Borges at Eighty: Conversations

by Jorge Luis Borges

  The Dick Cavett Show,

  New York, May 1980 As I found out that I was blind very gradually, there was no special affected moment. It came like a slow summer twilight. I was head librarian of the National Library and I began to find that I was ringed in by letterless books. Then my friends lost their faces. Then I found out there was nobody in the looking glass.

  DICK CAVETT: It’s nice to have, not only such an eminent poet and writer, but a poultry inspector on the program. Could you explain—it sounds like something out of S. J. Perelman—why you were a chicken inspector?

  JORGE LUIS BORGES: I had a small job in a library in Buenos Aires. Then I was given the order to go and inspect the sale of poultry and eggs in markets. I went to the municipality, the town hall, and asked a friend: “Why on earth?” He said: “Well, but you are in favor of the Allies.” Of course I was. Then he said: “What could you expect? That’s that.” Then I said: “Well, of course I can’t answer that argument.” That was the reason.

  CAVETT: And this was the Perón regime.

  BORGES: Yes, it was on the side of Hitler and Mussolini. I love Italy and love Germany, and because I do, I loathe Mussolini and Hitler.

  CAVETT: How serious an enemy were you of the Peróns? That seems like a sort of an insult, but not a very serious thing to do to you, to make you a poultry inspector. But your mother got a phone call one night that was ominous. Can you tell about that?

  BORGES: Yes, she got a phone call in the small hours. I heard the phone call. Then the morning after, I asked her: “Did I dream a phone call?” She said: “No, you haven’t. Some fool or other called me and said: ‘I am going to kill you, and to kill your son.’ ” And my mother said: “Killing my son is easy, you can find him any day you like. As for killing me, I am over ninety. You’d better be in a hurry. If you are not I’ll die on you.” After this she went to sleep.

  CAVETT: I’d like to meet her. Has your mother died since then?

  BORGES: Yes, my mother died five years ago. She was ninety-nine. At the time, she felt sorry, no? I mean, she said: “Well, this is too much.” To live to be ninety-nine is really awful.

  CAVETT: Is awful.

  BORGES: Yes. Well, to live to be eighty is awful. Living is awful, let’s say. But you cannot avoid it. It can be very beautiful. Now, for example, it is beautiful.

  CAVETT: Now is okay?

  BORGES: Yes, of course. I’m in New York. I’m talking to you.

  CAVETT: You like New York.

  BORGES: Yes. I think of New York in terms of Walt Whitman, of O. Henry, and also in terms of sheer beauty. The whole city—skyscrapers springing up like fountains. It’s a very lyric city.

  CAVETT: Señor Borges, is your blindness hereditary?

  BORGES: Yes. I saw my father die blind and smiling. My paternal grandmother, she was North Country. She came from Northumberland. I saw her die blind and smiling. And my great-grandfather also died blind. I don’t know whether he smiled or not. That’s as far back as I can go. I stand in the fourth generation.

  CAVETT: How does it change you when you do become blind?

  BORGES: As I found out that I was blind very gradually, there was no special affected moment. It came like a slow summer twilight. I was head librarian of the National Library and I began to find that I was ringed in by letterless books. Then my friends lost their faces. Then I found out there was nobody in the looking glass. And then things grew dim, and now I can make out white and gray. But two colors are forbidden me: black and red. I see black and red as brown. Where Shakespeare said “Looking on darkness which the blind do see,” he was wrong. The blind are forbidden darkness. I live in the center of a luminous mist.

  CAVETT: A luminous mist.

  BORGES: Grayish, or bluish, I’m not too sure. It’s far too dim. I would say that now I live in the center of a bluish world.

  CAVETT: Bluish.

  BORGES: But it may be gray for all I know.

  CAVETT: Did you try to read everything you could as fast as you could when you knew you were going blind?

  BORGES: No. I should have done that, of course. Since then—that was 1955, the year of a revolution—I have done much rereading but little reading.

  CAVETT: By braille, and people reading to you?

  BORGES: No, I’ve never attempted braille. But I keep on reading the same books I read when I was a child.

  CAVETT: You like Huck Finn but not Tom Sawyer as I recall.

  BORGES: I think that Tom Sawyer spoils the book. Why was he allowed to intrude into the book? Huckleberry Finn is a great book.

  CAVETT: You mean his appearance at the end of Huck Finn.

  BORGES: Yes, I think the book falls to pieces. It is such a wonderful book, it can’t fall to pieces. It is my personal theory that another great book was begotten by Huckleberry Finn. I mean, of course, Kipling’s Kim. Though the books are totally different—one of them is from America and the other is from India—they have the same scheme, the same framework: an old man and a boy discovering their country. The countries and the style are quite different. Kipling actually met Mark Twain. I read it in one of his books.

  CAVETT: And you would have liked to have met both of them.

  BORGES: Of course. That book of Kipling’s is called From Sea to Sea, though I’m not sure. He saw Mark Twain but he never met Robert Louis Stevenson.

  CAVETT: He wanted to.

  BORGES: Yes, he wanted to, but he never made it.

  CAVETT: Sometimes I think you would have been happier being born back a little farther because your fondness for that period is so great.

  BORGES: I think of myself as not being a modern writer. I’m a nineteenth-century writer. My novelties are nineteenth-century novelties. I don’t think of myself as a contemporary of surrealism, or dadaism, or imagism, or the other respected tomfooleries of literature, no? I think of literature in terms of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. I am a lover of Bernard Shaw, Henry James.

  CAVETT: Your fans are so totally addicted to your work, it’s wonderful. I only discovered it, I’m sorry to say, recently. One of the things that one finds immediately is that your work is full of mazes and puzzles and even hoaxes.

  BORGES: Well, hoaxes. But mazes are to be explained by the fact that I live in a wonderful world. I mean, I am baffled all the time by things. I am astonished at things.

  CAVETT: I know you have talked about Spanish as your doom. That it’s a language that limits you so in writing. What is an example of the things that you can’t say in Spanish that you can in English?

  BORGES: Well, I think I can quote some verses out of “The Battle of East and West” by Kipling. There is an English officer who is pursuing an Afghan horse thief. They are both on horseback and Kipling says: “They have ridden the low moon out of the sky. Their hooves drum up the dawn.” Now, you can’t ride the low moon out of the sky in Spanish, and you can’t drum up the dawn. Those things are not allowed you in Spanish. But in Spanish, of course, we have other virtues. For example, the open vowels. When you spoke Old English you had the open vowels. I think Shakespeare had them also. I was told in Scotland that Shakespeare would actually have said: “Tow be or not tow be, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the maend to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

  CAVETT: You hear all those languages. Dim is a beautiful word.

  BORGES: It is akin to the German Dämmerung “the twilight.” Dämmerung and dim, they go together.

  CAVETT: Is there a line about “death’s dim vagueless night” in Shakespeare?

  BORGES: Of course there is. There you get the Saxon alliteration. And yet alliteration is practically unknown in Spanish. There is a fine verse by Leopoldo Lugones where you hear the n sound twice over: Iba el silencio andando como un largo lebrel.* There you hear alliteration. But that is hardly ever tried in Spanish. We go in for rhyme and assonance, rather.

  CAVETT: Have you ever tried writing in English?

  BORGES: Yes, but I respect the
English language too much. I wrote two or three poems for friends, and they found their way into print, but now I won’t attempt it. I do what I can with Spanish. After all, Spanish is my destiny and my tool also. It’s my mother tongue.

  CAVETT: How can you explain something that’s always puzzled me, the sympathy for Nazis and Hitler in Argentina?

  BORGES: Look here. I think the Argentine Republic cannot be explained. It is as mysterious as the universe. I do not understand it. I don’t profess to understand my country. I am not politically minded either. I do my best to avoid politics. I belong to no party. I am an individualist. My father was a student of Herbert Spencer. He was brought up on “man versus the state.” I can’t explain that kind of thing. I don’t understand it myself.

  CAVETT: You wrote about Hitler somewhere that you saw him as a man who wanted to lose, in some way.

  BORGES: Yes, but maybe the whole thing was a literary game of mine. And yet since people admire Napoleon, why shouldn’t they admire Hitler? I think that they go together. If you admire conquerors, you endorse conquerors yourself. But of course I hate and loathe him. His anti-Semitism was very foolish.

  CAVETT: The mazes and the labyrinths and the strange patterns that you write in your work, are they there as artistic flourishes or are they there because they are something alive?

  BORGES: No. I think of them as essential tokens, as essential symbols. I have not chosen them. They were given me. I stick to them because I find that they are the right symbols for my state of mind. I am always being baffled, perplexed, so a maze is the right symbol. They are not, at least to me, literary devices or tricks. I don’t think of them as tricks. They are part of my destiny, of my way of feeling, of living. I haven’t chosen them.

  CAVETT: Do you still go to movies?

  BORGES: Yes, but I can only hear the voices.

  CAVETT: I was surprised to hear of your interest in movies and that, in fact, I think you wrote a script once.

  BORGES: I remember very fine movies that seem to have been forgotten now. Those movies on gangsters by Joseph von Sternberg. Movies I remember: The Showdown, The Dragnet. The actors were George Bancroft, William Powell, Fred Kohler. That was the last of the silent movies. Then you had the talkies and the whole thing changed. I have seen many times over that very fine film Citizen Kane.

  CAVETT: That’s one that people see over and over.

  BORGES: And I was frightened to death by Psycho. I saw it three or four times over and I knew the moment I had to close my eyes in order not to see the mother.

  CAVETT: You said somewhere that unhappiness is a blessing for the writer.

  BORGES: I should say that unhappiness is one of the many tools given to the writer. Or one of the many materials, for another metaphor. Unhappiness, solitude, all those should be used by the writer. Even the nightmare is a tool. Many of my stories have been given me by nightmares. I have a nightmare every other night.

  CAVETT: What is the story in which no one ages? After a certain point no one dies? So there are people of all ages throughout eternity. One of the characters turns out to be Homer.

  BORGES: Ah yes, of course. In that story there is a man who has lived so long he has forgotten his Homer and lost his Greek. That story is called “The Mortal,” I think. But it is written in the baroque style. I don’t write that way today. I try to follow the lesson of Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills. Not his later, complex stories but the first stories he wrote. Those are straightforward and they are masterpieces.

  CAVETT: You’re kind of hard on Carl Sandburg in something I read. You thought he was inferior to—

  BORGES: No, I only said he was inferior to Frost, for that stands for eminence. I think that Carl Sandburg was the finest disciple of Walt Whitman. I prefer Carl Sandburg to Edgar Lee Masters. Maybe that’s a heresy.

  CAVETT: Who do you think is underrated?

  BORGES: I think that Emerson, as a poet, is underrated. I think that Emerson was a great poet. Great as a cool, intellectual poet. He seems to be forgotten as a poet. Chesterton also is a great poet, but he seems to be forgotten. Kipling also. When people think about Chesterton, they say, what, he’s a Catholic. Kipling is an imperialist. But they are far more than that. They were both men of genius. Oscar Wilde said about Kipling—of course very unjustly and very wittily: “From the point of view of literature, Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his h’s.”

  CAVETT: Do you ever find it a drawback to be so famous?

  BORGES: I feel grateful and at the same time I feel that the whole thing is a huge mistake, that I may be found out at any moment. I will be detected.

  CAVETT: You mean discovered.

  BORGES: I don’t know why I am famous, really. I’m famous, let us say, in spite of the books I’ve written.

  CAVETT: You are very modest, by the way, and self-effacing.

  BORGES: I am. I’m really modest. Yes, sir.

  CAVETT: There is a story that your translator was trying to translate the phrase “unanimous night.”

  BORGES: Yes, how priggish, perhaps.

  CAVETT: And he said: “What on earth does this mean, ‘unanimous night’?”

  BORGES: I don’t know, really.

  CAVETT: Do you feel that it’s important to be immortal?

  BORGES: I would like to die wholly, body and soul, and be forgotten.

  CAVETT: That’s your fondest wish.

  BORGES: As for my own name, why should I care about it? So awkward a name, Jorge Luis Borges, much like Jorge Luis Jorges or Borge Luis Borges, a tongue twister. I can hardly pronounce it myself.

  CAVETT: Well, you’ve done very well, considering how long you’ve had to practice.

  BORGES: Yes, eighty years. I’m over eighty.

  CAVETT: It’s been wonderful to meet you and to have you here.

  BORGES: It’s been wonderful, meeting you, meeting New York, meeting America.

  CAVETT: Yes, skyscrapers and all. Thank you, Señor Borges.

  BORGES: No, thank you, sir.

  *“Silence was moving like a long greyhound.”

  4

  I Stand Simply for the Thing I Am

  Indiana University,

  March 1980 Borges stands for all the things I hate…. I stand simply for the thing I am.

  For this poetry reading, Borges’ poems and prose pieces were read in English by Scott Sanders and Willis Barnstone, and in Spanish by Luis Beltrán, Miguel Enguídanos, and Jorge Oclander. Following each reading, Borges commented on his work.

  MY ENTIRE LIFE

  Here once again, my lips memory-laden, unique and yet similar to you.

  I am that torpid intensity which is a soul.

  I have persisted in the approach to joy and the favoring of pain.

  I have crossed the sea.

  I have practiced many lands; I have seen a woman and two or three men.

  I have loved a white and haughty girl of Hispanic quietude.

  I have seen an infinite suburb where an insatiable immortality of sunsets are accomplished.

  I have seen some fields where the raw flesh of a guitar was painful.

  I have savored numerous words.

  I deeply believe that that is all and that I will neither see nor do anything new.

  I believe that my days and my nights are equal in poverty and richness to those of God and those of all men.

  [Trans. Anthony Kerrigan]

  MI VIDA ENTERA

  Aquí otra vez, los labios memorables, único y semejante a vosotros.

  Soy esa torpe intensidad que es un alma.

  He persistido en la aproximación de la dicha y en la privanza del pesar.

  He atravesado el mar.

  He conocido muchas tierras; he visto una mujer y dos o tres hombres.

  He querido a una niña altiva y blanca y de una hispánica quietud.

  He visto un arrabal infinito donde se cumple una insaciada inmortalidad de ponientes.

  He paladeado numerosas palabras.

  Creo profundamen
te que eso es todo y que ni veré ni ejecutaré cosas nuevas.

  Creo que mis jornadas y mis noches se igualan en obreza y en riqueza a las de Dios y a las de todos los hombres.

  I wrote this poem in a despondent mood. I did not know how many things the future held in store for me. I thought my days were mere repetitions, mere mirrors. But I did not know the gifts that were awaiting me. For example, England, Scotland, Iceland, Sweden, the discovery of America in 1961 in Texas. There I met my friend Enguídanos and also the teaching of English literature. Of course English literature is endless, it cannot be taught. At least I taught my students the love of it or, let us say, the love of the Saxons, of De Quincey, Milton, and so on. And many things were to happen to me—friendship, love, we underwent dictatorship, my mother in prison, my sister in prison, and other things were to come—and they would all lead up to one thing that I never expected: they would all lead up to this evening we are sharing. They would all lead up to Bloomington, Indiana, and to our personal and secret link tonight.

  REMORSE

  I have committed the worst sin of all

  That a man can commit. I have not been

  Happy. Let the glaciers of oblivion

  Drag me and mercilessly let me fall.

  My parents bred and bore me for a higher

  Faith in the human game of nights and days;

  For earth, for air, for water, and for fire.

  I let them down. I wasn’t happy. My ways

  Have not fulfilled their youthful hope. I gave

  My mind to the symmetric stubbornness

  Of art, and all its webs of pettiness.

  They willed me bravery. I wasn’t brave.

  It never leaves my side, since I began:

  This shadow of having been a brooding man.

  [Trans. Willis Barnstone]

  EL REMORDIMENTO

  He cometido el peor de los pecados

  Que un hombre puede cometer. No he sido

  Feliz. Que los glaciares del olvido

  Me arrastren y me pierdan, despiadados.

  Mis padres me engendraron para el juego

  Arriesgado y hermoso de la vida,

  Para la tierra, el agua, el aire, el fuego.