Jorge Luis Borges, the writer’s endless reinvention 40 years after his death

“The renown Borges enjoyed during his lifetime, documented by a slew of monographs and controversies, still astonishes us today. We know that he himself was astonished, and that he always feared being declared an impostor or a bungler or a peculiar mixture of both.” Thus reads the entry devoted to Jorge Luis Borges in an Enciclopedia Sudamericana dated 2074. With irony, typographical errors and anachronism, it was written, of course, by Borges himself, a century before its hypothetical publication. Forty years after the death of the author of Ficciones and El Aleph, which occurred on June 14, 1986, that fear — if it ever existed, if it was not pure imposture or shy modesty or a blend of both — could be declared abolished. The passage of time has raised his stature even higher and enriched both his figure and his work: Borges has long been ranked among the greatest authors of world literature, and undisputedly occupies the throne of Argentina’s greatest writer.

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