges remained ashamed of having been a bookish child, especially in Argentina, where his people had been men of action who had fought in the Wars of Independence and civil wars. (This feeling reflects Argentina’s perennial contradiction between civilisation and barbarism that Sarmiento explored in his seminal text Facundo.)
From 1924, after another European sojourn, Borges did not leave Argentina again until the early 1960s: he had rediscovered his native city. He gained a small reputation as a passionate and Ultraist poet by dropping many of the 300 copies of his first book into the overcoat pockets of literary Buenos Aires.
A near fatal accident in 1938, however, proved the turning point in his career, after which he published Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949). It is on these two volumes of short stories — a geographically peripherical life had allowed Borges to seek out stories in the margins — and the dazzling critical essays that his reputation as a master of the breviloquent narrative will rest. Italo Calvino would identify in Borges an “idea of literature as a world constructed and governed by the intellect”.
International recognition as the great universal writer came to Borges late. The first translation was into French in the early 1950s, followed by Italian and German editions. It was not until 1962 that Borges was translated into English. By this time he was blind.
The catalyst for his literary canonisation, especially in the Anglosphere, was sharing the Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett in 1961. Nine years later, the polyglottic George Steiner was still bemoaning the loss of Borges’s recherché status as a “private loss … the splendour of Borges [having been] clandestine, signalled to a happy few, bartered in undertones and mutual recognitions”.
Borges was now condemned to an endless international carousel of interviews and to dictating in the Jamesian fashion. Those willing to read to “Georgie” were legion, so too the number of books of interviews published under his name, all too often covering the same territory. In 1972, V.S. Naipaul wrote an excoriating essay on Argentina, in which he felt Borges’s reputation to be “so inflated and bogus that it obscures his greatness”. Though what form this greatness took was not made clear. Naipaul had coarsely painted Borges’s genius into his portrait of an Argentina on the slide.
By the late 1970s, Borges remained unequivocal in his admiration of English as a language. For the more cynical, this may have been a distancing ploy from his country’s parlous state. In an interview with William F. Buckley Jr., he admitted to finding “English a far finer language than Spanish” but one he was “unworthy to handle” himself.
He argued that English had two registers, being both a Germanic and a Latin language: “For any idea you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example, if I say ‘regal’ that is not exactly the same thing as saying ‘kingly’. Or if I say ‘fraternal’ that is not the same as saying ‘brotherly’. Or ‘dark’ and ‘obscure’ … if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or I wrote the Holy Ghost, since ‘ghost’ is a fine, dark Saxon word, but ‘spirit’ is a light Latin word.”
Moreover, he held “of all languages, English is the most physical”; whereas words in Spanish were by comparison “far too cumbersome … far too long”. The Peruvian novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa thought the prose “an anomaly … [and] in opting for the strictest frugality, he deeply disobeys the Spanish language’s natural tendency towards excess”.
Spanish, in Borges’s hands was made “intelligent [in that] there is always a logical, conceptual level to which all else is subservient”. The English translator, J.M. Cohen, was more succinct: “[he] writes a clear Spanish that has undergone the discipline of much English reading”. And yet for all his admiration of English letters and thoughts of England as a “loved one”, he could never quite fathom the English. Borges’s father, a quasi-anarchist à la Herbert Spencer who liked to read English poetry aloud, often joked: “After all, what are the English? Just a pack of German agricultural labourers.”
His son thought it bemusing that filling “the world with stupid sports” was never an argument levelled against England by her many detractors. That said, he remained throughout his life equally puzzled by his native Argentina. The Falklands War he thought a case of “two bald men fighting over a comb”, and General Galtieri and Margaret Thatcher he believed might be the same person (the “double” a gift from Robert Louis Stevenson).
Towards the end of his life, Borges sought to venture into new territory as an act of withdrawal. (Though this was not a rejection as some Argentine critics presumed.) His 1970 “Autobiographical Essay”, written in English, concluded “I had always thought of English literature as the richest in the world; the discovery now of a secret chamber at the very threshold of that literature came to me as an additional gift.”
This discovery had not been without reason. Borges’s enquiries into kennings had been propelled by his fascination with ancestry. He retained the romantic superstition that his English antecedents linked him “with a Saxon and perhaps a Danish past”.
This late-flowering enthusiasm was not without its practical use. When Anthony Burgess found himself at a party held for Borges at the Argentine Embassy, both men fell into conversation. With secret service men in evidence to pick up on any subversion, Burgess decided to quote the first line of Cædmon’s Hymn, only for the Argentine to respond in kind. They continued to the end of the poem in linear antiphony.
Buried near John Calvin’s grave in Geneva’s Cimetière des Rois, Borges’s headstone eschewed the languages of his childhood for the inscription “And ne forhtedon ná (“and not be frighted ever”) from the late tenth-century poem “The Battle of Maldon”. The reverse depicted a Viking ship on her final voyage beneath a legend extracted from Old Norse Völsunga Saga — a final nod to his father’s library where he had first read William Morris’s translations.
That Borges was esteemed in Britain has never been in doubt. He was awarded the KBE in 1964 and later received honorary doctorates from Oxford and Cambridge. In 1971, his lectures could fill the Central Hall, Westminster for four nights.
The obituaries when they came were less fulsome than might have been expected and certainly less grief-stricken than their European and Latin American counterparts. (“It’s as if Merlin has died,” said the Chilean poète maudit, Roberto Bolaño.) Perhaps, despite all the English constructions, the fact that he still thought like a Latino made him suspect.
For others he was far too oblique. Nabokov and his wife were initially “delighted” by the work, only to find themselves on a “portico” where they had “learned that there was no house”. Clive James, who had grown out of the enchantment, would later object to the Argentine primarily on political grounds as many would. (Borges had make the miscalculation of — having rubbished the international left — calling the 1976 junta “gentlemen”.)
But had many not missed the point of Borges? One of the clues can be found in his critical 1951 lecture “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”, in which he argued against the kind of literary nationalism that favoured the parochial over the universal. “Our patrimony is the universe; we should essay all themes,” he concluded.
Borges, ever the hedonist bibliophile, has always offered his readers that very freedom he was afforded by his father’s library. He was inherently a reader’s writer, rather than the writer’s writer everyone has mistaken him for. His blessing, that of an autodidact, still rings true: “It is not the reading that matters, but the rereading.”
