In 1918, Borges was awarded a baccalauréat from the College de Geneve. It was then that Borges started to read the works of German philosophers and expressionist poets. The outbreak of World War I forced his family to stay temporarily in Switzerland, where Borges started to learn French, Latin and German. In 1914, Borges moved with his family to Switzerland in order to treat his father’s eye illness, condition that would later lead Borges to blindness. This was something that was taken for granted… I was expected to be a writer." (The Poetry Foundation) ("Ultraism") As said by Borges: "From the time I was a boy, it was tacitly understood that I had to fulfill the literary destiny that circumstances had denied my father. Because of that, he wrote his first story when he was only seven years old, having his Spanish translation of Oscar Wilde’s “ The Happy Prince” published in a Buenos Aires newspaper when he was nine. ("Jorge Luis Borges") Both his father and his grandmother, with whom he spoke in English, always encouraged him to read and write. Brought up in a literary household and having an English ancestry, Borges was used to reading European and American literatures since very young ages. Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and raised in the neighborhood of Palermo.
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