50 Fun Facts About Jorge Luis Borges

Borges's 1949 collection The Aleph is named after the first letter of which alphabet?

Hebrew: aleph is its first letter, thought to have begun as a drawing of an ox's head, and the Greeks borrowed the same sign as their alpha.

Which 1944 Borges collection includes "The Library of Babel", "The Circular Ruins" and "Death and the Compass"?

Ficciones grew out of a slimmer book that Argentina's National Prize jury passed over, a snub that led the magazine Sur to devote part of an issue to a 'Reparation for Borges'.

Borges shared the first International Formentor Prize in 1961 with which writer?

Samuel Beckett shared the prize, which brought Borges, until then little translated into English, to international attention.

Which condition overtook Borges in his fifties?

Blindness crept up on him as it had on his father; he never learned Braille, and from then on he composed in his head and dictated.

In 1955 Borges was appointed director of which Argentine institution?

The National Library made a director of a man whose first library job, in 1938, had been as an assistant in a quiet municipal branch.

Borges died in 1986 in which city, where he had gone to school?

Geneva sheltered his family during the First World War; he called the city one of his homelands and, gravely ill, moved back there for his last months.

In Borges's "The Library of Babel", the universe is an endless library of rooms of what shape?

Hexagonal rooms repeat without end, four walls of each lined with shelves, and every book runs to exactly 410 pages, so the library holds every book that could ever be written.

Which Borges story features a point in space that contains all other points?

The Aleph sits in the cellar of Carlos Argentino Daneri, a mediocre poet who uses it to write an epic describing every place on the planet.

A Borges story curses the young Ireneo Funes with the inability to do what?

Forget is the one thing Funes cannot do: he retains every detail he has ever perceived, a gift so crushing that he can no longer think in general ideas.

Which 1941 Borges story is said to foreshadow the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?

The Garden of Forking Paths turns on a novel that is really a labyrinth of time, in which every choice branches into its own future, as worlds do in the later theory.

Borges wrote parody detective stories as "H. Bustos Domecq" with which collaborator?

Adolfo Bioy Casares supplied half the pen name: by Borges's account, Bustos was one of his own great-grandfathers and Domecq one of Bioy's.

Which honour was Borges nominated for year after year without ever winning?

The Nobel Prize in Literature eluded him for decades; he joked that not granting it to him had become a Scandinavian tradition.

As a child, Borges translated which Oscar Wilde story into Spanish?

The Happy Prince appeared in a Buenos Aires newspaper under the name he shared with his father, so friends assumed the father had done the translating.

Borges dismissed which literary form as one that requires padding?

The novel: he never wrote one, saying that laziness was the first reason and that novels wearied him, while he could read a good short story over and over.

In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", Uqbar is first sought in what kind of reference work?

An encyclopedia: the article on Uqbar exists in only one copy of a pirated reprint of the Britannica, the first clue that someone is inventing a world.

In "Death and the Compass", who is detective Erik Lönnrot's criminal nemesis?

Red Scharlach lays the clues himself: knowing Lönnrot will read a pattern into the murders, he lets the detective reason his way to the place where he is to die.

In "The Circular Ruins", a stranger arrives at a burned temple intending to do what?

Dream a man into being is his whole purpose, and he succeeds; only at the end does he understand that he too is a figure in someone else's dream.

What does the heroine of Borges's "Emma Zunz" set out to do?

Avenge her father is the plan: she shoots the mill owner she blames for his ruin, then tells the police a rehearsed story in which he attacked her.

Borges recorded the 1965 album El Tango with which Argentine composer?

Astor Piazzolla wrote the music and Borges the verses, which the tango singer Edmundo Rivero recorded with them in the studio.

Under which president was Borges "promoted" to inspector of poultry and rabbits?

Juan Perón's officials told him it was because he had sided with the Allies in the war; Borges took the hint and resigned the next day.

What was the title of Borges's first poetry collection, published in 1923?

Fervor de Buenos Aires was his first book; he later regretted some of his early publications so much that he tried to buy up every copy and destroy them.

Borges's sister Norah made her name in which art?

Painting made Norah Borges's name; she also cut the print for the cover of her brother's first book of poems.

Borges delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1967-68 at which university?

Harvard gave its Norton chair of poetry, for nine months, to a man best known for prose; his six talks there became the book This Craft of Verse.

From 1967 Borges spent five years working with Norman Thomas di Giovanni on what?

His English editions: Borges was so pleased with their joint translations that he gave di Giovanni an equal share of the royalties.

Who became Borges's widow and the heir to his estate?

María Kodama worked with him on Old English texts, studied Icelandic with him and travelled the world at his side; as his heir she ran his estate until her death in 2023.

Borges's 1986 marriage was conducted by proxy in which South American country?

Paraguay was the usual way round for Argentines blocked by their own divorce laws, so the wedding took place there by proxy, seven weeks before he died.

In Spain, the young Borges joined which avant-garde literary movement?

Ultraism was a young Spanish movement when Borges joined it; he carried it home to Buenos Aires in 1921, then gradually abandoned the style.

How was Prisma, the broadsheet Borges co-founded, mostly distributed?

On walls: Borges and his fellow poets printed each issue as one large sheet and pasted it up themselves around Buenos Aires, but Prisma lasted only two issues.

Which William Faulkner novel did Borges translate into Spanish in 1940?

The Wild Palms was barely a year old when Borges translated it; the choice of a lesser Faulkner novel probably came down to opportunity and the need for money.

Borges grew up bilingual thanks to his paternal grandmother, who came from which country?

England: Frances Haslam of Staffordshire married an Argentine colonel, and the English spoken in her family's home made her grandson bilingual from childhood.

In "The Book of Sand", the narrator acquires the infinite book from a seller of what?

Bibles are the stranger's trade, and the narrator pays for the infinite book with his pension money and a prized black-letter Wyclif Bible of his own.

In "The Book of Sand", the narrator hides the infinite book behind his copy of which work?

The Arabian Nights hides it at first; in the end he leaves the monstrous book on a basement shelf of a vast library, reasoning that the best place to hide a leaf is a forest.

In a 1939 story, Pierre Menard sets out to re-create which novel word for word?

Don Quixote, rewritten line for line, strikes the story's narrator as richer than the original, because the same words now come from a man of the twentieth century.

In Borges's "The House of Asterion", the lonely narrator of a house with endless doors is revealed to be which figure?

The Minotaur tells his own story, waiting for a redeemer; the last line belongs to Theseus, who tells Ariadne that the creature scarcely defended himself.

What accident leaves the young Ireneo Funes crippled in Borges's story?

A fall from a horse leaves Funes paralysed, and when the narrator comes to collect the Latin books he lent him, the boy is reciting Pliny from his bed in the dark.

In Borges's "The Zahir", which everyday object becomes an obsession the narrator can never put out of his mind?

A coin, a twenty-centavo piece handed to him as change for a drink, slowly crowds out every other thought until he expects to perceive nothing else.

In "The Immortal", the Troglodyte whom Rufus names Argos turns out to be which poet?

Homer, it turns out: the wordless cave-dwellers are the Immortals themselves, who abandoned their city for the caves and now barely notice the physical world.

In Borges's "The Secret Miracle", what does God grant a playwright facing a Nazi firing squad?

A year in a frozen instant: the squad stands motionless while he finishes his play in his head, and as he finds the last word the volley kills him.

In "The Lottery in Babylon", the all-encompassing lottery is run by what entity?

The Company grows so secret and so all-powerful that some Babylonians whisper it has never existed and never will.

Borges cited "The Crystal Egg" and "The Door in the Wall" as inspirations; who wrote them?

H. G. Wells wrote both; in "The Crystal Egg" a shopkeeper finds a crystal that shows him scenes from another world, a seed for one of Borges's own tales.

What happened to Borges in late 1938, shortly before he began writing his fantastic stories?

A near-fatal head injury: the wound turned septic, and while recovering he wrote "Pierre Menard", the first story in the new manner that made his name.

Which creature in the Book of Imaginary Beings did Borges invent outright?

The peryton, half stag and half bird, arrives with a lost medieval manuscript as its authority, and Borges made that up as well.

Borges's 1946 story "Deutsches Requiem" is the last testament of what kind of narrator?

A Nazi camp official, due to be shot in the morning, has pleaded guilty from the start; Borges said he set out to imagine an ideal Nazi, free of self-pity.

In 1934 Argentine ultra-nationalists tried to discredit Borges by claiming he was secretly what?

Jewish, they said, and so not truly Argentine; Borges replied with the essay "I, a Jew", saying he would be proud to be one.

Which American periodical ran one of the first English translations of a Borges story, in 1948?

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine ran Anthony Boucher's translation of a Borges spy story in August 1948, more than a decade before his literary fame in English.

The people of Tlön hold an extreme form of which philosophical position?

Idealism in its most extreme form: for the people of Tlön nothing exists apart from the mind that perceives it, so one of their languages does without nouns altogether.

In Borges's late story "The Other", whom does the elderly Borges meet on a riverside bench?

His younger self, not yet twenty: the two Borgeses disagree about poetry and about communism, and the elder realises they cannot understand each other.

Which sport did Borges famously detest?

Football struck him as a school of nationalism and crowd loyalty; he is said to have timed a lecture to clash with Argentina's opening match of the 1978 World Cup.

In 1976 Borges travelled abroad to accept an honour from which military ruler?

Augusto Pinochet handed him a decoration in Santiago that year, a visit that Borges's critics long held against him.

Borges called the 1982 Falklands War a fight between two bald men over what?

A comb, a prize of no use to either side; he made the same point in a 1985 poem about two soldiers, one from each army, who die on the islands.