Download Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges
Matt Sidell
Mrs. Favin
Honors Writing for Publication
Biographical Information
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Born August 24, 1899 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Grew up in Palermo, a suburb of Buenos Aires.
Grew up in a bilingual house.
Began writing young.
Moved to Switzerland in 1914, and Spain in 1919.
Met poet Rafael Cansinos-Asséns in Spain (Ultraist
movement).
Returned to Argentina in 1921.
Prolific period from 1921 through 1930’s.
Hereditary blindness, from father to son.
In 1938, he hit his head and almost died.
Appointed Director of the National Library in 1955.
“I speak of God’s splendid irony in granting me at one
time 800,000 books and darkness.”
Bio info (cont.)
• Won the National Prize for literature in
1956.
• Jointly won the International Publishers
Prize in 1961 with Samuel Beckett.
• In 1967 spent a year as a visiting
professor at Harvard. Married Elsa Astete
Millán from 1967-70, then Maria Kodama in
1986.
• Died June 14, 1986 of liver cancer.
Isms, isms, and more isms!
• Post-Modernism: “Of, relating to, or being any of various
movements in reaction to modernism that are typically
characterized […] by ironic self-reference and absurdity
(as in literature)”. –Merriam Webster
• Magical Realism: “A chiefly literary style or genre
originating in Latin America that combines fantastic or
dreamlike elements with realism”. -American Heritage
• Ultraism: “Movement in Spanish and Spanish American poetry
after World War I, characterized by a tendency to use free
verse, complicated metrical innovations, and daring imagery
and symbolism instead of traditional form and content.
Influenced by the emphasis on form of the French
Symbolists[…]”- Encyclopedia Brittanica
Influenced by...
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Miguel de Cervantes
Jonathon Swift
Franz Kafka
William Wordsworth
Victor Hugo
Edgar Allan Poe
Robert Louis Stevenson
Walt Whitman
James Joyce
Arthur Schopenhauer
Contemporaries
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Isak Dineson
Federico Garcia Lorca
Albert Camus
Pablo Neruda
Samuel Beckett
Vladamir Nabakov (born in the same year
as Borges!)
The Stanza
• A stanza is a unit within a larger poem.
• It consists of a grouping of lines, set off by a
space, that usually has a set pattern of meter
and rhyme.
– Stanzas are not always set off by a space; for
example, in traditional sonnets there are 3 stanzas
but usually no breaks between lines.
• They are named by the number of lines they
consist of.
– Examples: couplet, tercet, quatrain, cinquain, sestet,
septet, octave.
But Why?
• Why Borges?
– Borges has a fantastical element in his works that I
enjoy, and some of the themes he works with strike a
chord with me. I have known his poetry for about a
year and I think he has influenced my writing, as well.
• Why “The Art of Poetry”?
– This particular poem, to me, is what poetry is all
about. The words are so beautiful and deep, and so
right. This poem strengthened my love of poetry over
other forms of writing.
“The Art of Poetry”- Info
• Published: 1961.
• Theme: the convoluted and eternal nature of poetry, as well as its
beauty and ability to be unique to every individual.
• Key Literary Elements: Allusion to The Odyssey in stanza 6 and an
ancient Greek philosopher in stanza 7. Extended metaphors for
poetry throughout. Strong imagery (green eternity, endless like a
river flowing).
• What Poetic Form Is Used?: It is 7 quatrains with the rhyme scheme
ABBA, in which rhyming lines are actually repeated rhymes/end
words. The meter changes throughout.
• How the subject matter relates to Borges/the time period: A lot of
Borges’ recurring themes appear. Time (1), River (1, 7), Multiple
Aspects of the Self (5), Labrynth (2).
The Art of Poetry
• To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.
• To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.
• To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.
• To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.
The Art of Poetry
• Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.
• They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.
• Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.