Passions, like trades and professions, are usually hereditary. In many cases, the personal tastes that we incorporate into our lives originate from the hedonism of our ancestors. They usually come from a father, mother, older brother or sister. As if a legacy or perhaps a family mandate.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is the most important writer in Argentine literature and one of the most established in universal literature of the 20th century. His work speaks for itself. But which writers did you like and what inspired you to become a writer?
The author of fictions (1944) and The Aleph (1949) used to say that his father Jorge Guillermo Borges paved the way for writing. In a way, it induced him to embark on his successful literary career.
“The father was a frustrated writer. He was a philosophy professor, lawyer, anarchist. He had a relationship with writers, above all, very marginal poets from Buenos Aires like Evaristo Carriego”, points out Juan Francisco Baroffio, bibliophile, writer, essayist and scholar of Borgean literature. In fact, the famous Argentine writer, poet and essayist used to subtly emphasize it. “I never felt obligated, but today I realize that My father wanted to see that writer’s destiny come true in me”.
In addition to his father Jorge Guillermo, there were authors who also marked the way for him to become a writer. Borges was an early reader: in his childhood he read Don Quijote of La Manchathe masterpiece of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, but in English. Curiously, he first did it in this Anglo-Saxon language before doing it in his official language: Spanish.
“At the age of nine I translated The happy Prince of Oscar Wilde, which was published in El País, one of the Buenos Aires newspapers. As the translation was simply signed ‘Jorge Borges’, people assumed that it was the work of my father”, he recounted in his memoirs. Therefore, the author signed as “Jorge Borges (son)” to differentiate himself from his fatherJorge Guillermo Borges.
From a very young age, Borges –his family called him Georgie since he was born- used to read complex texts for his age and, above all, in English. This reading habit shaped him to later become a writer.
I also read children’s stories, like The tales of the Grimm brothers. Are Tom Sawyer’s adventures either The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(both, of Mark Twain), and other more advanced readings for a child of his age such as Martin Fierro (Jose Hernandez) and the novels of Oscar Wilde.
I even used to read the Bible along with Frances Anne Haslam, her grandmother of English origin and Protestant religion. In the last decades of his life, Borges ventured into the Anglo-Saxon and Northern European literature, such as Icelandic.
“As a child I read a lot in English. His first approach to literature is the library of his father Jorge Guillermo, where texts in English and texts by British authors predominated”, explains Baroffio, a scholar of the work of Jorge Luis Borges, who also owns around 300 titles of his work, mainly texts from the first edition.
Borges claimed to be more proud of what he had read than of what he had written. That was, for him, the importance of reading. But which authors were among his favorites? There are many of British origin like William Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Bernard Shaw, GK Chesterton, HG Wells, Thomas De Quincey, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Carlyle and samuel johnson, among others. but they are also Dante Alighieri, Homer, Victor Hugo, Walt Whitman, Kafka.
A singular fact is that Borges he quoted his favorite authors in his works. Shakespeare is mentioned in 216 texts. Then they come Leopoldo Lugones (164), walt whitman (145), Edgar Allan Poe (144), Stevenson (126), Arthur Schopenhauer (122), George Bernard Shaw (117), Francis of Quevedo (115), K Chesterton (108) and Miguel de Cervantes (104), among others. All of these were named over 100 times in his work.
His favorite works include Macbeth (Shakespeare), The Divine Comedy (Alighieri), The Iliad and The odyssey (Homer), The Quijote (Cervantes) and the first part of the Martin Fierro. “Regarding his influences, Borges was not so much influenced by the styles and aesthetics of specific authors but rather by the mechanisms and narrative resources and the stories they told”, warns Baroffio.
He also had a predilection for reading the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. His admiration was so deep that he used to name him repeatedly: “The universe is still mysterious but it seems to me that of all the philosophical doctrines, Schopenhauer’s is the one that seems to me to be the most solution,” said Borges.
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