His best-known works, Ficciones transl. Fictions and El Aleph transl. The Aleph , published in the s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams , labyrinths , chance , infinity , archives , mirrors , fictional writers and mythology. The family travelled widely in Europe, including Spain. On his return to Argentina in , Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. He became completely blind by the age of Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination.
Borges himself was fluent in several languages. In , Borges came to international attention when he received the first Formentor Prize , which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In , he won the Jerusalem Prize. 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. He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations of religious or ideological certainty — a mind turned wholly inward on itself.
His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything. Her family had been much involved in the European settling of South America and the Argentine War of Independence , and she spoke often of their heroic actions. Acevedo Laprida died of pulmonary congestion in the house where his grandson Jorge Luis Borges was born.
Borges's own father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam , was a lawyer and wrote the novel El caudillo in Borges Haslam grew up speaking English at home. The family frequently traveled to Europe. It was published in a local journal, but Borges's friends thought the real author was his father. Borges said his father "tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt", despite the opus El caudillo.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote, "As most of my people had been soldiers and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action.
