Neither "José" nor "Luis": the curious story behind the real name of Borges

When the King of Spain, Felipe VI, renamed Jorge Luis Borges as José Luis, at the inauguration of the Congress of Languages, social network users did not take long to replicate their furcio and invented another series of writers such as Rodolfo Woolf (Walsh); Federico García Lorca has transferred Federico García Calor and even Antonio Machado to Antonio Manchado, to name just a few examples. But, beyond the incredible furcio, the reality is that the author of The Aleph nor has it been written with the name that has become universally known.

"Your José (sic) Luis Borges, our also by universal, left writing that the language is not only an instrument of communication, but a tradition and a destiny," said the Spanish monarch.

In Borges: life and literature (Edhasa, 2006), Alejandro Vaccaro A remarkable biographer of the great Argentine storyteller and tireless collector of manuscripts of the author, a story unknown for decades is revealed.

The author of Fictions He was born on Thursday, August 24, 1899. It took two days for his father Jorge Guillermo, also author, to record it at the Registry of Civil Status and, in so doing, he did it under the designation Jorge Francisco Isidoro: Jorge for his father; Francisco for his paternal grandfather and Isidoro for his maternal grandfather. So, why is he known as Jorge Luis?

Of course, young Borges grew up and everyone called him Jorge Luis. It was only in 1939 that, because of the succession proceedings relating to his father's death, he noticed that they had not registered him under the name of Luis.

"The omission of the name of Luis may give rise to innumerable interpretations, was it the forgetting of his father or a deliberate act? Was it a decision of marriage, after birth, or maybe a commitment to a parent? " Years later, Borges would say that Luis's name came from his Uruguayan parent, Luis Melián Lafinur, "wrote Vaccaro.

It was then that after the corresponding procedures, he was able to modify his baptismal certificate, established in 1900 in the parish of San Nicolás de Bari, where are actually the four names. And finally, he was renamed Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis or, for the entire planet, Jorge Luis.