Jorge Luis Borges reinvented fiction; he discovered unknown territories. And it is not only because of the metaphysical nature of his literature, but rather the way he conceives the fantastic genre as something real, especially in some of his short stories.

It is worth remembering that most of them are very brief, no more than four or five pages. Therefore, the act of reading them is in itself a first creative activity. Few pages, an entire invention.

Sometimes Borges’s erudition is mistaken for a demand for erudition on the part of the reader. And most of the time, it is nothing more than a trap or a veil covering a fragile truth. Perhaps fiction in Borges is precisely that: the discovery of a key to open the door to a unique yet universal subjectivity. Like most famous literary characters, Borges is a creator of dozens of characters, generally all with a first name, last name, parents’ names, multiple coordinates of existence, and all of this makes them particularly real.

The Argentine writer and cultural journalist Silvia Hopenhayn will speak about some of them: Pierre Menard, Funes the Memorious, Juan Dahlmann, Ulrika, Borges (as a character in his story The Aleph), Emma Zunz. In this roundtable, one will find the sources of Borgesian creation: paradigmatic enumerations, portraits, genres (detective, fantastic), rhetorical figures (paradoxes, analogies, oxymorons, hypallages, etc.), but above all his incredible capacity for imaginative, sensitive, and analytical writing.

This activity is organized by the association Los conjuradoswww.losconjurados.ch as part of its BORGES 2026 project, which commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Argentine writer’s death in Geneva.

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