Biographies

Jorge Luis Borges 

"Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire." Jorge Luis Borges,

Taken from: http://www.utdallas.edu

Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on August 24, 1899 – the same year that Vladimir Nabokov was born. Shortly after his birth, his family relocated to calle Serrano 2135/47 in Palermo, a suburb on the northern outskirts of Buenos Aires.

Although Palermo had roots in Italian immigrants it was not named for the town in Sicily, but rather after San Benito de Palermo, a Sicilian saint to whom a nearby church was dedicated. Today a well-developed area with a high cost of living, at the turn of the century it was a lower class suburb known for its vaguely seedy underclass, discordant politics, and knife-wielding compadritos, or hoodlums. Although by the time the Borges settled there, the neighborhood had calmed down somewhat, Palermo still carried a colorful legacy of cabarets and brothels, a place where violent men and lusty women danced the tango and told stories aflame with gauchos, knife-fights, and vengeance. It was a legacy that Borges would absorb with all the passion of an intellectual outsider seeking to identify with the allure of the dangerorus and the socially misbegotten, and it cast its spell over much of Borges’ earliest work.

Although the flavor of this neighborhood was to permanently enter Borges’ writing, at the turn of the century the middle-class Borges family felt distinctly out of place. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was a lawyer and a psychology teacher whose personal beliefs were founded in anarchy. His mother, Leonor Acevedo de Borges, was a proud woman, descended from a long line of soldiers and freedom fighters; her own mother had furnished their home with family artifacts such as swords, uniforms, and portraits of great freedom fighters. Borges was terribly fond of both of his parents. His father taught him philosophy, once using a chessboard to explain Zeno’s paradox, and his mother, who would live to see 99, was a strong woman who would one day travel around the world with her son.

His parents spoke and read English, for his paternal Grandfather, Colonel Francisco Borges, had married an Englishwoman from Staffordshire named Francis Haslam. Although Colonel Borges was shot and killed in 1874, Grandmother Fanny was around to tell the young Jorge Luis – “Georgie” – many stories of the wild frontier days. Borges has often remarked that his Grandmother’s dry English wit was the origin of his concise style. (In an interesting parallel, Gabriel García Márquez would later lay his deadpan fabulism at the feet of his own storytelling grandmother in Colombia.) She would also read him English magazines; as well as securing Mrs. Tink, another Englishwoman, as his nanny. Borges would later comment that the household was so bilingual that he was not even aware that English and Spanish were separate languages until later in his childhood.

Borges’s younger sister Norah, his junior by two years, was his only real childhood friend. Together they invented imaginary playmates – “Quilos” and “The Windmill” – acted out scenes from books, and spent their time roaming the labyrinthine library and the garden, two images which would find endless incarnations in his writing. During the summers they stayed in their summerhouse in Adrogué, a nearby town where the reasonably well-to-do could relax in a European setting complete with tennis courts, English-style schools, and garden mazes scented with “the ubiquitous smell of eucalyptus trees.” Young Georgie was also fond of the zoo, and spent countless hours gazing at the animals, particularly the tigers – his favorites. As he would later remark toward the end of his life: “I used to stop for a long time in front of the tiger’s cage to see him pacing back and forth. I liked his natural beauty, his black stripes and his golden stripes. And now that I am blind, one single color remains for me, and it is precisely the color of the tiger, the color yellow.” In fact, a common punishment meted out to the young Georgie was to deny him trips to see his beloved tigers.

But despite his games with his sister and his relaxing summers in Adrogué, Borges has often remarked that he felt somewhat like an alien growing up. As a middle class child living in Palermo, he was essentially a bookish and terribly nearsighted child who tended to hide indoors. And yet in the manner common to all boys everywhere, in his imagination he fancied himself to be an active part of the local scenery. He established a friendship with a local poet, his neighbor Evaristo Carriego, a reckless man who represented much of the “sentimental machismo” of Argentine tradition and would become something of a minor idol to the young dreamer. It wasn’t until much later, returning to Buenos Aires after spending seven years in Europe, that Borges admitted to himself that “for years I believed I had grown up in a suburb . . . of risky streets and visible sunsets. The truth is I grew up in a garden, behind lanceolate railings, and in a library of unlimited English books.” He later wrote a small book on the poet Carriego in which he reconciles the fact that his younger self was no denizen of the streets, but rather a quiet intellectual. Nevertheless, images of thecompadrito, stray gauchos, and knife fights would make their occasional appearances throughout the rest of his literary career.

He was always expected to be a writer, as his father had made several attempts, and as his blindness increased over the years, it became a tacit understanding that his son would carry on the tradition. (Of course the blindness was hereditary, for Borges himself would later lose his sight as well.) He started writing at the age of six, mostly fanciful stories inspired by Cervantes. When he was nine, he translated Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” into Spanish, an effort which appeared in a local newspaper calledEl País. Since it was signed only “Jorge Borges,” everyone assumed it was his father’s work. After some visits to the pampa, where his mother’s cousins owned a ranch on the Uruguay River, he attempted to write gaucho poems, but quickly confessed that they were a failure. But still the pampas exerted an influence on him, and in addition to learning how to swim, he stored up many images that would typically later seek a more fulfilling release in his later stories.

In 1908 Borges began to attend school – his father’s anarchist sentiments had kept him out until now – but he was taught nothing but Argentine nationalism. He was also dismayed at the comparatively low moral and intellectual character of the other students. Adopting an English style of dress in a predominantly anti-English school, wearing thick glasses, and already having a superior education, needless to say Borges was picked on relentlessly by the other students. Possessed of a quixotic sense of ancestral honor, he refused to back down from a fight; but unfortunately his stamina could not back up his pride and he ended up becoming more familiar with defeat than victory. Indeed, he came to loathe school, even though he excelled at it academically.

Julio Cortázar 

"She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste.”  Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch

Taken from: http://www.utdallas.edu

Julio Cortázar was born in Brussels, Belgium, of Argentine parents abroad on business. When he was four years old, his family returned to Buenos Aires, where he grew up in a suburb. Cortázar attended the Escuela Normal de Profesores Mariano Acosta, a teachers training college. In 1935 he received a degree as a secondary-level teacher. He studied then two years at the University of Buenos Aires and taught in secondary schools in Bolívar, Chivilcoy, and Mendoza. In 1944-45 he was a professor of French literature at the University of Cuyo, Mendoza. He joined there a protest against Peron and was briefly imprisoned. After his release he left his post at the university. From 1946 to 1948 he was a director of a publishing company in Buenos Aires. He passed examinations in law and languages and worked then as a translator.

In 1951, in opposition to Peron's regime, Cortázar traveled to Paris, where he lived until his death. In 1953 he married Aurora Bernárdez. They separated and Cortázar lived with Carol Dunlop in later years. From 1952 he worked for UNESCO as a freelance translator. He translated among others Robinson Crusoe and the stories of Edgar Alan Poe into Spanish, Poe's influence is also seen in his work.

Los Reyes (1949) was Cortázar's earliest work of fantasy interest. The long narrative poem constituted a meditation on the role and fate of the Minotaur in his labyrinth. Cortázar's first collection of short stories, Bestiario, appeared in 1951. It included 'Casa tomada' (A House Taken Over), in which a middle-aged brother and sister find that their house is invaded by unidentified people. The story was first published by Jorge Luis Borges in the magazine called Los Canales de Buenos Aires; Borges's sister illustrated it. However, Borges did not like Cortázar as a novelist and once said: "He is trying so hard on every page to be original that it becomes a tiresome battle of wits, no?" (Jorge Luis Borges, ed. by Richard Burgin, 1998)

--'They have taken over our section,' Irene said. The knitting had reeled off from her hands and the yarn ran back toward the door and disappared under it. When she saw that the balls of yarn were on the other side, she dropped the knitting without looking at it.

--'Did you have time to bring anything?' I asked hopelessly.

--'No, nothing.'

--We had what we had on. I remembered fifteen thousand pesos in the wardrobe in my bedroom. 

'Casa tomada' set the pattern for a typical Cortázar story - it begins in the real world, then introduces fantastic elements, which changes the rules of reality. In the title story a young girl senses that a tiger is roaming through her house. Other collections followed: Final de juego(1956), Las armas secretas (1959), Todos los fuegos el fuego (1966), Octaedro (1974), andAlguien que anda por ahí (1977). 'Las Babas del Diablo' from Las Armas Secretas was filmed in 1966 by Michelangelo Antonioni under the title Blow-Up. In Cortazár's story, set in Paris, the protagonist is Roberto Michael, an amateur photographer, who sees a teenage boy and a young woman on a square, and shoots the scene. He develops the roll, enlarges the picture, and realizes that the woman was seducing the boy for a man in a car. The picture becomes Michael's life, he speaks of himself both in the fist person and third persons in the story: ".... nobody really knows who is telling it, if I am I or what actually occurred or what I'm seeing... or if, simply I'm telling a truth which is only my truth..." Antonioni used in his film version the theme of appearance versus reality and created around it a murder mystery, which he leaves open. Reality becomes in the film merely a subjective statement, "life itself is an illusion, a Dionysian celebration of masked and anonymous revels." (Neil D. Isaacs in Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, ed. by Andrew S. Horton and Joan Magretta, 1981)

"'It's like a waiting room, life is,' said the bald gentleman, carefully grinding out his cigarette with his shoe and examining his hands as if he didn't know what to do with them now; the elderly lady sighed a yes born of long years of agreeing, and put away her little bottle just as the door at the end of the corridor opened and the other lady came out with that look all the others envied, and an almost sympathetic goodbye when she got to the exit.' (from 'Second Time Around')

As a novelist Cortázar gained first attention with Los premios (1960), which appeared when the author was 46. The story centered on a group of people brought together when they win a mystery cruise in a lottery. The ship-of-fools becomes a microcosms of the world order. His masterpiece was Rayuela (1966, Hopscotch), an open-ended anti-novel, in which the reader is invited to rearrange the material. "The general idea behind Hopscotch, you see, is the proof of a failure and the hope of a victory. But the book doesn't propose any solution; it simply limits itself to showing the possible paths one can take to knock down the wall, to see what's on the other side." (interview from Evelyn Picon Garfield, Cortázar por Cortázar, 1978) The protagonist, Horacio Oliveira, is a writer who is surrounded by a circle of bohemian friends. After the the disappearance of La Maga, his mistress, Oliveira returns to Buenos Aires where he works in odd jobs. He meets his childhood friend, Traveler, with whom he operates an insane asylum, ending on the border of insanity himself.

Oliveira seeks a new world-view outside Cartesian rationalism. Though he never succeeds, his quest is depicted with humor, superb imagery, and optimism. There are two narrative sections: chapters 1-36, which are set in Paris, and chapters 37-56, set in Buenos Aires. The third selection is entitled "Expendable Chapters." The hopscotch progress begins at chapter 73. For this reading, led by the directions, the reader jumps forward and backward through the book.

Rayuela was intended to be a revolutionary novel. It opened the door to linguistic innovation of Spanish language and influenced deeply Latin American writers. The idea for a book based on disconnected noted continued in 62: Modelo para armar (1968). Here the reader had less instructions to arrange the parts. Libro de Manuel (1973) focused on the political condition of Latin America. In this case the various characters shuttle from a mysterious Zone and the City according to Godgame-like instructions they cannot understand or disobey. The novel formed a manual for the child Manuel, a sort of collage of press clippings, and among others revealed torture techniques used by U.S. soldiers in the Far East and juxtaposed them to similar tortures suffered by Latin American political prisoners.

Cortázar visited Cuba after the revolution, and in 1973 he traveled in Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile. Cortázar became in the 1970s a member of the Second Russell Tribunal for investigation of human rights abuses in Latin America. He also gave the Sandinistas the royalties of some of his last books and helped financially the families of political prisoners. When the seven-year ban on his entry into Argentina was lifted he visited his home country and Nicaragua in 1983.

In 1975 Cortázar was a visiting lecturer at the University of Oklahoma, and in 1980 he was a lecturer at Barnard College in New York. In 1981 he acquired French citizenship. Cortázar received numerous awards, including Médicis Prize for Libro de Manuel in 1974 and Rubén Darío Order of Cultural Independence in 1983. He died of leukemia in Paris on February 12, 1984. Cortázar's friend Christina Peri Rossi later pondered in her book Yo y Cortázar (2001) did the author die of AIDS instead of leukemia.