Borges at Eighty: Conversations

by Jorge Luis Borges

  AUDIENCE: The Old English epic Beowulf and various Old Norse sagas present heroes who are idealized models of social conduct while simultaneously suggesting contradictions inherent in such social systems, for example, the inevitability of blood feuds, the heroes placing reckless courage over pragmatic consideration, et cetera. Do you think it’s possible for contemporary literature to achieve the same effect?

  BORGES: I should answer that I know that it can, since we have the epic sense in such works as Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, in such works as The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by Lawrence. Therein I find the epic. I was always more touched by the epic than by the lyric side of poetry. I think we may achieve the epic. Why think that that great form of art has been denied us? But of course we have to look for it in a different way. Perhaps the epic may not be wrought today in verse, but surely can be wrought in prose. I have given you a few examples and of course there are many. For example, Whitman saw Leaves of Grass as being an epic, not as being a series of short poems. And he was right, since he created that great mythical figure we call Walt Whitman. So I think that epic is not denied us. Nothing is forbidden us. It depends on us to do it or at least attempt it.

  ALAZRAKI: Since the subject of poetry was touched upon, I’d like to turn to your poetry. In the last eleven years you have published five of your most important collections of poetry: Elogio de la sombra, In Praise of Darkness (1969), El oro de los tigres, The Gold of the Tigers (197 2), La rosa profunda, The Deep Rose (1975), La monedade hierro, The Iron Coin (1976), and Historia de la noche, History of the Night (1977).

  BORGES: Historia de la noche. The pick of the bunch. The best one.

  ALAZRAKI: In less than ten years you have more than tripled your poetic production.

  BORGES: So I have. I should apologize to you all!

  ALAZRAKI: Some readers and critics see in those collections some of the most accomplished and intense poetry you ever wrote.

  BORGES: You are very generous. Go ahead.

  ALAZRAKI: But it is your feeling that in these last years you find poetry a more fitting and effective medium than prose. Why is it that you have turned so vividly and intensely to poetry and slowly have almost abandoned prose?

  BORGES: I don’t think I have abandoned prose. I have written Dr. Brodie’s Report and The Book of Sand. Those are my best short stories. But a case may be made for what my friend Alazraki has said. The fact is that since I am blind, since I am often lonely, well, it is easier to compose a rough mental draft of verse than of prose. That is to say, I am alone and then a line comes to me, and yet another. I go on polishing those lines. I remember them by heart because of the rhymes. So that poetry comes in an easier way to me. Now, had I a secretary, things might be different. I might dictate many things to him. But I haven’t. And of course the one great advantage of poetry is that when you write prose you tend to see part of what you are writing, but if you write a poem, then you can see the whole. For example, a sonnet can be seen by the poet. It is composed of fourteen lines and those lines can be looked at in a single glimpse, while a narrative may be long, may be seven pages. So I find it easier to compose poetry than prose. Well, that’s my personal case. Plus the fact of being blind, of being obliged to evolve rough mental drafts. The drafts are not pages. So in that case I should say that the creating is a physical one. The fact of being blind, and of being, well, sometimes lonely and by myself. But I have in mind many stories that I would write. I know the plots already. I haven’t gone into details as yet, but I expect to write at least one more book of short stories. And maybe I’ll go on writing verse, and when I have some thirty or forty they’ll be collected into a volume like the others.

  BARNSTONE: Is there any particular reason why you decide to write a poem in free verse or in traditional rhyme?

  BORGES: I suppose the first line given me is the clue. If I’m given an eleven-syllable line, then that forebodes a sonnet. If I’m given a line of free verse, I go on in free verse.

  BRECHER: In Garden of the Forking Paths the instructor of the labyrinth Ts’ui Pên writes the following:

  In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. The network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries embraces all possibilities of time.

  BORGES: Yes, I think I took that from Bradley’s Appearance of Reality. I cribbed it. It may be true for all I know. The world is so mysterious and so rich. For I found that idea while thinking of Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. And there is another book, Dunne’s Experiment with Time, which might be quoted. And in Schopenhauer there is a remark on the subject many times, not necessarily present, past, or to come, but altogether different.

  BRECHER: Along this line, in The Book of Sand, you begin a story here in Cambridge during your last visit. It begins: “It was in Cambridge I sat down on the bench, facing the Charles River.”

  BORGES: Ah yes, I remember, yes.

  BRECHER: You wrote that story?

  BORGES: Yes, that story is called “The Other” I think. Remember Barnstone’s “otherness”?

  BRECHER: Have you ever sat on a bench and met a future Borges as opposed to a young Borges? And if so, what did he tell you?

  BORGES: No. I cannot yet. But I thought of that. I’ll write that story down.

  BRECHER: Can you tell us the story?

  BORGES: It’s not yet written. I attempted it and I failed. I’ll try again.

  BARNSTONE: You often speak of death with expectation and hope. Do you feel no fear or anger? Could you say something about the time, or non-time, of death?

  BORGES: When I am unhappy—and I allow myself to be unhappy now and then—I think of death as the great salvation. After all, what on earth can it matter what happens to Jorge Luis Borges? I’ll see him no more. I think of death as a hope, a hope to be totally blotted out, obliterated, and I can count on that, and I know that there is no future life, no cause for fear or for hope. We shall simply vanish and that’s as it should be. I think of immortality as being a threat, but in fact it will never achieve anything. I am sure that I am not personally immortal. And I feel that death will prove a happiness, since what better thing can we expect than forgetfulness, oblivion? That’s the way I feel about it.

  AUDIENCE: Since you are such a peaceful man, why is there so much violence in your stories?

  BORGES: Perhaps because I come of military stock. Because I might have been somebody else. But really, now, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe in violence, I don’t believe in war. I think the whole thing is a mistake. I believe in agreeing, not in disagreeing. I don’t believe in countries. Countries are a mistake, are a superstition. I suppose the world should be one, even as the stoics thought. We should be cosmopolitans, citizens of the world. I have so many hometowns, for example, Buenos Aires, for example, Austin, Texas, for example, Montivideo, well, tonight Cambridge, why not? Geneva, Edinburgh, ever so many hometowns. It’s much better than having one hometown or one country.

  AUDIENCE: You didn’t mention William Butler Yeats among the poets you like.

  BORGES: Well, I should of course. I am very sorry for that omission. I apologize to all of you. Yeats is a great poet but, I should say, I’m not sure if his is a lasting poetry, since what you chiefly get from him is surprise. And surprise fades away. I think that Frost will last longer than Yeats. Of course I delight in Yeats. I can give you so many lines from him. At this moment a line bubbles up. The line is thus: “That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.” What wonderful baroque verse. I’m not very fond of baroque verse. While Frost wrote many verses that go deeper down than it.

  AUDIENCE: Is the story “Funes the Memorious” autobiographical?

  BORGES: Yes. It is. It is meant as a metaphor for insomnia. I remember I had very sleepless nights, and then I did my best to forget myself, to f
orget the room I was in, to forget the garden outside the room, to forget the furniture, to forget the many facts of my own body, and I couldn’t do it. And I thought of a man being weighed down by a perfect memory. Then I wrote that nightmare that has pleased many people, called “Funes the Memorious.” Essentially, memorious in English is a farfetched word while in Spanish memorioso sounds like a plain word. So the title in this case is better in translation. Memorioso sounds almost as if it had been said by a peasant. Well, the story itself is, though I wrote it, a fine story.

  AUDIENCE: Some people wonder why you have never written a full-length novel. Do you believe the forms you use are superior to the novel form? And why?

  BORGES: I should say for merely personal reasons. The reason is that I can’t write a novel, though I can write short stories, and that’s that.

  AUDIENCE: Some people are wondering about the translations of your work. Are people allowed to retranslate works of yours that have already been translated?

  BORGES: Norman Thomas de Giovanni told me that his translations were far better than the originals. He was right, I suppose. I’m being improved and invented all the time by my translators. Among them, of course, Willis Barnstone and Alastair Reid. They are improving me all the time. They should be as unfaithful as they can. They are of course.

  MARGERY RESNICK: Are there more questions?

  BORGES: Life is brief. I’m eighty-one. I may die at any moment. Go ahead.

  AUDIENCE: Are you acquainted with Diderot?

  BORGES: Of course I am.

  AUDIENCE: Could you talk of how you view seguro azar [“unavoidable chance”] and how does this fit in with fatalism as Diderot sees it?

  BORGES: I wonder if I can answer that very complex question. Personally, I think that free will is an illusion, but a necessary illusion. For example, if I am told my past has been given me, I accept it. Whereas if I am told that I am not a free agent now, I can’t believe in it. So that free will is a necessary illusion. Of course Spinoza knew all about that when he said a stone falling could think “I want to fall.” I think that if I want to go on writing I am made to think so, not by any god, but by that long chain of causes and effects, branching out into infinity.

  AUDIENCE: Could you explain your idea of poetic inspiration?

  BORGES: I know that the thing exists and that’s all I knew about it. I know that I am given gifts and I misuse them. But I know inspiration exists. Where it comes from I don’t know. It may come from memory, from an unknown agent. But I know inspiration exists and all poets know it. Even as I know that the experience of yellow exists, that the experience of love exists, the experience of inspiration exists. That’s all I know about it. And we need know no more.

  AUDIENCE: Could you speak about recitation? We wonder what you feel about oral literature when oral engagement with literature is under attack from the printed word.

  BORGES: When a poem is a real poem, the reader has to read it up aloud. That’s the test of poetry. In reading a poem, or for that matter a novel or a short tale, if you don’t feel that you’d better read it up aloud, then there is something wrong about the writing. I notice many times over that though literature may be written, it is essentially oral. Since it began by being oral, it goes on being oral.

  AUDIENCE: What should the role of the artist be in a society as threatened as ours? Can beauty survive in the ambience in which we find ourselves?

  BORGES: I think that poetry and beauty will prevail. I have no use for politics. I am not politically minded. I am aesthetically minded, philosophically perhaps. I don’t belong to any party. In fact, I disbelieve in politics and in nations. I disbelieve also in richness, in poverty. Those things are illusions. But I believe in my own destiny as a good or bad or indifferent writer.

  7

  A Writer Is Waiting for His Own Work

  Indiana University,

  March 1976 If you allow me to be paradoxical—and why not since we are among friends?—a writer is waiting for his own work. I think a writer is being changed all the time by his output. So that perhaps at first what he writes is not relevant to him. And if he goes on writing, he’ll find that those things are ringing a bell all the time.

  WILLIS BARNSTONE: During World War I, when you were in Geneva, studying in French and Latin, talking English and Spanish at home, you came upon another American poet whose lines you read in German: Als ich in Alabama meinen Morgengang machte.

  JORGE LUIS BORGES: Walt Whitman.

  BARNSTONE: What effect did finding that other American have upon the possibility of a modern language for your poetry?

  BORGES: When I read Walt Whitman, I did not think of myself as a poet. I read it as a reader, and I was swept off my feet. I thought that Walt Whitman was perhaps the only poet, that all other poets, from Homer and so on down to Whitman, were merely his forerunners. That was the sensation I got. The same sensation that I had when I first discovered Hugo, John Donne, or why not Seneca? who was also a poet, or Shakespeare, or Quevedo.

  I suppose the first time a young man discovers a poet he thinks of him not as a poet but as poetry, as poetry as an art at last discovered by someone after the gropings of the centuries. That was the impression I got from Whitman. I said what bunglers all the others have been. Now I see of course that I was wrong, since all poets are right in their way, and I don’t think that one should think of one as being an outstanding poet. In fact, I suspect that poetry is not an uncommon thing. I suppose that even the worst poets, I myself for example, may have achieved a fine verse now and then. In every book of some third-rate Argentine writer there may be a fine verse. And perhaps God, if he exists—of course he may not exist—would certainly think that every moment is wonderful, otherwise why on earth should this poetry writing be going on.

  SCOTT SANDERS: You have said that you are a literary man, not a thinker, not a philosopher. And yet those of us who read you, and there are millions who read you, get great joy and excitement from the conceptual quality, the intellectual quality of your writing. Are we misreading you?

  BORGES: No, I think that you are enriching me. Because after all reading is an elaboration even as experience is an elaboration. Every time I read something, that something is changed. And every time I write something, that something is being changed all the time by every reader. Every new experience enriches the book. You can see that—I am thinking of the Bible—you can see how it has been enriched through the many generations. I suppose Hamlet is a far richer character after Coleridge than he was for Shakespeare who created him. Yet for myself, I know I am not a thinker, except in the sense of being very puzzled over things. I try to find interpretations and I generally find them by letting the author do my thinking for me, that is to say, in Hume and Berkeley and Schopenhauer and Bradley and William James, and the Greeks also. But I think that I use thinking for literary purposes. I think of myself primarily as being a man of letters. I have acquired, at long last, some skill in the writing of Spanish, not too much, but I can more or less express what I want to, and I can say it in fairly melodious language. But then people read my stories and read many things into them that I have not intended, which means that I am a writer of stories. A writer who wrote only the things he intended would be a very poor writer. A writer should write with a certain innocence. He shouldn’t think about what he is doing. If not, what he does is not at all his own poetry.

  ROBERT DUNN: Do you think that there is a proper relationship of the personality of the writer to his product? That is, what distance should be established between the latter and the former?

  BORGES: If you allow me to be paradoxical—and why not since we are among friends?—a writer is waiting for his own work. I think a writer is being changed all the time by his output. So that perhaps at first what he writes is not relevant to him. And if he goes on writing, he’ll find that those things are ringing a bell all the time. I have written far more than I should have written. I am sorry to say that I have written fifty or sixty books, and yet I
find all those books are contained in the first book I ever published, in that dim book, written ever so long ago, Fervor de Buenos Aires, published way back in 1923. That book is a book of poems, and yet I find that most of my stories are there, except that they are there lurking, they are to be found there in a secret way and only I can ferret them out. And yet I keep on rereading that book and reshaping what I have written in that book. That is all I can do now. Some character in a Western says: “You are mute and dim.” But I go back to that book and there I find myself, and there I find my future books.

  BARNSTONE: In various conversations and so frequently in your writing you mention Milton. You mention him far more than you do Dante. And yet I have the feeling that you perhaps appreciate Dante more than you do Milton. Could you tell us something about why you like Dante? What is it in Dante?

  BORGES: Had I to name a single work as being at the top of all literature, I think I should choose the Divina Commedia by Dante. And yet I am not a Catholic. I cannot believe in theology. I cannot believe in the idea of punishment or of reward. Those things are alien to me. But the poem in itself is perfect. Not the last part of the poem, since no man can imagine he is dead because he is in hell all the time. Now in the case of Dante, you can hear that every line is perfect. While Milton is lofty but also rather tame. And besides, I cannot be fond of Milton personally. In the case of Dante, I wonder if I am fond of him. But I think of him as being a real man. I can hardly think of Milton as being a real man. For example, it is very clear to me that when Dante had his dream of hell and his dream of purgatory, he was imagining things, but in the case of Milton he was working rather in terms of words, not images. Now, you may say, that for a poet, that kind of thinking should be allowed. It is. But it does not touch me as Dante touches me. I am impressed by Milton. But I am only impressed by him. But as for Dante, I feel every word standing out. I think of every image as being exactly as it should be. You don’t have to justify his lines. You don’t have to think of him in terms of the Middle Ages. Every word is perfect, every word is in its place. You think nobody could better a line of Dante. While there are many lines of Milton that I, at least, think are quite wretched. If you have to admire Milton—why should we not?—I should think of Samson Agonistes and of the sonnets rather than of Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained. Paradise Regained is quite bad. And even if it is Paradise Lost, I cannot accept the theology. I cannot accept the story, for example, of God making man and then making Christ. All those things are beyond me. They really are. But in the case of the sonnets, of course he wrote some very powerful sonnets. In fact, I suppose that except for the fact that they both wrote of God, of hell and of heaven, there is no link whatever between Milton and Dante. They are really quite unlike each other, and I wonder why we link them together. What I am saying is very obvious, and obvious things are very trivial.