Google Doodle Celebrates 112th Birthday of Author Jorge Luis Borges

• By Chloe Albanesius
• August 24, 2011 08:30am EST
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Google on Wednesday celebrated what would have been the 112th birthday of Argentine poet, essayist, and short story writer Jorge Luis Borges with a homepage doodle the captures the author's surreal approach to literary works.

"Wishing Jorge Luis Borges a happy 112th birthday!" Google tweeted early this morning, adding a well-known Borges quote: "I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library."

One of Borges' more famous works, "The Garden of Forking Paths," was published in 1941, but many view it as a story that captures the spirit of a system that would eventually become the Internet, thanks to his idea of "forking paths through networks of time."

An ongoing exhibition of historic and contemporary artists' computer games sponsored by Australia's d/Lux/MediaArts focuses on Borges' contributions.

"The storyline [in 'Forking Paths'] surrounding an infinite, labyrinthine book that realizes multiple paths and futures are echoed in the information age with hypertext, the World Wide Web and the form and structure of computer games," the organization said. "Just as Borges and his contemporaries pushed the envelope of the narrative form, so too artists have been creating and modifying computer games, experimenting with the notions of what a game is and exploring alternate approaches to interaction and play methodologies."

Before the Internet or computer games were commonplace, however, Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899, but he spent his formative years traveling with his family in Switzerland and Spain. While in Spain, he discovered an avant-garde literary movement known as Ultraist, a style he brought back to Argentina when his family returned in the 1920s, though later shunned it. He penned surreal poems and contributed to literary journals, culminating in the publication of a collection of poems, Fervor de Buenos Aires, in 1923.

Borges spent nine "unhappy" years as a librarian in Buenos Aires. But after his father's death in 1938, he suffered a head wound and blood poisoning; a near-death experience that apparently awakened the creative spirit inside him.

He produced many a magical story, most of which were collected in Ficciones and an English translation known as The Aleph and Other Stories. He also teamed up with writer Adolfo Bioy Casares on detective stories under the pen name H. Bustos Domecq.

"The works of this period revealed for the first time Borges's entire dreamworld, an ironical or paradoxical version of the real one, with its own language and systems of symbols," according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

But while he survived the head injury, his eyesight suffered and he was almost completely blind by the 1950s, an affliction that also affected his father. Nonetheless, he soldiered on, producing works in the 1960s that dealt with revenge, murder, and horror, among other things. Borges died in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1986.

The University of Pittsburgh is currently home to the Borges Center, which houses a Borges archive, criticism, and a tri-lingual journal known as Variaciones Borges. It was started in 1994 at the University of Aarhus in Denmark by philosophy and literature scholars Ivan Almeida and Cristina Parodi. Despite his Argentinean roots, Borges was "passionately interested in Nordic mythology and languages," according to the center, and he "systematically undertook the study of the old Scandinavian tongue."

When Almeida and Parodi retired in 2005, the Borges Center moved to the University of Iowa. But when director Daniel Balderston relocated to the University of Pittsburgh in 2008, the Borges Center moved with him once again, and it remains there today.

For more on Google's doodles, see the slideshow below. One of the company's last popular doodle was a playable image in honor of musician Les Paul, which eventually got its own standalone site. The search giant also celebrated the year's first total lunar eclipse with a doodle that included a live feed of the event.

Recently, it was revealed that Google obtained a patent for its popular homepage doodles, covering "systems and methods for enticing users to access a Web site."

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