Reading the work of Jorge Luis Borges for the first time is like discovering a new letter in the alphabet, or a new note in the musical scale. His friend and sometime collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares called his writings “halfway houses between an essay and a story”. They are fictions filled with private jokes and esoterica, historiography and sardonic footnotes. They are brief, often with abrupt beginnings. Borges’ use of labyrinths, mirrors, chess games and detective stories creates a complex intellectual landscape, yet his language is clear, with ironic undertones. He presents the most fantastic of scenes in simple terms, seducing us into the forking pathway of his seemingly infinite imagination.

Cyber-author William Gibson describes the sensation of first reading Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which revolves around an encyclopedia entry on a country that appears not to exist. "Had the concept of software been available to me,” writes Gibson in his introduction to Borges’ short story collection Labyrinths, “I imagine I would have felt as though I were installing something that exponentially increased what one day would be called bandwidth.”

Half a century ago, when Borges’ ground-breaking collection Ficciones was first published in English translation, he was virtually unknown outside literary circles in Buenos Aires, where he was born in 1899, and Paris, where his work was translated in the 1950s. In 1961, he was catapulted onto the world stage when international publishers awarded him the first Formentor Prize for outstanding literary achievement. He shared the prize with Samuel Beckett (the other authors on the shortlist were Alejo Carpentier, Max Frisch and Henry Miller). The award spurred English translations of Ficciones and Labyrinths and brought Borges widespread fame and respect.

Labyrinthine plot

He was, from the beginning, a writer attuned to the classical traditions and epics of many cultures. He grew up immersed in reading. His father, from whom Borges inherited an eye condition that left him blind by the age of 55, was “a marginally successful literary hand – a few poems, a so-so historical novel, and the first translation of FitzGerald's Rubaiyat into Spanish,” says Donald A Yates, one of Borges’ first American translators. Borges’ English grandmother read him English literary classics. “Being short-sighted, he escaped into a world where the printed word was more significant than his surrounding reality,” says Yates.

As a boy, Borges wrote poetry and visited the library regularly to read long articles by authors including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey from volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He spent his teenage years in Geneva and Spain. As an adult, he worked as a librarian and later as the director of the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires. By 1930 he had published six books: three of poetry and three collections of essays. Between 1939 and 1949 he wrote and published practically all the fiction for which he would become famous.