SOURCE: “Borges and Sur,” in The Poetic Avant-Garde: The Groups of Borges, Auden, and Breton, Northwestern University Press, 1997, pp. 98-119.

In the following essay, Strong outlines Borges's literary and political attitudes by tracing those of Sur, an Argentine journal with which he was closely associated, and in which “Pierre Menard” was first published.

Borges, one of the 1920s' “last happy men,” entered the 1930s already established as one of Argentina's most important writers. For intellectuals, this “infamous decade” was devoted largely to a conservative retrenchment of the sort advocated in Benda's La trahison des clercs and to looking toward Europe, which increasingly found itself confronting the prospect of war. In the summer of 1930-31, Victoria Ocampo launched the journal Sur, which was to survive into the 1970s. Borges's decades-long participation in Sur, arguably Argentina's most important cultural journal of the twentieth century, has caused critics to identify the...