SOURCE: “Borges and Argentine Literature,” in Borges Studies on Line. J. L. Borges Center for Studies & Documentation. January 13, 1993, pp. 1–15.

In the following essay, Sarlo examines the influence of Argentine literature on Borges's writing.

Borges's work offers one of the paradigms—perhaps the paradigm—of Argentine literature. This is a literature constructed, like the nation itself, in a marginal country, out of different influences: European culture, the criollo tradition and the Spanish language spoken with a River Plate accent. The place which Borges inhabits, which he invented in his first three books of poetry published in the nineteen twenties¹, is what he called ‘las orillas’. From the outset, Borges rejected the kind of utopian ruralism that Ricardo Güiraldes had put forward in Don Segundo Sombra (1925), a classic novel which traces the education of a boy in the habits and morals of the pampas, guided by the most successful...