Borges at Eighty: Conversations

by Jorge Luis Borges

  BARNSTONE: In regard to your writing, has dictating your poems, as opposed to writing them by hand, altered the poems that you write?

  BORGES: I think it has altered them for the better, because they’re shorter now.

  BARNSTONE: Have the people to whom you have dictated the poems—your mother, Annaliese von der Lippen, María Kodama, who is here today—

  BORGES: Have they objected to them? Many a time. But I’m very stubborn. I keep on.

  BARNSTONE: Have their objections and opinions affected the actual writing of the poems?

  BORGES: Yes, they have. They are collaborating with me, all the time. I remember I wrote a story called “The Intruder.” Two hoodlums, two brothers, kill a woman because they are jealous of each other. The one way they had to get rid of her was to knife her. I came to the last sentence. My mother was writing it down. She disliked the whole thing. She was sick and tired of hoodlums and knives. Then I came to a moment when the elder brother had to tell the younger brother that he had knifed the woman that morning. Or he had strangled her, I don’t know—why go into the gory details? He had to say that, and I had to find the right words. Then I told my mother: “How on earth can he say that?” And she said: “Let me think.” This was in the morning. Then, suddenly, in quite a different voice, she said: “I know what he said.” Then I said: “Well, write it down.” She wrote it down and I asked her to read it. She read it and those words were: “To work, brother, I killed her this morning.” And she found the right words for me. The story ended. I added a sentence or so. Then she asked me not to write any more of those blood-and-thunder stories. She was sick and tired of them. But she gave me the words, and at that moment she became, in a sense, one of the characters in the story, and she believed in it. She said “I know what he said” as though the thing had actually occurred. She gave me the key word for that story called “The Intruder,” perhaps the best story—or perhaps the one story I have ever written.

  BARNSTONE: When you were a young man, you went north for a short time with the gauchos. Could you describe your experiences, what effect they had on you and your work?

  BORGES: In 1934 I went to the borderland of Brazil and Uruguay. And therein I found the Argentine past. I found the plains, the gauchos, those things that are no longer to be found in my country. Those things were expecting me, or at least were waiting there for me. I spent some ten days there. I was rather bored, but I saw a man killed. I had never seen that before. He was an old Uruguayan herd drover. He was killed by a Negro with a revolver, who got two shots into him, and he died. And I thought, what a pity. And then I thought no more about it. But afterwards, in the many years that came after those ten days in Santa Anna do Livramento, the border of Uruguay and Brazil, the place came back to me, and I seem to be always recalling it. It is very strange. I have traveled more or less all over the world. I have seen great cities. I have seen perhaps the capital city, New York, and I have also seen London and Rome and Paris. Yet I don’t know why my memory goes back to that shabby little town on the Brazilian border and, when I am writing, it seems to inspire me. And yet at the time, it was not especially interesting. The whole thing happened in memory afterwards.

  BARNSTONE: When you were reading as a child, as a young person—

  BORGES: I was always reading.

  BARNSTONE: What were the first things that you read?

  BORGES: I suppose the first book I read was Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The best book that came out of Germany, as Chesterton had it. And then I read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I’ve gone on reading those books since then, since 1906 or 1905. I read perhaps the finest science fiction in the world, those nightmares woven by Wells. I read The Time Machine, The First Man on the Moon, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, The Food of the Gods, The War of the Worlds. And I also discovered that endless book, endless in many senses because it’s a book that has to be long. It has to live up to its title. I read for the first time the Arabian Nights, in an English version of Galland’s French version. Then afterwards I found my way into Edward William Lane’s translation and Captain Burton’s translation and Littmann’s translation into German. And two years ago I read a very fine Spanish translation published by Aguilar in Mexico, by the Judeo-Andalusían writer Rafael Cansinos-Asséns. A very fine translation, perhaps the finest of them all.

  I found a novel, and at first I could hardly tackle it because the language was so different. But somehow I was led to it and I kept on reading it. The book is of course Cervantes’ Don Quixote. I read that for the first time and I’ve gone on reading it. I’ve gone on reading Wells also. Those two books by Lewis Carroll. Those books were my first reading. And also I found my way into two books that I hardly look into now because I go on reading other books by the same writer. I mean the Just So stories and the two jungle books by Rudyard Kipling. I love Kipling. Another book I read at the time is a book that seems to me more or less unknown, and it should be known. And that book is really two books, Roughing It and The First Days in California, by Mark Twain. And then I went on to Huckleberry Finn. Then the tales of Poe, and at the same time Jules Verne.

  BARNSTONE: When did you read Milton’s Paradise Lost?

  BORGES: My parents went to Europe in the year 1914. They were so ignorant they didn’t even know that the war would begin then. Then I got a copy of Milton’s works in the Everyman’s Library edition, and instead of seeing Paris—I must have been fifteen at the time—I stayed in the hotel and read Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and the sonnets. And I don’t regret it.

  BARNSTONE: When you first discovered the Old English poets, what effect did that have on your own writing and on you?

  BORGES: I discovered Old English poetry at a moment that might have been dramatic. And I did my best not to make it dramatic. That was the year 1955, when I lost my eyesight for reading purposes. And as I was a professor of English literature, I told my students, when will we really try to know something about the subject? And I had at home a copy of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon reader. And also a copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. And then we began to read, and we fell in love with two words. And those two words were the Saxon names for London and for Rome. London was called Lundenburgh. Burgh was the same word as borough or burg, the word you get in burgos, in Edinburgh, Hamburg, Gottenburg, and so on. And the name for Rome was really wonderful also, because half of it was Latin, and the other Saxon. Rome was called, by the Anglo-Saxons, Romaburgh. We fell in love with those two words, and we found a beautiful sentence in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It said: Julius Caesar, or Julius the Caesar, was the first Roman to seek out Britain. But the sentence has a finer ring to it in Old English: Gaius Iulius se Casere ærest Romana Brytenland gesohte. And then we ran along a street called Perú in Buenos Aires, shouting “Iulius se Casere…. ” And people stared at us. We did not mind. We had found beauty! Then I went on studying, and now I’m going in for Old Norse. That always happens. You begin with Old English, and, if you’re lucky, you achieve Old Norse.

  BARNSTONE: A few questions on fame. You now think about your fame as a possible mistake.

  BORGES: Of course it is. But a very generous mistake.

  BARNSTONE: When you were a young man working in a provincial Buenos Aires library, what did you think then of publication and fame, and how have your thoughts along the years changed?

  BORGES: I never thought of fame. The idea of fame was alien to the Buenos Aires of my youth. For example, Leopoldo Lugones would be thought rightly to be the first poet of the Argentine Republic. I suppose his editions run to five hundred copies, and he never thought of sales. I remember having read that Emily Dickinson said that publishing was no part of a writer’s destiny or career. She never published. And we all thought the same way and along the same lines. We were not writing for a minority, for a majority, or for the public. We wrote to please ourselves and to please our friends perhaps. Or perhaps we wrote because we stood in need of getting rid of some idea. Alfonso
Reyes, the great Mexican writer, said to me: We publish in order not to go on emending rough drafts. And I know he was right. We publish to be rid of a book, to forget it. Once the book has appeared, then we lost all interest in it. I’m sorry to say that people have written fifty or sixty books about me. I haven’t read a single one of them, since I know too much of the subject, and I’m sick and tired of it.

  BARNSTONE: In your writing you say that you are not brave like your ancestors, that you are a physical coward—

  BORGES: Yes, I am. My dentist knows all about it!

  BARNSTONE: And your eye doctor?

  BORGES: My eye doctor and my surgeon also. Everybody knows it. It’s no big secret.

  BARNSTONE: Yet in your public life you have always spoken out against public fashion.

  BORGES: Of course!

  BARNSTONE: And you have never uttered an opinion for your own benefit. On the contrary. Now, I remember that you told me once that, when a thief said to you “Your money or life,” you answered “My life,” and so frightened the thief that he turned and ran.

  BORGES: I wanted him to kill me, and he didn’t want to.

  BARNSTONE: Now, Borges, are you a coward or a brave man?

  BORGES: I think I am physically a coward, but not mentally. I have never pandered to power or to the mob. I think that I am a brave man in the serious sense of the word, not in the military sense, though my people were all military men. But I can’t think of myself as being a literary man. I can’t think of myself as a soldier or as a sailor or as a businessman or, worse still, as a politician!

  BARNSTONE: When you were in Japan, you were impressed by very civilized monks who practice meditation in a formal way.

  BORGES: In the course of meditation, one of the subjects was this: The participant should try to think that he is the Buddha. And he may be so, for all we know. Or he should try to think of nothing, and that will also help him. I was told that in a Buddhist monastery. In Japan I was being impressed all the time. Every day was a gift to me. For all we know, we may be saved by the East, especially by Japan, since Japan has two cultures: Our Western culture, its own culture, and also the luminous shadow of Chinese culture over it. It’s a very lovable country. I only spent thirty days there, but I know that those days will remain long and long with me. I am looking back on them.

  BARNSTONE: How do you feel about being in a country where every day is important to you?

  BORGES: I felt very, very, very grateful. And I’m feeling grateful all the time in America also. People are so good and so forgiving to me. Here you are, you take me seriously. I don’t take myself seriously, and I’m thankful to you, but I think you’re mistaken.

  BARNSTONE: What do you see when you look into yourself?

  BORGES: I try not to look into myself. Or rather, as a Chicago chauffeur said ten minutes ago, I hate memory. He said those words which might have come from Seneca. A taxi driver, who had also been a soldier.

  BARNSTONE: How do you feel today, perhaps sixty years later, about your early Geneva friends, Simon Jichlinski and Maurice Abramowicz? Have you kept up with them?

  BORGES: Yes, I have. I met them, and half a century had elapsed, but it was of no account. I met them, we talked, we went on talking without minding the fact that half a century had elapsed, about the same things, the French Symbolists. It was a very fine experience. No word was said about the interim. We went on talking about literature, about Latin, the German language, about Yiddish.

  BARNSTONE: What books do you want to write, Borges?

  BORGES: I would like to write a story called “The Prize.” That story was given me by a dream some ten days ago. I keep on turning it over in my mind. I know I’ll write it. I would like to write a book on Swedenborg, and perhaps a few stories, and quite a sizable amount of poems. I keep on turning them over in my mind. Also I am translating Angelus Silesius with María Kodama. We are finishing the first rough draft. And then we’ll go on to better things.

  BARNSTONE: What is your frank opinion about the human body, which puts you to sleep, which wakes you up, which lets you breathe, which lets us die, in which your mind is always lodged? Tell us about the body.

  BORGES: I think of it as a very clumsy contrivance. Milton already wondered at the fact that sight lay in what he called “those two tender orbs,” the eyes. Why not see with all your body? Then we would be blind. The whole thing is very clumsily done, but it gives us delight and also, I’m sorry to say, it gives us hell. It gives us pain. Physical pain can be really unbearable. I suppose the best solution is one given by the gnostics: the idea of a rather clumsy God, God not doing very well his own job. The same idea is to be found in a very fine novel by Wells called The Undying Fire, the idea of God as doing his best with a rather rough, unruly material. And to go back to Bernard Shaw, God is in the making, and we are part of the making. We should be part of God.

  BARNSTONE: Would you tell us something about the poems of Emily Dickinson? What do you think of Emily Dickinson among American poets?

  BORGES: Emily Dickinson is the most passionate of all women who have attempted writing. At the moment I only remember these hackneyed lines—but of course they’re not hackneyed, they’re eternal: “Parting is all we know of heaven/ and all we need of hell.” The second line is perfect. The word need is the perfect word in the context. She spent her life writing, forgetting what she had written, leaving rough drafts, and now she is famous, but that is unimportant of course. I think of her as if I had known her personally. I have personal regard for her, personal love for Emily Dickinson.

  BARNSTONE: Among other American poets, where would you place her?

  BORGES: I think that one should never use words like “the best” or “the first,” since those words carry no conviction and only lead to arguments. Beauty is not something rare. We are coming across beauty all the time. For example, I know nothing whatever about Hungarian poetry, and yet I am sure that in Hungarian poetry I should find certainly a Shakespeare, a Dante, a Fray Luis de León, because beauty is common. People are creating beauty all the time. I wrote a poem on the library of Alexandria and I dedicated it to Omar, who burned it. And I made him think thus: Here is a memory of the word. Here we have all the poems, all the dreams, all the fictions of mankind. Well, I shall burn this library, the books will be ashes, because I know that in due time other men will rewrite the same books and nothing will really be lost.

  BARNSTONE: Please speak to us about time.

  BORGES: I think that time is the one essential mystery. Other things may be mysterious. Space is unimportant. You can think of a spaceless universe, for example, a universe made of music. We are listeners of course. But as for time, you have the one problem of definition. I remember what Saint Augustine said: “What is time? If nobody asks me, I know what it is. If I am asked, I am ignorant, I do not know.” I think that the problem of time is the problem. The problem of time involves the problem of ego, for, after all, what is the ego? The ego is the past, the present, and also the anticipation of time to come, of the future. So those two enigmas, those two riddles, are the essential business of philosophy, and happily for us they will never be solved, so forever we can go on. We can go on making guesswork—we will call that guesswork philosophy, which is really mere guesswork. We will go on weaving theories, and being very much amused by them, and then unweaving and taking other new ones.

  BARNSTONE: You have a very curious memory.

  BORGES: Yes, my memory may be, for all I know, a strange memory, since I forget my past. I tend to forget circumstances, and I abound—my friends know only too well—in quotations. But my mind is enriched. I can give you ever so many verses in Spanish, in English, in Old English, in Latin, in French, in German, some lines in Old Norse also, in Italian of course, since I have read and reread the Divine Comedy half a dozen times. My memory is full of verses, but not full of dates or of place names. I forget those things. I forget the chronological order of things that happen to me. But somehow words cling to me or
I cling to them.

  AUDIENCE: A book that you published in 1925, Inquisiciones, I read that you have tried to purchase old copies and burn them. Could you explain?

  BORGES: I am sorry to say that’s true. The book was quite a bad book. I was trying to be at the same time Leopoldo Lugones, Don Francisco de Quevedo, and Sir Thomas Browne, and I failed of course. That book will disappear, I hope.

  BARNSTONE: What about your first book of poems?

  BORGES: My first book of poems, Fervor de Buenos Aires, came out in 1923. It was really my fourth book. I destroyed three books before publishing that one. Then I asked my father, who was a learned man, to go over it, and he said no, you must make and unmake your own mistakes. And when he died I found a copy of the book. The book was full of emendations, whole poems were rejected, and then I used that edition emended by my father for what is called Obras completas, The Complete Works of Borges. I owe that to my father. He never showed me the book, he never said a word about it, but I knew how he felt since I have seen that copy, that copy greatly emended, and greatly emended for the better, by my father.

  BARNSTONE: Is it true that you put copies of the book in the raincoat pockets of critics in public places and then when you changed your mind you tried to get the books back from the bookstores?

  BORGES: Yes, that is a true story. It is so unlikely that it is true. The thing actually happened.

  AUDIENCE: You state that literature has inspired you, in your own literature—

  BORGES: My own literature, no, I should say literature of other men. But I think that the books are inspiring. The reading of a book is an experience, like the experience, let us say, of looking at a woman, falling in love, walking across the street. Reading is an experience, a very real experience.

  AUDIENCE: My question is really to find out if other arts inspire you, because I am curious to know the genesis of Para las seis cuerdas.*