BARNSTONE: What specifically in the prosody of Whitman do you think the other writers imitated? Or if not prosody, what aspect of Whitman appealed to other writers?
BORGES: Of course Whitman was one of the many inventors of free verse, perhaps the most conspicuous. You read the psalms and you read Walt Whitman. You can see that of course he had read the psalms, but the music is different. Every poet evolves a music of his own, and almost a language of his own. After a great poet has passed through a language, then the language is no longer the same. Something has changed. And in the case of Walt Whitman, it did change. Now, Whitman went in for the vernacular. And at the same time, one feels that he did not know how to use it very well. And you find very ugly lines now and then. For example: “Americanos! conquerers! marches humanitarian!”* That is highly offensive, and he could write things like that. But those who mastered the vernacular used it after him. I mean two such diverse men as Mark Twain and Sandburg. They used the vernacular easily, while in the case of Walt Whitman, he rather floundered. He used French words, Spanish words, not too happily. At the same time I know that when I discovered Walt Whitman I was overwhelmed. I felt of him as the only poet. I had the same feeling afterwards with Kipling, I felt it with De Quincey, who wrote poetry in prose, and they were very different poets. But I thought of him at the time as being the poet, the man who had found the right way, the way in which poetry should be written. Of course there are many ways of writing poetry, all of them different from each other.
BARNSTONE: Would you be willing to comment on the poem you wrote about Whitman?
BORGES: Well, I don’t recall the poem. Go ahead, I am very curious. Why don’t you read it in the English translation where it will be greatly bettered? I know you will be very disappointed. That poem is no good.
BARNSTONE:
CAMDEN 1892
The smell of coffee and of newspapers.
Sunday and its boredom. It is morning.
Some allegorical verses are adorning
The skimmed over page: the vain pentameters
Of a happy colleague. The old man lies
Stretched out and white in his respectable
Poor man’s room. Lazily he fills
The weary mirror with his gaze. His eyes
See a face. He thinks, now unsurprised: that face
Is me. With fumbling hand he reaches out
To touch the tangled beard and ravaged mouth.
The end is not far off. His voice declares:
I am almost gone, and yet my verses scan
Life and its splendor. I was Walt Whitman.*
BORGES: It’s quite good, eh? Not too good but quite good, as far as it goes. That’s the human Whitman only, not the myth.
BARNSTONE: Whitman thought of himself as a prophetic figure, writing a kind of Bible.
BORGES: Well, he did!
BARNSTONE: Frequently in your stories and poems, you don’t write a Bible, but you aspire to secrets, to enigmas, to a single word.
BORGES: I am constantly being baffled by things.
BARNSTONE: You go different routes. Your work gets simpler and simpler, fewer and fewer words.
BORGES: Yes, I agree.
BARNSTONE: If Whitman could throw in an adjective, he did so.
BORGES: He did only too often, I should say.
BARNSTONE: His work might have been called Broad Leaves of Grass, because he usually added words to intensify, often not with the best results. What do you think of the fact that this poet, who is marvelous and uneven, manages—
BORGES: But he is marvelous and uneven. Silvina Ocampo said to me that a poet stood in need of bad verses. If not, the others would not stand out. We were commenting on Shakespeare. I said he has many bad verses. And she said: “That’s all to the good. A poet should have bad verses.” Only secondary poets write only good verses. Out of politeness you should have bad verses.
BARNSTONE: Eliot said there should be weaker words among the stronger ones so that the lines do not become crabbed. But among the hack works which you claim you have done was to translate a book of Walt Whitman’s poetry. You say that Walt Whitman was your poet and meant so very much to you. What did he teach you?
BORGES: He taught me to be straightforward. That was the one lesson I learned from him. But teaching, after all, is not important. The fact is that I was overwhelmed by emotion, that I knew pages and pages of his work by heart, that I kept on saying them to myself in the day and in the night. I think that what’s important is the way a man is moved when he reads poetry. If a man doesn’t feel poetry physically, then he doesn’t feel poetry at all. He had better become a professor or a critic. I think of poetry as being a very personal and a very important experience. Either you feel it or you don’t. If you feel it, you don’t have to explain it.
BARNSTONE: I am listening so intently that it wipes out further thoughts and questions. I stand in need of Edgar Allan Poe. Would you speak now about Poe?
BORGES: Every writer is undertaking two quite different works at the same time. One is the particular line he is writing, the particular story he is telling, the particular fable that came to him in a dream, and the other is the image he creates of himself. Perhaps the second task that goes on all throughout life is the most important. In the case of Poe, I think that our image of Poe is more important than any of the lines on the pages that he wrote. We think of Poe as we may think of a character in fiction. He is as vivid to us as Macbeth or Hamlet. And creating a very vivid image and leaving that to the memory of the world is a very important task. As to the verses of Edgar Allan Poe, I know some of them by heart, and I think them lovely, and others are not so good. For example, I will begin by verses I learned:
Was it not Fate that, on this July midnight—
Was it not Fate (whose name is also Sorrow)
That bade me pause before the garden-gate,
To breathe the incense of those slumbering roses?
(Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!)*
And also this very strange line from his first book, Al Aaraaf. I am not sure. My erudition is but dim:
The eternal voice of God is passing by
And the red winds are withering in the sky!†
And at the same time, when I think of the raven, I think of it as a stuffed raven. I cannot take it seriously! When the raven speaks, “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore,’ ” that seems to me to be ineffective. Rossetti, who had read “The Raven” of course, did it better. He was inspired by Poe, but he wrote thus:
Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
I am also called No-More, Too-late, Farewell…. *
There is also that wonderful word invented by Bishop Wilkins in the seventeenth century, a word so fine that no poet has ever dared to use it. He invented two words. One, everness, and I was bold enough to use that as the title for a sonnet of mine, “Everness.” Because everness is better than eternity. It goes with the German Ewigkeit. Then another word like doom, a word far better than that line I like so much in Dante: Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate “Abandon all hope you who enter here.” That single word invented, given to the English language by Bishop Wilkins and never used because all those poets have stood in fear of it, that terrible, that beautiful, word is neverness. That could be done into German perhaps as Nimmerkeit. It can’t be done into Spanish, I know. You see, everness is a fine word and neverness is a desperate word. Edgar Allan Poe wrote many verses and I don’t think much of them, but there is one story of his that stands out, and that story is “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.” You have Arthur and Edgar, both Saxon names, then Gordon and Allan, both Scottish. Then Pym goes for Poe. Now the first chapters of that long tale are not too memorable, I should say. But the last chapters are a nightmare. And they are, strangely enough, a nightmare of whiteness, of white being thought of as being terrible. Of course Herman Melville had read “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” and he wrote Moby Dick, or the White Whale. There he used the same idea,
the idea of white, not scarlet or black, as being the most terrible of colors. You find that both books, Moby Dick and “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” are a nightmare of whiteness.
And of course Edgar Allan Poe created a genre. He created a detective genre. It seems to me that everything that has been done afterwards, all those things had already been thought out by Poe. You remember “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” “The Murders of Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The Gold Bug.” Then you have all those many fine books that came afterwards. After all, Sherlock Holmes and Watson are but Poe and his friend, the Chevalier Auguste Dupin. Poe thought of many things. He thought that detective novels were artificial, so he did not seek a close reality. He placed them in France. His detective is a French detective, because he knew that it would be easier to deal with Paris—I don’t think he knew Paris—the French—though he hardly knew them—than to write stories about contemporary happenings in New York. He was quite aware that detective fiction is a form of fantastic fiction. He invented all the conventions. He also invented something else. He invented the reader of the detective story. That is to say, when we read any detective story, when we read, for example, Eden Phillpotts, or Ellery Queen, or Nicholas Blake, we are really being created by Edgar Allan Poe. He created a new type of reader. That of course has made for thousands of books all over the world. I have attempted the genre myself, writing detective stories, but I knew all the time that real writer was Edgar Allan Poe. So he has given us many things. He also gave us an idea, which I think is mistaken, but is very interesting: the idea that poetry can be made through reasoning. I suppose you remember what he wrote about “The Raven.” He said that when he began he needed a word with an o and an r. That gave him nevermore. Then he had the problem of why in the world it should be repeated at the end of every stanza, because he thought in terms of ending every stanza with the same word. He said: Why should a reasonable being keep on saying nevermore? Then he thought of an unreasonable being—and at first he thought of a parrot. But of course a parrot is green and would do him no good. Then he thought of a raven. A raven’s black. That’s the right color. Then the black had to stand out, so he thought of marble, and that gave him the bust of Pallas, and so on. So through a link of reasoning he came to the poem “The Raven.” He said the poem should not be too long since, if it is read at two sittings, then attention dissolves, and it cannot be followed. It cannot be too short either, because a short poem would not be intense. So he said to himself, I will write a poem of a hundred lines. In fact, he wrote a hundred and seven or ninety-seven, or whatever it may be. He also thought: What is the most tragic subject on earth? And he immediately answered: The most tragic subject on earth is the death of a beautiful woman. And who can lament her death best? Of course he thought her lover. That gave him the lover and the death of a perfect woman. But he thought that poetry could not happen in too wide a scope, so he needed a closed room. Then he thought of a library, and that of course would be the right place for the bust of Pallas. Then there should be a contrast. Since the raven had to enter into the poem, he would have to be driven in by the stormy night. Thus, by a link of reason, he went on to write down his poem. I suppose this is merely a hoax. Poe was very fond of hoaxes. I don’t think anybody could write a poem in that way. But let us suppose that we accept the first of his arguments. Well, he might have argued: I need an unreasonable being, let’s say, a madman. But no, he chose a bird, a raven. From my own poor experience, I know that poems do not get written in that way, and Poe wrote much that were poems according to that system. But I think of writing poetry and of reasoning as being essentially different. I should say there are two ways of thinking. One is the argument and the other is the myth. The Greeks could do both things at the same time. In, for example, that last conversation of Socrates before he drinks the hemlock, you find reason and myth wound together. But today it seems we have lost that capacity. We are either using arguments or we are using metaphors or images or fables. I suppose the real way of writing poetry is to let yourself be passive to dream. You do not try to reason it out. Of course you will reason out the details, the meter, the patterns of rhymes you will follow, the cadences, but as to the rest, it is given to you in the form of myths. Now all this comes out of our image of Edgar Allan Poe. And it is important that I should think of him as being unhappy. Unhappiness is part of that image, as much as unhappiness is part of the image of an old character, Hamlet. And were I to choose from the works of Poe, I suppose I would choose “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.” But why choose? Why not have all the stories? Why not have, for example, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Gold Bug.” All those stories are quite different from each other, and yet in all of them we hear the voice of Poe, and we are still hearing it at this moment.
BARNSTONE: One of Whitman’s myths was that he was dealing with the common man and woman, that he was dealing with vernacular speech, with historical events such as the Civil War, with the death of Lincoln, which he celebrated in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” another historical event. In your own writing, you have this aspect of dealing with the vernacular, with hooligans, with rough people, with death, ordinary life.
BORGES: Well, those are literary tricks.
BARNSTONE: Are not the literary tricks of the ordinary man, meaning what you have in common with Whitman, complemented by some other aspects of Poe, that is, the nightmare, the dream, the invention, the imagination, the erudition, sometimes sham, but there, sometimes the spoofing at erudition, the hoax, are you in part Poe and Whitman?
BORGES: I am indebted to both of them, as all contemporary poets are, and as all contemporary poets should be. As to nightmare and Poe, it’s very strange. I have read many books of psychology, and little is said of the nightmare, and yet the nightmare stands apart. In Spanish the word for it is quite ugly, pesadilla, it can hardly be used. In Greek they have a fine word, ephialtēs, standing for the demon of the night. Now, I have a nightmare every other night. I am often haunted by nightmare. And I feel that were I a theologian—happily I am not—I might find an argument in favor of hell. It is very common to be unhappy, but when we are unhappy, we do not get the nightmare touch, the uncanny touch, the eerie touch. That is given us by the nightmare itself. The nightmare has a peculiar horror to it. The nightmare, that tiger of the dream. It has a peculiar horror that has nothing to do with things that happen to us in waking life. And that horror might be a foretaste of hell. I don’t believe in hell, of course, but there is something very strange about the nightmare, and nobody seems to have noticed that. I have read many books on dreams—Havelock Ellis, for example. But I have never found any reference to that uncanny and very strange taste of the nightmare. Yet there it is, and it may be a gift, for all we know. I have been given plots for stories in nightmares, and I know them only too well, I have them very often and they always follow the same pattern. I have the nightmare of the labyrinth. I always begin by being at some particular place in Buenos Aires. Now that place may be a street corner I know well. It may be, for example, Venezuela or Perú or Arenaldes, Esmeralda. I know that is the place, but it is quite different. In nightmare what I see is actually marshes, mountains, hills, sometimes cattle and horses. But I know that I am on that particular street in Buenos Aires, which is quite unlike what I see, and I know that I have to find my way home and that I won’t. And then I know that this is the nightmare of the labyrinth. Because I keep on moving and coming back to the same place over and over again, to the same room over and over again. One of the nightmares. The other is the nightmare of the mirror. I see myself looking up, and then I see somebody I don’t know, someone unknown to me, and I know that I am that being, and when that happens I awake and I am trembling all over. So my nightmares always follow the same pattern. But we seem to be straying farther from Poe.
BARNSTONE: I think we have strayed from Poe because you have strayed into that strange notion of reality, meani
ng dream and nightmare, which is so characteristic of your work and Poe’s work.
BORGES: Poe’s work of course and also of idealism. As to thinking of the world as unreal I am always thinking of it and am always surprised by the world, by the things that are happening to me. For example, last year I was eighty, and I thought nothing can happen to me. Then after that I underwent a successful but very painful operation. After that I went on a wonderful trip to Japan, a country I now greatly love and had not known before, and now strangely enough, here I am in Indiana, talking to you. All those things the future had in store for me, all those gifts, and I was quite unaware of it. And now it has come. And I keep on expecting more gifts from the future. Since the one thing we know about the future is that it will be quite unlike the present. People only think of the future in terms of the twentieth century magnified and distorted. But I know firstly that there will be many futures, and secondly that things that we think of as being important will be frivolous and irrelevant in the future. For example, men will not be politically minded, men will no longer be equal—it is an illusion—men will not think in terms of circumstances, of success, of failure. I expect a quite different world, and many different worlds. Not the brave new world of Huxley, which is merely a transformation of Hollywood. I know that many futures are about to come. Why speak of the future? That has no meaning.
BARNSTONE: I wonder whether we could finish our talk by your saying something about Robert Frost. Perhaps you remember by heart his poem “Acquainted with the Night”?
Borges at Eighty: Conversations Page 16
