The Secret Miracle
by Jorge Luis Borges
9 Members (3.67)
On This Page
Tags
Member Reviews
Members
- Recently Added By
Lists
Favourite Short Stories
22 works; 2 members
Author Information
859+ Works 58,697 Members
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1899, Jorge Borges was educated by an English governess and later studied in Europe. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1921, where he helped to found several avant-garde literary periodicals. In 1955, after the fall of Juan Peron, whom he vigorously opposed, he was appointed director of the Argentine National show more Library. With Samuel Beckett he was awarded the $10,000 International Publishers Prize in 1961, which helped to establish him as one of the most prominent writers in the world. Borges regularly taught and lectured throughout the United States and Europe. His ideas have been a profound influence on writers throughout the Western world and on the most recent developments in literary and critical theory. A prolific writer of essays, short stories, and plays, Borges's concerns are perhaps clearest in his stories. He regarded people's endeavors to understand an incomprehensible world as fiction; hence, his fiction is metaphysical and based on what he called an esthetics of the intellect. Some critics have called him a mystic of the intellect. Dreamtigers (1960) is considered a masterpiece. A central image in Borges's work is the labyrinth, a mental and poetic construct, that he considered a universe in miniature, which human beings build and therefore believe they control but which nevertheless traps them. In spite of Borges's belief that people cannot understand the chaotic world, he continually attempted to do so in his writing. Much of his work deals with people's efforts to find the center of the labyrinth, symbolic of achieving understanding of their place in a mysterious universe. In such later works as The Gold of the Tigers, Borges wrote of his lifelong descent into blindness and how it affected his perceptions of the world and himself as a writer. Borges died in Geneva in 1986. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Some Editions
Work Relationships
Is contained in
Borges esencial. Edición Conmemorativa / Essential Borges: Commemorative Edition (EDICIÓN CONMEMORATIVA DE LA RAE Y LA ASALE) (Spanish Edition) by Jorge Luis Borges (indirect)
Biblioteket i Babel : en antologi sammanställd ur novellsamlingarna Ficciones och El Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges (indirect)
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Secret Miracle
- Alternate titles*
- Das geheime Wunder
- Original publication date
- 1943-02
- People/Characters
- Jaromir Hladik
- Epigraph
- And God had him die for a hundred years and then revived him and said:
"How long have you been here?"
"A day or a part of a day," he answered.
(Koran, II, 261) - First words
- The night of March 14, 1939, in an apartment in the Zeltnergasse of Prague, Jaromir Hladik, the author of the unfinished drama entitled The Enemies, or Vindication of Eternity, and of a study of the indirect Jew... (show all)ish sources of Jakob Böhme, had a dream of a long game of chess.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Jaromir Hladik died on March 29, at 9:02 a.m.
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 9
- Popularity
- 2,297,838
- Rating
- (3.67)
- Languages
- English, Russian
- Media
- Paper
