"Jorge Luis Borges is probably the most British of Latin American writers," says Cynthia Stephens, author of the book The Borges Enigma. Mirrors, Doubles, and Intimate Puzzles, summing up how experts on Spanish-language literature in the United Kingdom feel about the legendary Argentine author.
Borges’ links with the United Kingdom and Anglo-Saxon literature were predictable, given that he learned Spanish and English at the same time through speaking with his paternal grandmother, Frances Anne Haslam, born in the Midland county of Staffordshire.
"Apart from eminent literary figures in the United Kingdom, scientists, artists and filmmakers have been attracted by the complexity of the Borges fictional universe," points out Stephens, a member of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland.
Evelyn Fishburn, the author of Borges and Europe Revisited and Dictionary of Borges and a former Latin American literature professor at several British universities, concurs as to the vast legacy left by Borges to Anglo-Saxon culture.
"His leaning towards [William] Shakespeare as the fictional writer par excellence, comparable to God, is an indirect indication of the importance of English to the Borges mentality," Fishburn said in an interview.
English literary canon
"The influence of Borges on Hispanic literature has its parallel in the Anglo-Saxon world. He has become an accepted member of the English literary canon, due to his values, doubts and incredulities," adds the expert.
Fishburn sees in the author of Ficciones and El Aleph "a recurrent use of irony and paradox as a manifestation of the English legacy which came to define him with his fine sense of humour and an underestimation and feigned denigration of himself."
In the writer’s eyes, "that is illustrated by the double entendre of this quote: ‘Not giving me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition – ever since I was born, they have not given it to me.’”
Edwin Williamson, a Spanish literature lecturer at Oxford University and author of the biography Borges, una vida, highlights his influence on British cinema.
"His name is linked to the nouvelle vague of European cinema in the 1960s," the UK representative at the Real Academia Española explained in an interview.
"In the 1960s this cinematic link influenced important British filmmakers. The film Performance, directed by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell, and starring Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, would turn Borges into a sort of icon of the [London] cultural vanguard," he affirms.
It is a film which, in Williamson’s view, "paid tribute to Borges in various aspects."
"Some other 1970s productions of Nicolas Roeg, such as Don't Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth, the latter starring musician David Bowie, also showed traces of the ideas of Borges," he adds.
Influence on British cinema
Borges’ influence on British cinema continued after the 1970s and 1980s, according to Williamson.
"In 1996, another English filmmaker Alex Cox converted the short story La muerte y la brújula (“Death and the Compass”) into a kind of punk fantasy, combining the English pop culture of the 1980s with the metaphysical issues associated with Borges. In a wink at the writer, Cox himself played the role of a blind detective named Borges," he explains.
The author "continues inspiring English filmmakers, the most famous of whom, Christopher Nolan, has recognised that the ‘labyrinthine’ work of Borges is one of his sources of inspiration because he plays with philosophical themes and above all a fundamental paradox of the human condition, which is the tension between our subjective experience and our obstinate belief in an objective reality," he concludes.
William Rowlandson, professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kent and author of the book Borges, Swedenborg and mysticism, pointed to a commentary piece by the United States writer Suzanne Jill Levine to sum up his thoughts on the Argentine.
"He could be considered the most important writer of the 20th century because he created a new literary continent between North and South America, between Europe and America and between the old and modern worlds," he said, quoting Levine.
by Pablo San Roman, AFP
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