Childhood and adolescence, Spain

Borges was born in his maternal grandparents’ house in central Buenos Aires, calle Tucumán, but moved in 1901 to calle Serrano in the neighbourhood of Palermo, a far less salubrious area with many southern Italian immigrants, and close to notorious establishments such as the Tierra del Fuego, where local toughs or compadritos fought knife-fights and danced tango. Though Borges writes that his mother's prim and snobbish household isolated the children from this world, he later became fascinated with it through the poems and accounts of a friend of his father’s, Evaristo Carriego, a popular poet and bohemian who had befriended a notorious knife-fighter and local electoral boss Nicolás Paredes, who in turn became an important figure in Borges's mythology. It was in this year that his sister Norah Borges was born, a far more outgoing character than her gauche and timid brother, and a painter whose woodcuts illustrated many of his early reviews and collections of poetry. They were very close until Norah married the Spanish poet and literary historian Guillermo de Torre. While both grandmothers told him stories of heroic forebears and fortunes lost to Rosas and his Mazorca, with Fanny Haslam he was engulfed in English culture; indeed his upbringing in Serrano was bilingual in English and Spanish.

In the ‘Autobiographical Essay’ Borges writes: ‘If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library. In fact, I sometimes think I have never strayed outside that library’ (Aut 209). In the same essay he confesses that, for him, reading had always preceded reality:

In his father's library he read countless books in English: Stevenson, Mark Twain, Poe, H. G. Wells, Dickens, Don Quijote, Burton's A Thousand Nights and One Night.