Slow in my shadow, with my hand I explore
My invisible features…
I’ve lost no more
Than just the useless surfaces of things.
This consolation is of great import,
A comfort had by Milton. I resort
To letters and the rose—my wonderings.
I think if I could see my face I’d soon
Know who I am on this rare afternoon.
In his last decades, Borges became the itinerant sage. He went from Izumo in Japan to the Minotaur’s labyrinth in Crete, floated in a balloon over the Napa Valley and traveled to Santa Sophia’s gold domes in Istanbul. In all his voyages and in his charlas, Borges developed a special oral literature for listeners everywhere. The blind man walking slowly with a cane, seemed to be in a world of his own, but once he began to speak, he was, like Mark Twain a century earlier, the speaker of his age.
There is a well-known ancient tradition of the sage whose work is exclusively spoken. Among them are the Buddha, Jesus, Diogenes, and the peripatetic philosophers of the Lyceum, those figures who not only didn’t care to limit their thoughts by fixing them on a page but wished to avoid the danger of the word becoming doctrine. So Plato gave spontaneous orality to his books by framing them in Socratic dialogues. The former wrestler and philosopher noted that thought is movement and cannot be fixed any more than ink on an ocean wave. Our record of most sages comes to us from chance anonymous scribes who happened to record them in their time.
The Chinese Daoist Laozi, who may actually have been three people or simply a tradition of quietism, is said to have ridden off one day on a water buffalo into the desert, beyond the realm of civilization, where he composed his poems and parables. The Buddha left his palace and went to the countryside to meditate and dictate his verse philosophy. Borges continued to dictate poems, parables, and some essays and stories until the end, but increasingly his new medium was the charla, the modern dialectic. In those wordsmith dialogues with his questioning colleagues and audiences, he created a public testament for our time, not different in quality, intensity and range from personal talk with friends, which during most of his adult years had been his Dao, his way of sharing the unwritten word.
In walks, shared meals, and talks, there remains the blind man’s voice awake or dreaming as in Calderon de la Barca’s La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream). His voice equates the universe with a word whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. It deciphers the alphabet of time. It despairs. It leaps fantastically over walls. The voice embraces the other. The voice of the blind man is the essential Borges. Those who have heard him or read him remain affected for life.
WILLIS BARNSTONE
OAKLAND, 2013
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
JAIME ALAZRAKI, Professor of Spanish, Harvard University, is the author of numerous books of criticism, including The Narrative Prose of Jorge Luis Borges and Versions, Inversions, Reversions: The Mirror as a Structural Model in the Stories of Borges.
LUIS BELTRÁN, Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature, Indiana University, has written several volumes of poetry, the novel The Fruit of Her Womb, and critical books on Federico García Lorca and Juan Ruiz’ The Book of Good Love.
KENNETH BRECHER, Professor of Physics, Boston University, shares with Borges an interest in paradoxes and time. His published works in astrophysics include the book Astronomy and the Ancients.
DICK CAVETT, comedy writer, actor, and television personality, was the host of the interview program “The Dick Cavett Show,” aired on PBS.
ALBERTO COFFA, Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University, was the author of numerous articles, including a philosophical study of Borges’ use of time.
JOHN COLEMAN was Chairman of the Department of Spanish, New York University, and the author of Notes on Borges and American Literature and other books.
ROGER CUNNINGHAM received the Ph.D. degree in comparative literature from Indiana University in 1978.
ROBERT DUNN was Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University at the time of Borges’ 1976 visit to Indiana.
MIGUEL ENGUÍDANOS, Professor of Spanish, Indiana University, edited Jorge Luis Borges: His Best Pages.
ALASTAIR REID, distinguished essayist, poet, and Contributing Editor of The New Yorker, has translated many Spanish works, including Borges’ Gold of the Tigers.
MARGERY RESNICK is Chairwoman of Foreign Languages and Literature, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and author of The Broken Rhythm: The Poems of Pedro Garfias and several articles. She is the editor of Women Writers in Translation: An Annotated Bibliography, 1945–1982.
The Editor
WILLIS BARNSTONE, poet, translator, Biblical scholar, essayist, and artist, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Indiana University. His recent books include Life Watch (poems), Café de l’Aube a Paris, The Gnostic Bible, The Restored New Testament, and ABC of Translation. His Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (bilingual) was a Lannan Literary Selection in 1993.
Errata
PAGE 49, LINE 26. For “Sergeant Rolles,” read “Sergeant Parolles.” The quote is from All’s Well That Ends Well.
PAGE 54, LINE 7. For “Federico Riña,” read “Max Henriquez Ureña”.
PAGE 54, LINE 20. The quote should read: “Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly? / Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 8.)
Copyright © 1982 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved.
Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine,
radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899–1986.
[Interviews. Selections]
Borges at eighty : conversations / edited, with photographs, by Willis Barnstone.
pages cm
Previously published: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1982.
eISBN 978-0-8112-2324-9
1. Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899–1986—Interviews. 2. Authors, Argentine—20th century—Interviews. I. Barnstone, Willis, 1927– editor of compilation. II. Title.
PQ7797.B635Z46 2013
868’.6209—dc23
2013010847
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
Borges at Eighty: Conversations Page 20
