On Argentina

by Jorge Luis Borges, Alfred Mac Adam (Editor), Suzanne Jill Levine (Editor)

Borges' On Argentina provides vital information for anyone trying to come to grips with Latin American thought in the early twentieth century. The twenty selections chosen for this collection will flesh out the vision of the young Borges between 1925 and 1930. These essays constitute an important intellectual biography of one of the most influential Latin American authors of all time.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, History, Poetry, Classics, Writing

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph (transl. The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
Born in Buenos Aires, Borges later moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind by the age of 55. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. By the 1960s, his work was translated and published widely in the United States and Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages.
In 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971, he won the Jerusalem Prize. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by the growing number of English translations, the Latin American Boom, and by the success of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. Writer and essayist J.M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists."

Reviews

[Darwin8u · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was good. Not his best stuff, but a good collection of his nonfiction (with a couple poems) all orbiting Argentina.

[Hannah Wu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Was hoping that this anthology would better my knowledge of Argentinian history and society but Borges demands a very deep understanding of the societal and literary context from the reader (which I do not have). I feel a little bad for the two stars because it's not really his fault...but still, not really beginner friendly. It did have some great lines and interesting observational bits about nationalism during the WWII period that I enjoyed. His explanation of the card game Truco was incredibly hyper-realistic, as it made me feel the exact same confusion I felt while trying to learn Dutch Blitz last summer.

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing collection, and Alfred MacAdam does a fabulous job of introducing the book with a very detailed and insightful account of Borges' personal life and writings across Borges' lifetime -- its evolution and thematic shifts -- that any Borges aficionado MUST read!

[Brendan Camilleri · Rating 3 out of 5]

There’s something very beautiful about translated works. The clashing of meters and rhythms, the abstraction of metaphors and idioms, the removal of connotations, the inventiveness required to reintroduce them into a completely foreign context. There’s an intense passion and poetry being conveyed by Borges and his translators.

This is a collation of works considered secondary and inessential by scholars of the author; but you get something out of it that you don’t in the canonised works; you get to witness the cogs turning, and to see the translators and scholars come up against the established narrative of what the writer has to contribute.

I like the loose and meandering structure. The oscillations between short poems, stories, vignettes, essays and critiques; they culminate in a strong impression of the author’s complexity, who was in many ways, constantly at war with himself. He was somebody who’s social ideas were generally progressive; who understood that his country’s cultural milieu was core to its cultural identity and influence; who foresaw the rise and folly of fascism even when it disguised itself as communism; but who also wasn’t immune to regressive views and opinions;, especially towards the native population and the poor. He was wrong a lot, but he was always questioning himself, inching further towards an infinity he would never fully find. We can all take something from that.

[Lukas Evan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's so much more to Argentina than Evita, war criminals, and quality steaks.

[Louis Agate-Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Argentina:

This is my first time reading anything by Borges and I was impressed, although it took me a while to get into this book.

This may be down to how it was edited or translated, it may also be down to my own lack of contextual understanding of Argentine history and the story of the gauchos. The chronology of this book has helped me understand that perhaps it’s because I find Borges’ earlier stuff to be rather pretentious and find him too worried about criticising other Argentine writers for very small things that need no quarrel.

There were scatterings of impressive and delicate descriptions of Buenos Aires and its suburbs, the tango and the card game truco. Even the short fiction at the beginning of the book is great. My favourite part, however, were Borges’ writings on the nation and Argentina and what it means to be Argentinian by association or Argentinian by geography.

Overall, I was fairly impressed and will definitely read Borges’ “Ficciones” as I believe I’ll enjoy this better. I wish there had been a bit more about Argentina as a whole, rather than specifically Buenos Aires, but who can blame someone for loving where they’re from?

[John Goodell · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve always loved Borges but I struggled through the first half of this series of essays on Argentine history and culture, in large part because of Borges’ pedantic and unnecessarily wordy style (which seems to have defined his early writing). As the book is ordered chronologically, the second half delivers some reflections from the later years of his life, which are far more cohesive and insightful, aided by the obvious wisdom one attains as they age.

He is critical of his nation, and comes across as pessimistic regarding its future, while longing for a more glorious past. Argentina has had a series of dictators, revolutions, coups, etc over the years, so it’s helpful to piece it all together like Borges does for us here.

In sum, however, I find I much prefer Borges’ fiction to his nonfiction, and we are treated to one of the more enjoyable pieces in the book with a short story as the final chapter.

[Charlotte · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to enjoy this so bad but it was honestly so hard to get through 😭😭 i LOVED some of the chapters but some of the other chapters were just too obscure and a little philosophical. I think borges expects the reader to be as familiar with Buenos Aires as he is and to that end skips a lot of the cultural context which made it confusing at times

[Elsie DiLisio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to follow or stay invested

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Borges, Jorge Luis. On Argentina. Ed. Alfred Mac Adam and Suzanne Jill Levine. New York: Penguin, 2010. Print.
Jorge Luis Borges was born in Argentina in 1899 and spent most of his life there. His parents were of British decent and actually taught Borges to speak English before Spanish. This classified Borges as being criollo, meaning that he was born in Latin America but he was of European decent, making him not quite a native and not quite European. This criollo identity plays a big role in many of his essays and short stories in this collection. Also, as the title would proclaim, his homeland of Argentina is the main topic of this collection. Although this collection was published in 2010, Borges’ works were written between 1925 and 1955.
Borges’ short stories in this collection show a side of Argentina that is brutal, real, and mysterious. He gives great detail to the dance called Tango and how immigrants drifted in and out of Argentina like the waves of the ocean. In one of the stories titled “Man on Pink Corner” Borges depicts the brutality of the ghettos of Boca where Tango is said to have started. A man named Rosendo Juárez is known as the “Sticker” because of his killing abilities with a knife. Another man, Francisco Real, comes into the hangout where all the men go to dance the Tango with their escort, and possibly take her upstairs. Francisco challenges Rosendo and kills him, while everyone continues to dance and simply dumps the dead body out the window. This story, though fiction, can also be considered as a metaphorical history of the changes of power in Argentine history. The Spanish conquistadors that wanted to take over power would most times dispose of the previous person in charge without any questions or attention from the subjects in the district.
Borges’ essays in this collection give a better understanding to issues faced by criollos, like himself. In the essay “The Complaint of All Criollos” he depicts the differences of the Spaniards that founded Argentina and the criollos that now populate the country.
You might say that upon settling here, that vehemence dissipated, got lost out on the pampa [Argentine countryside]. Speech acquired a drawl, the identical nature of all horizons frustrated ambition, and the obligatory rigor of subjugating a savage world rewarded itself in the sweet languor of contrapuntal payadas [singing battles similar to present day free-style rap battles, but set to a guitar],of
joking bouts of truco [popular Argentine card game], and of maté [an Argentine tea-like drink].
Borges illustrates the negative idea that Spaniards have towards criollos. Criollos are thought of as being lethargic, uneducated, and uncultured by the Spaniards. He then shows the poetry of Argentine criollo writers and how it has a voice of its own. He shows that the criollos of Argentina are educated and cultured but have the struggles of expressing themselves without mimicking the Castillian (Spaniard) style.
Borges shows a passion for his homeland through his writings of fiction, essay, and poetry. While Borges gives great detail to his homeland of Argentina and the situations that its people face, he also writes from his perspective of what he likes about or relates to Argentina. Therefore, his writings are biased. Also, Borges is writing for a local audience, an Argentine audience. Someone with little to no knowledge of Argentina’s history or the Spanish language may find his essays uninteresting or difficult to read. There may be a lack of understanding with his fiction and poetry as well. However, his fiction may still be very intriguing because of its readability and honesty. Those with knowledge of Argentina or the Spanish language or both will find his works very interesting and enjoyable.
After reading On Argentina by Jorge Luis Borges, I have been inspired to attempt writing about my hometown. While I am not much of an essayist, Borges writing has inspired me to attempt giving a better understanding to the issues and history of my hometown through essays. I would also like to explore more about my hometown’s history so that I can write short stories on that history as well.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most of the pieces in this book consist of the juvenilia of its author, Jorge Luis Borges -- and, as such, he would prefer that they were destroyed. (Perhaps this is one of the reasons no one in the English-speaking world has attempted a collected works in translation.) Living with his parents in Switzerland during the conflagration of World War I, he returned to Argentina to find a someone strange land to which he became strongly attached.

Borges's world were the arrabales or suburbios of Buenos Aires, especially around Palermo. Now more like a mixture of Beverly Hills and Greenwich Village, Palermo in the 1920s was a world of low-lying houses along the banks of the Rio Plata inhabited by young toughs who spoke lunfardo, an underworld argot mixing Spanish, Italian, and French. In his Evaristo Carriego (1930), the author described this neighborhood:

Strolling along Chavango Street (later renamed Las Heras)—the last bar on the road was named The First Light because of that district's early rising habits—leaves an impression, proper at that, of clogged dead-end streets without people, and, finally, after the fatigue of walking, a human light in a store. Within the depths of the red cemetery of the North and the Penitentiary, a smashed-up suburb of low, unstuccoed buildings has materialized from the dust, infamously known as Tierra del Fuego. Rubble at its threshold, street corners of solitude or aggression, furtive men who call out to one another and name one another's character, who scatter suddenly in the lateral light of the alleys. The entire neighborhood was a final corner. Thugs on horseback, Mitre-styled brimmed hats over their eyes and in countrified bombachas [baggy pants], out of inertia or impulse, kept up a war of individual duels with the police.

In short, the young Borges was a sort of wannabe. It is as if a young man, arriving in Chicago, should be drawn to idolize Al Capone, Frank Nitti, and their gang.

The beauty of the essays, poems, and stories of On Argentina is that we see the young writer's growth into one of the most powerful world literary lights of the Twentieth Century. We see this most especially in the book's two final pieces, the essay entitled "The Argentine Writer and Tradition" and the short story entitled "The South." All the callowness of Borges's criollo posturing is at an end, but he has succeeded in integrating it with that other Borges, giving not not only the Borges of Palermo, but the Borges of the world beyond Argentina, without losing one iota of what makes him a great Argentinian author.

[Thanakorn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit hard to follow if you don't understand specific Spanish terms.

[Mads Kamp · Rating 2 out of 5]

I know, I know.
I know that Borges can write, that much is evident. I know that this book is not a story or fiction. I know now that this was not the best way to introduce myself to Borges.

I wanted to get to know Argentina through its greatest writer, but this was not the way to go about it. The book contains a compilation of what Borges has written about his country, but it is a tedious read. It is criticisms of other and far less know writers and the occasional titbit of colorful writing that Borges is excellent at. It is article and essays about language and frankly the collection makes Borges appear as a self absorbed and bitter man.
I want to read a real story by Borges, but after this, I think it will be awhile before I start that project.
Sorry