The blind Borges became Homer, a lecturer who travelled the world, sharing brilliant suppositions by pairing bits of knowledge from here and there that were only made possible by his prodigious reading. The question would be, which is very much a Borges type question, is who then would I be? I process words much differently by reading them than by having them read to me, so I do think that if I did lose my eyesight, I would be, frankly, finished as a reader. Maybe, if I were blind, I could convince myself that I’ve returned to the age of Homer, where an oral tradition is the only means to pass on stories to others, but that will be a difficult transition for me.
Yes, with Audible now making thousands of books available to be read to people, a blind reader has not completely lost the way to their magical escape tunnels to other worlds. I believe the most terrible thing to have happen to a reader is to lose their ability to see. Jorge Luis Borges, possibly one of the greatest readers of all time, lost his eyesight later in life. ”The truth is I grew up in a garden, behind lanceolate railings, and in a library of unlimited, English books.” Coetzee said of Borges: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists." His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. In 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first International Publishers' Prize Prix Formentor. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library (Biblioteca Nacional) and professor of Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He was a target of political persecution during the Peron regime, and supported the military juntas that overthrew it.ĭue to a hereditary condition, Borges became blind in his late fifties. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer.
On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in Surrealist literary journals. In 1914, his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school and traveled to Spain. Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo, usually referred to as Jorge Luis Borges (Spanish pronunciation: ), was an Argentine writer and poet born in Buenos Aires.
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