Borges's Fascination with Hilario Ascasubi

This article examines Jorge Luis Borges's lifelong fascination with gauchesca poet Hilario Ascasubi, tracing this interest from Borges's youth in Geneva through his mature critical writings. The author argues that Borges's championing of Ascasubi served multiple purposes: challenging nationalist appropriations of gauchesca literature, particularly the elevation of José Hernández's Martín Fierro to epic status by critics like Leopoldo Lugones and Ricardo Rojas, and opposing Peronist cultural nationalism.The study analyzes how Borges, in collaboration with Adolfo Bioy Casares, strategically reconfigured the gauchesca canon in their 1955 Poesía gauchesca anthology to emphasize liberal, anti-Rosas voices like Ascasubi while marginalizing Federalist writers. Drawing on Bakhtinian concepts of dialogism and novelness, the article demonstrates that Borges valued Ascasubi's versatility, visual immediacy, and dialogical complexity over Hernández's narrative approach. Through close readings of Borges's essays and poetry spanning from 1925 to 1975, the author reveals how Ascasubi functioned as Borges's literary and political weapon against cultural nationalism, representing a cosmopolitan alternative to parochial definitions of Argentine identity while embodying the dialogic heteroglossia that Borges found more compelling than nationalist epic traditions.