Borges at Eighty: Conversations

by Jorge Luis Borges

  BORGES: I dislike the tango and I like the milonga, and so I wrote lyrics for milongas, and I have tried to avoid local color since local color is false, and to avoid slang since slang comes and goes. I have used the elemental words of Spanish. I think it is quite a good book, Para las seis cuerdas. As to music, I can only tell you this. I work with Adolfo Bioy Casares, and his wife, Silvana Ocampo, puts records on the gramaphone, and we found out that certain records did us no good and that others made for good. We found out that the records that did not inspire us came from Debussy, and the records that inspired us came from Brahms, and so we stuck to Brahms.

  AUDIENCE: What do you feel about Argentina and the Argentine people? Do you seem to be able to understand why Argentina is the way it is today?

  BORGES: I think that the Argentine Republic is as mysterious as the universe. I don’t understand it.

  *For Six Chords, a book of poems for the milonga (a fast tango).

  9

  I Always Thought of Paradise As a Library

  New York PEN Club,

  March 1980 I knew that my destiny would be to read, to dream, well, perhaps to write, but that was not essential. And I always thought of paradise as a library, not as a garden.

  We also have been created by Edgar Allan Poe, that splendid dreamer, that sad dreamer, that tragic dreamer.

  ALASTAIR REID: You once said in London—and I was sitting beside you on the occasion in 1970—that all great literature eventually became children’s literature and you hoped in the long run your work would be read by children. Would you like to amplify that?

  JORGE LUIS BORGES: Yes. I think that that statement is true, though I said it. For example, the works of Edgar Allan Poe are read by children. I read them when I was a child. The Arabian Nights are read by children. But maybe that’s all to the good, since, after all, children read as we should read. They are simply enjoying what they read. And that is the only kind of reading that I permit. One should think of reading as a form of happiness, as a form of joy, and I think that compulsory reading is wrong. You might as well talk of compulsory love or compulsory happiness. One should be reading for the pleasure of the book. I was a teacher of English literature for some twenty years and I always said to my students: if a book bores you, lay it aside. It hasn’t been written for you. But if you read and feel passion, then go on reading. Compulsory reading is a superstition.

  JOHN COLEMAN: Borges, I’ve always had the impression that you instinctively sympathized with Henry James’ characterization of the Russian novel as a loose, baggy monster, and I wonder if you still agree with such general descriptions, grosso modo, of the Russian novel and of the novel in general as a genre.

  BORGES: I have read but few novels in my life, but I don’t like to say anything against the novel since then I would be sinning against Conrad and Stevenson, of course, and Dostoyevsky, and the second part of Don Quixote, so that maybe I was wrong when I wrote against the novel.

  COLEMAN: I was told that when one of your early books, Ficciones, arrived here in New York, it was rejected on the grounds that the reader for the house here in New York said that these stories by Mr. Borges are very fine but why don’t we wait for a big novel?

  BORGES: I am not a reader of novels so I can hardly be a writer of novels, because all novels, even the finest novels, always include padding, while a short story can be essential all the time. For example, the last stories that Rudyard Kipling wrote or the last stories of Henry James or the tales of Conrad—those are essential. Why not the tales of the Arabian Nights? There is no padding to be found there. But in general a novel seems to me, to a writer at least, a weariness of the flesh.

  REID: We thought we would ask you, Borges, about all the things we didn’t understand in your work.

  BORGES: I wonder if I understand them myself. I wager I don’t.

  REID: John and I decided that we would ask you about two or three words that quiver in your work, and the one word—

  BORGES: Yes, I know, the word labyrinth, thank you.

  REID: No, no, no.

  BORGES: Thank you. It’s a word like it.

  REID: It’s a little more mysterious than labyrinth. It’s the word asombro that you use in your writing, and the expression horror sagrado. These are words that seem to me absolutely fundamental to your work. Would you tell us what you mean by asombro?

  BORGES: By asombro I suppose I mean what I am feeling all the time. I am astonished by things, I’m taken aback by things. That’s what I mean, and as to the other, the horror sagrado, you can find it in one of the finest poems in the English language:

  Weave a circle round him thrice

  And close your eyes with holy dread,

  For he on honey-dew hath fed,

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.*

  What a fine line the last one is. “And drunk the milk of Paradise.” You think of that milk as being terrible, as being awestriking, as being uncanny. “Weave a circle round him thrice/ And close your eyes with holy dread.” That would be the sacred horror.

  REID: In other words, is horror sagrado a translation of “holy dread” of Coleridge?

  BORGES: I think that “holy dread” should be a translation of something from Latin, of what the Romans felt. I remember reading somewhere, I think in Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, that there were certain places that the Romans regarded as holy and that the Romans would say about them numen in est “there is a god inside,” there is something divine about it. So it had to be horror sagrado. Horror divino “divine horror,” which is the same thing, has also been used by Góngora.

  REID: But asombro is a feeling you often attribute to quite innocuous objects in the house.

  BORGES: Perhaps the virtue of that word for you lies in the fact that when you say asombro you think of sombra, you think of shadow just as when you say amazement you think of a maze. But with asombro you think of shadow and of something at the same time unknowable.

  COLEMAN: Borges, I was going to ask you about a word that is in one of the autobiographical short stories, “The South.” When you talk about the discord in your genealogy between your mother’s and your father’s side, of a military and courageous man and a man of letters, and you talk about Juan Dahlmann, who may or may not be you, and you talk about—

  BORGES: Well, I think he was. It’s strictly confidential, I think he was. Don’t say a word, eh?

  COLEMAN: So could you talk about discordia and this wonderful sense you have of being a man split between your two genealogies?

  BORGES: Maybe I was divided. I don’t think of it as discord today. There are main strains. I think of my English forefathers, of my Portuguese forefathers, of my Spanish forefathers, of my Jewish forefathers, and I think they agree, that they are essentially friendly. But of course they stand for a different thing. Since of my Argentine and Uruguayan background I think of many military men, and then of my English background I think of Methodist preachers, of doctors of philosophy, and I think of books chiefly. But in the case of my mother’s side, I think of swords, of battles, not of books. But after eighty years of living, the discord has been softened. I don’t think of it as discord but rather a form of diversity. I may be enriched by those strains.

  COLEMAN: So in the end you sense no discord.

  BORGES: No, I am grateful.

  COLEMAN: I was wondering if I could try your patience once more. It is the word sueño, which is an impossible word to translate because in English it means both sleep and a dream.

  BORGES: No, not in English. No, in Spanish you mean.

  COLEMAN: Excuse me, thank you.

  BORGES: In English we have the two words, dream and sleep. In Spanish we have merely sueño. We must put up with it.

  COLEMAN: Could you talk a bit about what the word sueño means in your own work?

  BORGES: I suppose it depends on the context. It may mean un sueño “a dream” or sueño “sleep.” I know nothing about that—that’s Spanish grammar.

  REID: Are you alwa
ys sure yourself which of the two you mean when you use the word sueño?

  BORGES: Well, I suppose I go in for ambiguities as all poets do. In that case I am enriched by that particular poverty of the Spanish language.

  REID: I have one question which is very fundamental to—

  BORGES: Only one?

  REID: For the time being. One at a time.

  BORGES: Yes, one at a time. And the night is young.

  REID: And it begins—

  BORGES: And the night is always young!

  REID: Again, it begins with the phrase you once said, really crucially: “I don’t write fiction. I invent fact.”

  BORGES: I think that sentence is a gift from you and I thank you.

  REID: Shall we suppose for a moment that you once said that?

  BORGES: It’s good if I did.

  REID: Yes, I think it’s very likely that you did.

  BORGES: Who knows? I may be guilty of that sentence.

  REID: Guilty?

  BORGES: Well, not guilty, but I wonder if I can live up to that sentence.

  REID: What would you say is the difference? I don’t write fiction. I invent fact.

  BORGES: I suppose there is no difference between fact and fiction.

  REID: This is a fairly radical point of view to express this evening.

  BORGES: Well, solipsism or the past, what is the past but all memory? What is the past but memories that have become myth?

  REID: But at the same time you have often obfuscated fiction by pretending that it’s fact. As the people who look up the references in your stories know to their costs: two of them are true and the third they can’t find anywhere. Now, have you done that deliberately? You have been playing—

  BORGES: Yes, I did that deliberately when I was young. Now I am too old for those games. I want to tell simple, straightforward tales. I don’t go in for literary hoaxes. All that happened a long time ago, to somebody else, to somebody else who wrote “Pierre Menard” and called it Don Quixote.

  REID: The habit has been less easy to shed than you pretend. I think you still play around deliberately with ambiguities we all feel between fact and fiction. I mean, are we sure what is the difference?

  BORGES: We are not sure about anything. Why should we be sure about these particular points? We live in such a mysterious universe. Everything is a riddle.

  REID: It may be mysterious enough without some people making it more mysterious than it appears to be.

  BORGES: Of course I don’t really believe in free will. I have to play in that game. Playing that game and others is my destiny. I think of my destiny as being a literary destiny. Ever since I was a child I knew that would be my destiny. When I read biographies of Coleridge and De Quincey, of Milton also, they all knew that their destiny would be literary. And I knew that from the beginning. I knew that my destiny would be to read, to dream, well, perhaps to write, but that was not essential. And I always thought of paradise as a library, not as a garden. (You find that line in one of my poems.) That means that I was always dreaming.

  REID: You mean that’s a line from Poema de los dones, “Poem of the Gifts.”

  BORGES: Yes, that’s it.

  REID: You think of paradise as a library?

  BORGES: And when I attained that library I was blind.

  REID: That’s the irony of that poem.

  BORGES: Not the irony of that poem but “God’s irony.” “God’s irony.”*

  COLEMAN: May I ask you about genres? You have practiced so many genres. You are an all-round literary man. Poems, essays, and stories.

  BORGES: “All-round literary man.” That’s from Stevenson.

  COLEMAN: And I was wondering—

  BORGES: I love him. Go ahead.

  COLEMAN: Could you tell us why you love the work of Robert Louis Stevenson? It’s more than Treasure Island for you. Can you say why?

  BORGES: I don’t think Stevenson has to be explained. If you don’t sense Stevenson, then there is something wrong about you. I remember a line out of Angelus Silesius. I am translating his work with María Kodama. Angelus Silesius, the seventeenth-century German mystic wrote: Die Ros’ ist ohn’ warum,/ sie blühet weil sie blühet, “The rose has no why,/ she blooms as she blooms.” I suppose that Stevenson has no why either. Besides, why explain Stevenson? It’s enough for me to recall some lines of his. And then no explanation is needed:

  Under the wide and starry sky,

  Dig the grave and let me lie.

  Glad did I live and gladly die,

  And I laid me down with a will.*

  Well, that’s sufficient. If that doesn’t explain Stevenson to you, then nothing will. One of his best books is more or less unknown because he wrote it in collaboration with his stepson—the novel The Wrecker. And another work of his I greatly like is The Ebb Tide. He wrote that also in collaboration with Lloyd Osbourne.

  COLEMAN: It just occurred to me that many of your friends here might not also know of your intense admiration and love for Mark Twain.

  BORGES: The explanation is very simple. I have read Huckleberry Finn. And that should be sufficient, more than sufficient.

  COLEMAN: But could you speak of how North American literature has affected your own life as a writer?

  BORGES: I think that North American literature has affected the whole world, affected all literature. Literature would not be what it is today had it not been for two men, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman. And you can add Mark Twain, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Emily Dickinson, Hawthorne, and you can go on and on, and not least is Robert Frost. It has affected the whole world, or at least the whole literary one. You can’t think them away. They stand up still.

  COLEMAN: But what you say is manifestly untrue as it applies to Spanish literature and to Spanish-American literature. It hasn’t had that much effect upon—

  BORGES: It has. I venture to disagree with you. You can’t think of modernismo without Hugo, Verlaine, and not least Edgar Allan Poe. And Edgar Allan Poe came to us through France, although we are fellow Americans. I think Edgar Allan Poe cannot be thought away or argued away. You may like or dislike what he wrote, but his influence cannot be denied. He begat Baudelaire, who begat Mallarmé, and so on.

  COLEMAN: Everyone knows that you love detective stories…

  BORGES: Well, the genre was invented by Poe. He created the whole thing. He created a very strange character: the reader of detective stories. We also have been created by Edgar Allan Poe, that splendid dreamer, that sad dreamer, that tragic dreamer.

  COLEMAN: I started a question but thankfully I got a little off the track, but now I would like to go back to it…

  BORGES: I’m off the track all the time. That’s what you are here for.

  COLEMAN: People always say that there is not much of a difference when you practice poem, essay, and story, it’s one literature by Borges. My question is how the same impulse might result in a poem, or an essay or a story, or maybe all three.

  BORGES: I sense a plot. I see the beginning and the end. That plot may be the plot of a poem or of a sonnet. I think there is no essential difference. The essential difference lies in the reader, not in the writer. For example, if you see a page printed as prose, then you expect or fear information or argument. But if you see it printed as verse, then you expect, and maybe you get, emotion, passion, and so on. But I suppose they are essentially the same. Except that Stevenson thought the difference lay in the difficulty. There are many literatures that never attained prose. I don’t think the Anglo-Saxons attained prose, although they wrote very powerful poetry. Poetry always comes, at least as far as my historical knowledge goes, before prose. Now, according to Stevenson, the reason is the fact that once you have achieved a unit, let’s say a verse, then you merely have to repeat the pattern. That unit may be an alliterative verse as in the case of the Norsemen and of the Saxons, or it may be a rhymed verse, or it may be a question of long and short syllables, of hexameter. But once you have attained it then you merely have to
repeat it. But in the case of prose it has to be changed all the time, and it has to be changed in such a way as to make it pleasant to the reader. That is far more difficult.

  REID: If I may add to that, I have noticed in conversations with you over the years that you have infinitely more respect for poetry than you have for prose. You have a kind of imbued respect for poetry, as though it were something far superior to prose.

  BORGES: I suppose you’re right.

  REID: Nevertheless, in your practice it strikes me you don’t make much difference in what you bring off with prose and poetry.

  BORGES: Personally I think that my poetry, such as it is, is better than my prose. But my friends tell me that I’m wrong. If they are poets they tell me I am an intruder in poetry. If they write prose fiction they tell me I’m an intruder. I don’t know. Maybe—

  REID: I think you’ve made a mockery of the difference between prose and poetry.

  BORGES: Yes. I think there is no essential difference.

  REID: I don’t think so either.

  BORGES: I think we are both right. We should be very happy.

  REID: You always cite Stevenson, Chesterton, and Kipling, with occasional concessions to De Quincey and Sir Thomas Browne—

  BORGES: No, no. Not occasionally I hope.

  REID: Okay, okay.

  BORGES: And Dr. Johnson, thank you.

  REID: But the writer I think you are closest to in my mind is Coleridge.

  BORGES: Coleridge, yes.

  REID: Although you don’t write much or talk much about Coleridge, Coleridge is the writer you are the reincarnation of, it would seem to me. Do you feel that too?

  BORGES: I’m very thankful to you. I wish I were Coleridge. Yet Coleridge wrote but three poems, really. He wrote “Kubla Khan,” he wrote “Cristabel,” and “The Ancient Mariner.” And “Ode to Dejection” and that’s that. All the rest may safely be forgotten.