Jorge Luis Borges

It's the birthday of writer Jorge Luis Borges (books by this author), born in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1899). In 1955, at about the same time he lost his sight, Borges was appointed director of Argentina's National Public Library. He said: "Little by little I came to realize the strange irony of events. I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library. Others think of a garden or of a palace. There I was, the center, in a way, of 900,000 books in various languages, but I found I could barely make out the title pages and the spines. I wrote the 'Poem of the Gifts,' which begins: 'No one should read self-pity or reproach / into this statement of the majesty / of God, who with such splendid irony / granted me books and blindness at one touch.'"

After he went blind, Borges turned from writing prose fiction to formal poetry. He dictated his writing to his mother, Leonor Acevedo, who worked as his personal secretary and lived to be 99 years old.

His books include Fictions (Ficciones, 1944), The Aleph (El Aleph, 1949), Book of Imaginary Beings (Manual de zoología fantástica, 1957), and Dreamtigers (El Hacedor, 1960).

He said: "A writer lives. The task of being a poet is not completed at a fixed schedule. No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry."
Writer's Almanac