The Library of Babel

Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on August 24, 1899. His mother, Leonor Rita Acevedo Suarez, was from Uruguay, and her family was involved in key battles during the Argentine War of Independence. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was a prominent lawyer and a novelist who wrote the book El Caudillo in 1921. He taught Jorge English and introduced him to key writers of English literature, such as H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Edgar Allan Poe, whose speculative and science fiction influenced the young Borges immensely.

Borges’s educational journey began in his family home, where he remained until the age of 11. He was proficient in Spanish and English and delved into the works of Shakespeare when he was just 12. The Borges household had an extensive English library, housing a collection exceeding a thousand volumes. In 1914, Borges and his family relocated to Geneva, where he obtained his baccalaureate degree from the Collège de Genève. The family remained in Europe until 1921, moving among various cities in Switzerland and Spain. In Madrid, Borges became part of the Ultraist movement, a radical collective of writers and philosophers—including Guillermo de Torre, Juan Larrea, and Gerardo Diego—who rebelled against traditional literary and artistic conventions by embracing avant-garde aesthetics and experimental narrative techniques. Returning to Buenos Aires in 1921, Borges instigated the Ultraist movement’s presence in South America, founding the literary magazine Prisma as a platform for Ultraist writers to showcase their work. Borges himself wrote and published poetry, literary essays, and a biography during this phase as he explored the themes of modernity, urban life, and technology.

In 1938, Borges suffered a severe head injury, followed by a protracted and difficult recovery. This experience is fictionalized in his 1953 story, “The South.” During his recovery, Borges developed the style for which he would come to be known, as he began to write speculative stories that explored the relationships between text and context. For example, his first story from this period, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” imagines a contemporary writer whose masterpiece is an exact replica of Miguel de Cervantes’s early-17th-century novel Don Quixote. The narrator of Borges’s story is a literary critic who argues that the new text, though identical to the original, has a radically different meaning because of the context in which it was produced. This story, like “The Library of Babel,” is included in Borges’s 1941 collection, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths). In 1944, six more stories were added to this collection under the title Artificios (Artifices), and the full collection was reissued as Ficciones (Fictions). This collection was first translated into English in 1961 and is largely responsible for cementing Borges’s international reputation.  Borges explores dreamworlds and bizarre fantasies as vehicles for probing profound social, political, and ethical questions. His stories also often serve as mirrors reflecting the ambiguities and contradictions of the human condition.