When one thinks of Borges, one thinks more of a literature, than of a writer. Borges’ stories and poems are aimed at the universe, unlike the writer with clearly defined scopes and goals whose book only reaches those goals. Through out his vast oeuvre, one keeps discovering the man of refined intellect, the philosopher, the “writer for writers” as he was considered some twenty years ago, in a somewhat dismissive way. He was not a writer for the masses, not for the people, mind you, when political propaganda was rampant in Latin America, and it was easy to divide the world in two.

Borges’ greatness does not fit into one book. His artistry belongs to both fiction and poetry. It was fashionable to consider Borges the story teller superior to Borges the poet. I disagree. Partiality for his prose is due to Borges’ own insecurities with his earlier poetry. In his youth, Borges helped create the ultraist movement. A movement, whose main ideals were to be “enemies of rhyme” and “to place the metaphor above anything else”, as Borges, somewhat jokingly explained many years later. It was a time, when Borges longed to be (as he himself confessed) Whitman. Among his concerns in those poems of youth was to be Argentinean, to write like Argentineans, with Argentinean’s dialect and vocabulary.

After his third book of poetry, San Martín Notebook, he decided to forget about poetry and concentrated on writing his marvelous short stories and essays. His two most famous collections of short stories were written in this period: “Fictions” and “The Aleph”. Stories that, as literature’s ultimate game, confused and tricked readers with the almost scholarly approach he took. These stories pretended to be essays when in fact they were great creations of fiction. An example: “Pierre Menard, author of el Quijote”. This story, which deals with a man who tried to write el Quijote in the 20th-century, was so intricate, the bibliography so thoroughly explained, that many people actually started looking for a Pierre Menard biography and his writings in libraries!

Nonetheless, I’d say that Borges’ greatest virtue is the rediscovery of the Spanish language. Taking the language towards regions that had not before been visited and using words with the greatest of clarity and precision than any Spanish writer of this century. More than anything Borges is a great verbal writer. His descriptions, his use of adjectives, are always outstanding. An example from his fiction: “Nobody disembarked in the unanimous night” One from his poetry: “It was known by the arduous students of Pythagoras”