Relates Borges’s works to several contexts, revealing the existence of a systematic model of context in ’Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’.

A sculpture of a golden hand in one of the busiest districts in Lisbon is a memorial meant to invoke Borges’s Portuguese origins - about which he wrote a poem, ’Los Borges’. Borges possessed extensive knowledge of Portuguese culture and was willing to use that knowledge to locate himself as part of European universalizing traditions. His knowledge ranged over Luis de Camões, Antero de Quental, Eça de Queiros, et al. He wrote a sonnet, ’A Camões’ and an essay on his work. Elsewhere, he claimed that his Portuguese lineage enabled him to grasp Pessoa’s writing more thoroughly. Saramago drew inspiration from Borges and imbued the Argentine writer’s tropes with a progressive slant. Borges’s influence also extends to the visual arts of Portugal and is present in a recent (2017) work of Portuguese fiction.

Borges’s impact on the ’Boom’ writers of Spanish American narrative consists of several factors, beginning with his unapologetic universalism. His translations of authors including Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Faulkner broadened literary horizons. He provided the Boom novelists with a model of style and verbal artifice that broke with previous practices. His laconic humour and playfulness enliven the works of García Márquez, Cabrera Infante, Donoso, and Cortázar, who all acknowledge a debt. Borges also equipped them with a set of narrative tehcniques and devices which allowed them to represent the worlds around them with previously unimagined sophistication and sweep. His insistence on reader-involvement in the construction of the literary work is another item of his legacy.

Borges was partial to Kafka’s short stories, reading forty one of them in the versions edited by Max Brod. On Kafka, he put forth a view that was largely biographical and religious. Borges saw the Book of Job as about the enigma of the universe, and he read Kafka’s stories as modern-day versions of Job: stories about stoicism, suffering, and the inscrutable character of God and the universe. Borges authored (or co-authored) translations of eighteen of Kafka’s texts, and the influence of Kafka is clearly visible in key stories of the 1940s - cf. ’The Library of Babel’, ’The Lottery in Babylon’, and ’The Secret Miracle’, the latter of these being about the relationship between man and God..

I have attempted to show that the the mid-twentieth century constituted a watershed in Spanish American poetry. This is confirmed by two more important facts of literary history. The first is that Borges was now about to begin writing a significant amount of poetry again, after having all but abandoned the genre since 1929. The second is that in 1954, the year which saw the first volume of Neruda's Odas and the publication of Parra's Poemas y antipoemas, Ernesto Cardenal began to write his first major poem, Hora O.

Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina, 1899–1986): Later poetry

Paul Cheselka (1987, 125) writes:

A curious feature of Borges criticism, which Cheselka notes, is that despite dozens of books and more than two thousand relatively recent articles in learned journals, this later poetry has hardly been studied in detail and in fact only a handful of publications deal with it at all. Cheselka rightly criticizes Zunilda Gertel's Borges y su retorno a la poesía (1969) for its inaccuracies, but his own book, though useful, deals exclusively with the thematics of Borges's later collections and has nothing whatever to say about their contents as poetry or about any influence which borges may have exercised on later poets.

Marco Polo, Petrarch, Tasso, Croce interested Borges, however Dante sat at the very highest pinnacle in his map of world literature and permeates his works. Italy took to Borges with intense enthusiasm, starting in the mid-1950s, earlier than in most countries. Following his death, a pivotal point came in 1998 when the rights to his entire oeuvre were acquired by the publishind house, Adelphi. Many highly important writers absorbed Borgesian elements, with Calvino, Sciascia, and Eco standing out. The case of Eco as a Borges avatar is compelling. Sciascia drew out hidden political and historical aspects in Borges’s work. Borges exercise influence on Italian fantastic literature both before and after his death. And the adaptation of ’Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’ by Bertolucci in ’The Spider’s Stratagem’ is an example of the astonishing energy Borges gave to two generations and more of Italian literature and culture.

Borges and Nobel Prize-winner J Coetzee coincide on many points. Both have written literary criticism consistently throughout their careers, and there are similarities in their views on specific writers (e.g. Kafka), philosophers, and works. The two resemble each other in their use of language, their education, family background, and post-colonial agendas. Borges is present at numerous levels in Coetzee’s novels, for example in ’Foe’ (Borges had himself written on ’Robinson Crusoe’), and Borgesian self-masking of the author pervades novels from ’Elizabeth Costello’ (2003) on.

The Bible is one of the most cited and reworked texts in Borges’s output. The chapter analyses the context in which Borges did his reading of the Bible and its resulting implications. His approach to the Bible was in opposition to that of Catholic integralism: a conception of Catholicism characterized by intransigence and intolerance, which held sway in Argentina in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Borges attributed importance to the Scriptures and defined hiimself as an interested yet sceptical individual. He made almost exclusive use of the Protestant Bible, his personal favourite being the King James Bible, published in 1611. In his later years, Borges declared his preference for Reformed Christianity, and he cited his paternal grandmother. Fanny Haslam, as an example of Protestant bibliocentrism.

Borges came to know Buddhism from a European perspective filtered through Schopenhauer and other philosophers, and his interest in it was ultimately concerned with the extent to which it coincided with Western ways of thinking. Together with Alicia Jurado, he co-authored What is Buddhism?, and he wrote with clarity of understanding about karma, nirvana, suffering, and nothingness, concepts that find their way into stories and essays such as ’The Garden of Forking Paths’, ’The Library of Babel’, ’The Cult of the Phoenix’, and ’The Writing of the God’. Borges showed greater enthusiasm for the fables and legends of Buddhism than for the spiritual truths of its doctrine. The chapter proposes a Buddhist-inflected reading of ’Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ and a more fully developed one of ’The Circular Ruins’, which it concludes is Borges’s consummate ’Buddhist fiction’.

The ‘Real’ Borges is difficult to pin down; in a word, he is an enigma. Many facts are now known about his life, but others are a puzzle to decipher, and he was careful while he lived about what he would reveal. His intimate secrets might be dramatized within his fictions, but the reader would have to guess and surmise regarding autobiographical relevance. The most explicit autobiographical document that Borges wrote was his ‘Autobiographical Notes’ published in New York in 1970. That essay highlights the difficulty of pinning down the ‘real’ Borges; and we will look at examples of the sophisticated masks that his fictional personae wear. Then there will be a discussion of three well-known books about Borges's life and work: by J. M. Cohen, Edwin Williamson, and Jason Wilson. This discussion will be followed by examples of how Borges's biographical experiences lie behind some of his most well-known stories, albeit in a disguised form. Borges had a deep interest in the relationship between a writer's life and work, which lasted until the end. The partially blind protagonist of a late story, like Borges himself, has interesting views on the nature of biography; he is interested in the idea of destiny, and the possibility that Shakespeare created more vivid characters than the grey man who dreamt them.

Borges never wrote a conventional autobiography, but his ‘Autobiographical Notes’, written in collaboration with Norman Thomas di Giovanni, was published in The New Yorker in 1970; it was a literary sensation. Borges's ideal was a biography ‘in the nature of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria’; he was unhappy with the amount of documentation (dates) his Notes contains, and consequently refused permission for it to be translated into Spanish. The controversy surrounding such translations after his death is documented by

di Giovanni; he has a chapter entitled ‘Borges and His Autobiography’ in the book The Lesson of the Master: On Borges and his Work, copyrighted in 1988, two years after Borges's death.

In The Lesson of the Master, di Giovanni refers to Borges's reluctance to include any mention, in the ‘Autobiographical Notes’, of his three suppressed books of essays of the 1920s; and in fact they had an argument over this point. Borges referred to them as ‘unmentionables’.

Gauchesque literature has a central place in the Argentine canon, and Borges wrote repeatedly on the subject, with particular reference to works by Sarmiento, Hernández, and Guiraldes. ’The Argentine Writer and Tradition’ houses some of his most mature critical assessments, as part of the ongoing debate about national literature. Borges edited collections of gauchesque poetry and of literary criticism of the kind. In his creative corpus, ’The End’ attempts to do away with an outdated archetype, and ’The South’ is his acknowledgement that the gaucho now exists only in literature.

Kennings fascinated Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), both attracting and repelling him. Often described as a figurative circumlocution or a double metaphor in Germanic poetry (most commonly in Old Norse but also in Old English), the kenning is a highly stylized and artificial compound noun. Borges found kennings sufficiently intriguing in his early days as a creative thinker that he wrote and published a significant analysis of them. In that study, he placed them in the context of Old Norse and Old English poetry, but also brought to bear the Spanish poetic movements known as gongorismo or culteranismo (the rococo and aureate stylings of the Baroque period) and the modernism called ultraísmo, which had greatly appealed to the young Borges when he briefly lived in Madrid with his family. He reused the material from this piece repeatedly throughout his life, and developed it further in several projects. Borges cared deeply about kennings, and gave examples of them frequently in talks and conversations, demonstrating his knowledge and his liking for this stylistic quirk of early Germanic literatures. He put them in his poetry, as best he could. At the same time, Borges's attitude to the kenning was remarkably contradictory. He describes the usage in one interview as “rather a weariness of the flesh to the poets themselves–at least to the Old English poets.” Old Norse poets, he implies, seemed to enjoy them more and certainly used them more. However, he also cites their “poignant quality,” and states they are “the first deliberate verbal delight of a literature governed by instinct.” His choice of goce here, which I have translated as “delight,” may be an example of deliberate borgesian double meaning; goce can also be “choice, preference, taste.” Kennings might be a delight, but they might also simply be a preference of the poet. Borges might just as easily be suggesting here that kennings were the first step away from a literature of instinct and towards a literature of artifice, or stylistic excess, rather than that they were a new elegance in the literature. Since he places kennings in the context of Spanish literary periods of excess and great artifice, his implication might be that kennings are a sign of excess in an otherwise fascinating poetic oeuvre. Or not.

Various prologues and public statements made by Borges about Domingo F. Sarmiento respond to specific historical conjunctures where violence evinces anxiety about barbarism. In 1944, the prologue to ’Recuerdos de provincia’ responds to the immediate context of the Second World War and equates Nazism unequivocally with barbarism. In 1957 and 1968, Sarmiento’s formula of civilization/barbarism continues to serve as a framework for interpreting reality under Perón’s two governments. At the same time, however, the other classic work of Argentine literature, ’Martin Fierro’, evokes a world of courage and rebellion that crystallizes the aesthetic phenomenon. With the return of Perón in 1974, Martin Fierro is displaced again by Facundo as a compelling archetype in and for the national imaginary.