PUC-RS Verão 2015

INSTRUCTION: Answer question according to text.

TEXT

Reading the work of Jorge Luis Borges for the first time is
like discovering a new letter in the alphabet, or a new note in
the musical scale. His writings are fictions filled with private
jokes and esoterica, historiography and sardonic footnotes.
[5] They are brief, often with abrupt beginnings. Borges’ use
of labyrinths, mirrors, chess games and detective stories
creates a complex intellectual landscape, yet his language is
clear, with ironic undertones. He presents the most fantastic
of scenes in simple terms, seducing us into the forking
[10] pathway of his seemingly infinite imagination.

Half a century ago, when Borges’ ground-breaking collection
Ficciones was first published in English translation, he was
virtually unknown outside literary circles in Buenos Aires,
where he was born in 1899, and Paris, where his work was
[15] translated in the 1950s. In 1961, he was catapulted onto the
world stage when international publishers awarded him the
first Formentor Prize for outstanding literary achievement.
He shared the prize with Samuel Beckett (the other authors
on the shortlist were Alejo Carpentier, Max Frisch and Henry
[20] Miller). The award spurred English translations of Ficciones
and Labyrinths and brought Borges widespread fame and
respect.

Over the decades since his death in 1986, Borges’ global
stature has continued to grow. “Today one could consider
[25] Borges the most important writer of the 20th Century,” says
Suzanne Jill Levine, translator and general editor of the
Penguin Classics five-volume Borges series. Why? “Because
he created a new literary continent between North and South
America, between Europe and America, between old worlds
[30] and modernity. In creating the most original writing of his
time, Borges taught us that nothing is new, that creation is
recreation, that we are all one contradictory mind, connected
amongst each other and through time and space, that human
beings are not only fiction makers but are fictions themselves,
[35] that everything we think or perceive is fiction, that every
corner of knowledge is a fiction.”

Adapted from http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140902-the-20thcenturys-best-writer (acessado em setembro 2014).