One thing that surprised me when I first learned about Borges was the weight he gave to his English lineage, intellectually and culturally. Argentina has a fraught relationship with the UK, especially since the Falklands, but there are many historical events that link the two countries. The Welsh settlements in Patagonia being just one... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patagonian_Welsh
> Borges even christened the car Rocinante and fancied their getaway as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on a Scottish literary pilgrimage. They stayed at the Crusoe hotel in Lower Largo, where Borges tasted a pint of Export – by stirring the foam with his fingers and licking them – for the first time in his life. In Dunfermline, he licked the spine of a Walter Scott novel inside a library. In the Cairngorm mountains, he slipped down a slope while screaming out lines from King Lear in a thunderstorm. At Loch Ness, he fell out of a boat while trying to recite Beowulf in the middle of the lake. In Inverness, he set out to meet one Mr Singleton, with whom he had been corresponding for years on Anglo-Saxon riddles. But when Parini called the number on the slip of paper Borges handed to him, they discovered that Mr Singleton lived in Inverness, New Zealand.
Borges´ paternal side of the family had strong British roots. His grandmother was called Frances Haslam - she was born in Staffordshire in 1842.
In 1871 she married Colonel Francisco Borges in the Argentine province of Entre Ríos. But the colonel died (or rather, deliberately got himself killed to prove his honor) in the Battle of La Verde (1874), final skirmish of a fruitless insurrection.
The couple had two children: Francisco Eduardo (who was to follow the military career of his late father) and Jorge Guillermo (who instead followed the bookish tradition of his British ancestors, and would eventually become the writer´s father)
After the colonel´s death, his widow, Frances Haslam was left to fend for herself - without ever having learned to speak proper Spanish.
British, Borges´ father was thus raised in a fully British atmosphere. His mother only spoke to him in English and he grew up reading reading English literature.
Colonel Borges´ premature death thus had the effect of duplicating his British widow´s British influence on coming generations. Even though Borges´ father was half "criollo" and half British, he was raised in a fully English household reading English literature.
He then passed this British tradition on to his son, the writer. Borges clearly states in his Autobiographical Essay that he first heard poetry in English and that his first acquaintance with literature was in English. He even remarked, that he first read that most famous of Spanish-language novels, Miguel de Cervantes´ Don Quijote, in English. And when he finally had the chance to read it in Spanish, he deemed the Spanish edition to be a poor translation from the English "original"
He may have said that about Don Quijote, but it may well have been just another humorous comment by him. He was known for his dry humor and deadpan delivery. He was extremely learned, no doubt about it, but the reader has to keep in mind that about half of the elaborate citations and detailed references he uses in his writings were simply his fabrications, his way to play with the reader's ability to make out reality from fiction. He loved labyrinths, and putting people in them. Source: born and raised in Argentina, having a Literature professor as mother and another one as wife.
