Argentinean Literature in a Seminar at the BA
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Alexandria, 13 December–
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is hosting a seminar on the Linguistic Definitions of Jorge Luis Borges, 14 December 2004. The seminar is jointly organized with the Argentinean Embassy in Cairo and will be presented by Dr. Santiago De Luca, Professor of Hispanic Philosophy at the University of Madrid.
Dr. De Luca will mainly present the life and works of Jorge Luis Borges (1899- 1986); Argentinean poet, essayist, and short-story writer, whose tales of fantasy and dream worlds are classics of the 20th-century world literature. Borges’s first poem, Hymn to the Sea, written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published in the magazine Grecia. In 1921, Borges settled in Buenos Aires, where he started his career as a writer by publishing poems and essays in literary journals.
Borges’s first collection of poetry was FERVOR DE BUENOS AIRES (1923), while at the same time, he contributed to the avant-garde review Martin Fierro, and co-founded the journal Proa (1924-26). Sur, founded in 1931 by Borges’s friend Victor Ocampo, became Argentina’s most important literary journal. Borges was its chief contributor for decades. He also served as literary adviser for the publishing house Emecé Editores, worked as a literary editor of the Saturday Color Magazine of the tabloid newspaper Crítica, and wrote weekly columns for El Hogar from 1936 to 1939. As a critic Borges gained fame with interpretations of the Argentine classics. His writings displayed a deep knowledge of European and American literature, in particular for such writers as Poe, Stevenson, Kipling, Shaw, Chesterton, Whitman, Emerson, and Twain. He also translated Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Henri Michaux’s A Barbarian in Asia, Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, and William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. Borges was known for his re-inventing of the Spanish language, and his clear and subtle use of its words and expressions in an unprecedented style of writing.