It is 25 years since the death of Jorge Luis Borges

• April 23, 2024

On June 14, 1986, in the Geneva , Switzerland, died one of the most important representatives of Ibero-American literature: the Argentine poet and narrator Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges, or simply Jorge Luis Borges . The world of literature lost one of its greatest exponents, not only for its extensive literary production, but for the depth and erudition that was wasted in each verse, in each stanza, in each poem, in each story. Always controversial. Always recognized even by its detractors.

Borges is blind at 55 years of age, victim of a progressive and hereditary blindness that, decades before, had also snatched his father's sight. Despite this, his literary production was not diminished, on the contrary, thanks to this suffering, his work remains as a journal of his disease and the suffering what caused it.

During the last years of his life, Borges he lived in an antithesis in which, on the one hand, there was the recognition of critics and readers of his work; and on the other hand, his body was invaded by a terrible liver cancer, which did not come alone, but was accompanied by pulmonary emphysema; evils that eventually ended his life at 86 years of age.

Undoubtedly an icon of Latin American letters, Borges marked a time in the poetry and in fiction in Spanish speech; and until the date it stands as one of the pillars of the South American literature , which, after a quarter of a century of his death, is still as valid as it was in its heyday. This is a fragment of "Poem of the gifts ", where the poet sheds a bit of his pain and resignation for the blindness he suffers.

Nobody belittles or reproaches this declaration of God's mastery, which with magnificent irony gave me both books and night.

From this city of books he made masters to eyes without light, which can only be read in the libraries of dreams by the foolish paragraphs that give way.

J. L. Borges

Video Medicine: Jorge Luis Borges' 30th Anniversary on Passion Time w Patricia Gras: Anita Kiperman PhD. (April 2024).