Share
<br />
<b>Notice</b>:  Undefined variable: i_post in <b>/var/www/geniuses/geniuses.club/tpl/public/blog/post.php</b> on line <b>9</b><br />
<br />
<b>Notice</b>:  Trying to access array offset on value of type null in <b>/var/www/geniuses/geniuses.club/tpl/public/blog/post.php</b> on line <b>9</b><br />
The Daggers of Jorge Luis Borges
02.07.2021 Michael Greenberg
literature
Jorge Luis Borges Jorge Luis Borges

Throughout his life, Jorge Luis Borges was engaged in a dialogue with violence. Speaking to an interviewer about his childhood in what was then the outlying barrio of Palermo, in Buenos Aires, he said, “To call a man, or to think of him, as a coward—that was the last thing…the kind of thing he couldn’t stand.” According to his biographer, Edwin Williamson, Borges’s father handed him a dagger when he was a boy, with instructions to overcome his poor eyesight and “generally defeated” demeanor and let the boys who were bullying him know that he was a man.

Swords, daggers—weapons with a blade—retained a mysterious, talismanic significance for Borges, imbued with predetermined codes of conduct and honor. The short dagger had particular power, because it required the fighters to draw death close, in a final embrace. As a young man, in the 1920s, Borges prowled the obscure barrios of Buenos Aires, seeking the company of cuchilleros, knife fighters, who represented to him a form of authentic criollo nativism that he wished to know and absorb.

nybooks.com
Discussion
Discussion
geniuses club

Welcome To Geniuses.Club!

Here you’ll find All that’s interesting about humanity’s greatest Minds
Continue!