14 DAY TRIAL // It is already some sort of tradition for Google to commemorate the most valuable artists, no matter if they are sculptors, musicians, scientists, painters or writers, so today the Doodle is meant to remind us of Jorge Luis Borges. Considered to have pioneered the science fiction genre, the full name of the Argentinian man of letters was Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo.
Born on August 24, 1899, today would have marked his 112nd birthday and the designing team at Google created a mystery-filled doodle in his memory.
All those who used the Google search engine today have surely noticed that a colorful and eerie image has replaced the default one.
Unlike the animated doodle dedicated to Jules Verne which represented only one of his numerous books (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), the one depicted today, on August 24th, 2011, is an attempt at illustrating the surreal impression that most of Borges’ works leave on their readers.
Two of his most famous works, Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949), are collections of short stories which tackle themes such as labyrinths, dreams, religion and libraries, hence the mystery one can sense in his books.
It was suggested that Borges’ progressive blindness was the one that forced the man to find symbols and new interpretations, thus creating new worlds and meanings for everything around him.
Borges was a very prolific author and his writings earned him numerous awards throughout his life, but he was never nominated for the Noble prize.
He even said that “Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition; since I was born they have not been granting it to me”.
Critics claim that Borges did not receive this award due to his controversial politic views which got him in various conflicts in Argentina.
Jorge Luis Borges travelled around the world a lot, in search of inspiration, and was 86 years old when he died in Geneva, Switzerland.