Borges at Eighty: Conversations

by Jorge Luis Borges

  REID: But his prose also must have had a great effect on you.

  BORGES: Yes, it has. But I wonder if Coleridge’s prose had an effect on me or whether Coleridge first came to me through De Quincey, who has much the same music. I think really that when I admire De Quincey and enjoy him I am really admiring Coleridge.

  REID: Translated.

  BORGES: Yes, translated into very splendid nightmares.

  COLEMAN: At the table we were talking about Dr. Johnson’s letter to McPherson, otherwise known as Ossian. And you felt quite strongly that the birth of European romanticism was to be found in a Scotsman, in an imposter.

  BORGES: I don’t think he was an imposter. I think he was a great poet, but he wanted his poem to belong to his country, not to himself. So he was really a great poet and a very important poet. I think that the romantic movement, the whole thing, began, I’m glad to say, in Scotland in the eighteenth century.

  REID: I wish I could agree with you.

  BORGES: You’re not too sure.

  REID: I’m not too sure.

  COLEMAN: Why do you think that Johnson fulminated against McPherson to the extent he did in the letter?

  BORGES: I venture to think that the real reason is that Johnson felt that his whole style, that his whole religion of poetry, was threatened by something new. He must have felt the presence of Ossian as a threat, even as Tennyson thought of Walt Whitman as a threat—something quite new, something quite different, something not altogether understandable, had occurred and they both felt threatened. I remember somebody asked Tennyson: “What do you think of Walt Whitman?” And Tennyson answered: “I am aware of Walt Whitman. I think of him as a wade in the ocean. No, sir, I don’t think about Walt Whitman.” Because he knew that he could not afford to do so. They are too dangerous. I think the remark of Johnson came out of fear, and that remark of Tennyson also. He knew something was happening and then the whole structure would tumble down.

  COLEMAN: I get the sense that you’re not threatened by any author.

  BORGES: No, I try to think of all authors as friends. Sometimes I failed. Sometimes I’m defeated. But I go on. I try to enjoy every single book I read. I do my best to agree with it.

  COLEMAN: In 1924–25 you published a book of essays called Inquisiciones.

  BORGES: An awful book, yes.

  REID: Ah. But wait a minute now.

  BORGES: Why remember it?

  REID: But I must plow on for a moment now. Permit me a few seconds.

  BORGES: The one thing I remember is that it was quite bad and the binding was green.

  REID: But there were those essays on Quevedo and Unamuno and Sir Thomas Browne. Now this is a book that you have prohibited and forbidden from being republished.

  BORGES: Some ideas are good but the writing is bad. I don’t say a word against Unamuno or Hugo or Sir Thomas Browne. But what I wrote about them is bosh, sheer bosh.

  COLEMAN: So you believe in burying books that you would like to forget? And not have them republished under any circumstances?

  BORGES: The real reason for a publication of Obras completas, The Complete Works, is that two books should be left out. Inquisiciones and another cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme.* That was the real reason, the omission of those two books.

  COLEMAN: That was the question. I was trying to elicit from you some dithyrambs against those books to figure out why they weren’t in The Complete Works.

  BORGES: Well, they were written in an absurd style, in a baroque style. I was baroque when I was a young man. I did my best to be Sir Thomas Browne, to be Lugones, to be Quevedo, to be somebody else. But now I’m content with my own humble self, if it exists, my private self, if the private self is to be found.

  COLEMAN: If you started as a baroque writer, how did you become classic?

  BORGES: I started as a baroque writer, as all young men do, out of timidity. A young man thinks: I write such and such a thing. But then he thinks, well, this is trivial. I have to disguise it. And he disguises it by being baroque. A form of shyness, really. Aggressive shyness, perhaps.

  COLEMAN: So you became more daring and became plainer.

  BORGES: Yes, now I am daring and I write in a straightforward way and use no word to send a reader to the dictionary, and avoid violent metaphors.

  REID: We have decided to ask you a practical question.

  BORGES: I wonder if I can answer a practical question. I’m not a practical man.

  REID: It is very curious to me that—for instance, this most recent phase of your life—you have begun to travel more and more and more and more, whereas most people think of this period of their life as one in which they stay at home.

  BORGES: If I stay at home I am repeating the same day over and over again. When I travel every day is different. Every day brings a gift. So I enjoy traveling, and so on. But if I stay home the whole thing is rather drab. Every day is the mirror of the day that came before it.

  REID: I remember that you once said to me in Buenos Aires that newspapers are headed for oblivion. That’s why they have to come out every day.

  BORGES: They are meant for oblivion, while books …

  REID: That’s right, books are aiming higher.

  BORGES: They strive to be everlasting. Some of them that last aren’t.

  REID: In speaking of other writers you have mentioned almost exclusively English and American writers, at least so far. Is this only because you were addressing an English audience? Do you consider yourself to be an “English” writer? Or does the question of nationality not enter into your writing? Would you respond to the place of nationality in literature, or in your own writing?

  BORGES: I am not interested in nationality. It is a superstition.

  REID: You think it is a superstition?

  BORGES: As to English literature, I think it is the literature. But I don’t say that against other literatures. At the same time I greatly love the German language and German literature, and I love French literature and I dislike the French language. But of course I must broaden it to all English literature. If I think of the Bible, I think of the King James Bible. When I think of the Arabian Nights, I think of the Arabian Nights in terms of Lane and Burton.

  REID: And was it in fact true that you read Don Quixote in English before you read it in Spanish?

  BORGES: No. You can quote that, why not?

  REID: It’s a very useful metaphor. You always spoke to me of that edition of the English translation that you have that you read.

  BORGES: No, I think I was speaking of Dante’s Divine Comedy, as done into English by Longfellow. I began reading the Divine Comedy in English.

  COLEMAN: Borges, you have spoken of literary men you admire, what about literary women? Could you identify the women in literature whose contribution you consider most significant?

  BORGES: I think I would limit myself to one, to Emily Dickinson.

  COLEMAN: Is that it?

  BORGES: That’s that. Short and sweet.

  REID: I think it should be pointed out, however, that there are more.

  BORGES: Yes of course. There is Silvina Ocampo, for example, who is translating Emily Dickinson at this moment in Buenos Aires.

  REID: Changing the note, the question here comes quite bluntly, and I feel no reason not to deliver it just as bluntly. Speak to us about death. You don’t feel threatened by any writer. Do you feel threatened by death?

  BORGES: I think of death as being full of hope. Hope of annihilation. Hope of being forgotten. Sometimes I feel unhappy. I can’t help it. Then I say: But after all why should I be unhappy, since at any moment I may die? And that comes to me as a comfort. Because I think of death as being total. I don’t want to go on. I’ve lived far too long. Why go on after death? That’s an exaggeration. I stand in hope of death, not in fear of death.

  COLEMAN: How would you have written differently had you written in English?

  BORGES: I respect the English language too much. I have done most of my reading in Eng
lish. I wonder if it would have been greatly different.

  COLEMAN: You said once—I’m sorry to repeat a sentence which you may not want to have repeated—but you did say: “I would have liked to have been born an Englishman.” I remember your saying that.

  BORGES: But in a sense I was born to English, since at home I spoke English and Spanish. So that I was born to English. Though my oral English may not be really effective, my reader’s English is quite good.

  COLEMAN: Maybe the question is too blunt, and I was wondering if I might tease it out a bit. Do you feel that your own prose style, which is unique in Spanish—

  BORGES: But is it, really?

  COLEMAN: Yes.

  BORGES: I wonder.

  COLEMAN: Some writers who are so-called bilingual writers say: “Sometimes I think in one language and then I put it into another language.”

  BORGES: I’m doing that all the time with Latin. People have been trying to write Latin in different languages. For example, Sir Thomas Browne, for example, Quevedo, were all writing Latin in English or in Spanish.

  REID: I would like to make a little hiatus here and ask you to tell us that story about the taxista in Chicago and what he said to you the other day.

  BORGES: The taxi driver.

  REID: The taxi driver, yes.

  BORGES: That was the day before yesterday, or yesterday, I’m not sure. My days are very hazy. He had been a soldier. He had known bitterness. He had known unhappiness. Then he suddenly said without realizing the full power of his spoken word. He suddenly said: “I hate memory.” I thought that very fine, and I think I’ll grab that and use it. I’ll annex that sentence “I hate memory.” It’s a beautiful sentence. Flee and forget the world.

  COLEMAN: You once said that you would like to discover yourself a Jew. Why?

  BORGES: I suppose I am partly a Jew. Not through the fact that my forefathers were called Acevedo or Pinedo, but merely by the fact that one of the fundamental books, or the essential books, is the Bible, and I was brought up on the Bible. I should say that all of us—and it has nothing to do with genealogy, with blood—we are all of us in the West Greeks and Hebrews. Those are the two essential nations, Greece and Israel. After all, Rome is but an extension of Greece.

  COLEMAN: Borges, people read to you now. When you read a book you hear it. Most of the books, it seems to me, that you talk about are books that you read when you were a child in that paradise of your father’s library.

  BORGES: I’m always rereading rather than reading.

  COLEMAN: Are you rereading in your memory what you read or are people reading to you again?

  BORGES: Both things, I should say. My memory is full of quotations, as you know only too well. But also, kind friends come and we take a book, generally by Conrad, by Stevenson, by Kipling, and we read on.

  COLEMAN: As an example of this, I was told that Graham Greene went to see you in Buenos Aires. Graham Greene said to you, well, about Stevenson’s poetry…

  BORGES: I don’t think he went to see me. He’s far too important a person to do that. I think I went to see him.

  COLEMAN: Let us assume that you were the aggressor in this case. But Greene recounts that you were talking about Stevenson, and Greene said to you that Stevenson wrote one great poem, and Greene didn’t name the poem, but then you recited it.

  BORGES: I suppose it was “Requiem.” I’m not sure. It may have been “Ticonderoga,” he wrote so many fine poems, and every single one of them is the best poem he wrote. He achieved perfection.

  REID: Do you see a meld of languages, for instance, Anglo-Hispanic, as a possibility in the future?

  BORGES: No, let us hope not. I hope that both will survive in their purity. I don’t think anything of it.

  REID: I’ve just come back from Puerto Rico yesterday and I can testify that such a meld is in progress there. But they wouldn’t enrich one another, necessarily. They would only intrude on one another, as they do in fact. Do you notice when you are changing languages? For instance, at dinner tonight you were changing several times and I don’t think you realized.

  BORGES: No. I never realized it. I was shifting from one to the other.

  REID: All the time.

  BORGES: Yes. I was at home in both of them.

  REID: What fascinated me about Emir Rodríguez Monegal’s biography, which you haven’t read, of course—

  BORGES: No, I haven’t read it. The subject hardly interests me.

  REID: Yes, the subject hardly interests you—was that English was associated very much with your father and Spanish with your mother.

  BORGES: That’s true. My father always spoke to me in English.

  REID: He did, really?

  BORGES: When my father died—that happened in 1938—my mother began to study English in order to be near him.

  REID: I see.

  BORGES: Then she made translations from the English of books by Sir Herbert Reed, by Saroyan.

  REID: She translated on her own.

  BORGES: On her own, yes. She did books by Virginia Woolf and others.

  REID: But you had a certain distinction between English and Spanish in the sense that you said that English was the language of the library and that Spanish was the language of the household, of the practical household.

  BORGES: I suppose it was. I think of English as being a very physical language, far more physical than Spanish, as in such phrases as “pick yourself up.”

  REID: Did your father never speak to you in Spanish?

  BORGES: Oh yes, he did. Of course he used both languages. But I knew that I had to speak in a certain way to one of my grandmothers, and in a different way to the other one. And then I found out those two ways were called the Spanish language and the English language. That was natural.

  REID: So you just thought of it as different manners of address, as it were, for a while.

  BORGE: Different ways of talking to two different persons.

  REID: So that languages are associated with people more than with things in themselves.

  BORGES: Yes, a child doesn’t know what language he is speaking. If you tell a child he’s speaking Chinese, he believes you.

  REID: He doesn’t need to know.

  BORGES: No. The things are given him.

  REID: So you don’t see any glowing future for “Spanglish” as it’s called.

  BORGES: No!

  COLEMAN: Borges, your father wrote a novel, which very few people have read. Could you tell us something about that novel, which was published, I think, in Majorca. Is that true?

  BORGES: It was published in Majorca, as far as I remember. He told me to rewrite it, and he gave me a set of chapters as they should be rewritten. And I intend to do that. The novel is a good one.

  COLEMAN: Why don’t you rewrite that book now? Might that be one of your ambitions?

  BORGES: I will be rewriting that book within ten days or so. I can’t do it here in the States.

  COLEMAN: Could you tell us something about the novel? Do you remember it at all? Because your father was a father who always wanted you to be a writer. No one would characterize him as a writer as such. He was a man of letters, but…

  BORGES: He wrote some very fine sonnets. He also wrote a book of Easter short stories. He also wrote a drama, a book of essays. And he destroyed them. As for the novel, if you wait a year or so you will know all about it. I can’t tell you the plot.

  COLEMAN: You mean you are going to rewrite the novel.

  BORGES: Yes, I am going to rewrite it the way he wanted it to be rewritten. Not the way I would do the job myself. I want to save that book, an historical novel, about the civil war in our country in the nineteenth century.

  COLEMAN: Most children are not brought up instructed to be writers from the very moment that they are born.

  BORGES: But I wonder whether I was instructed. I think that I felt that.

  COLEMAN: You felt it.

  BORGES: Yes.

  REID: It’s described as a tacit und
erstanding.

  BORGES: Yes, a tacit understanding, yes. That’s the right word.

  REID: Nobody was responsible.

  BORGES: Yes, it was a part of the universe, a part of destiny.

  REID: Which you accepted as an inevitability.

  BORGES: Yes, but at the same time, I was thankful.

  REID: Were you intimidated by the realization that your destiny was to be a writer?

  BORGES: On the contrary, I was very happy about it. My father said: “Read as much as you can. Write when you have to do it, and, above all, don’t rush into print.”

  REID: Borges told once an amazing story about his first book.

  BORGES: The one in Buenos Aires.

  REID: No, the one before that sold seventy-five copies.

  BORGES: As many as seventy-five, I wonder. You are exaggerating a bit.

  REID: Borges said that since his first book sold seventy-five copies, he felt that it was still within his control because he could physically visit all the people who had bought a copy and apologize and ask for it back and promise that the next book would be better. But when his second book sold seven hundred and fifty copies, he said that the public was already an abstraction, and the work was out of his hands. What do you feel now when your books sell seventy-five thousand copies?

  BORGES: I think I am ringed in by very generous people. They’re wrong of course, but what can I do about it?

  REID: Borges, had it ever occurred to you sometimes that you use modesty somewhat like a club?

  BORGES: I’m very sorry. I apologize. I’m not using modesty, I’m being sincere.

  REID: That’s just an observation, Borges, please forgive me.

  BORGES: No! We’re all together.

  REID: However, to substantiate the rudeness of my remark, I must—

  BORGES: No!

  REID: I must tell a story. When I met you once in Scotland we were driving back and you asked me what I’d been doing recently and I said that I had written some poems. Then you thought for a minute and you said: “I too have written some verses.”

  BORGES: Some lines, yes, not verses.

  REID: Some lines, that’s right. Modesty carried to an extreme that I found a little…