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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges

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BOOK: Jorge Luis Borges
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BORGES:
About that Saxon?

BURGIN:
Yes. It’s the same kind of idea. Which did you write first?

BORGES:
No, I think I wrote that parable, that story of the Saxon, first.

BURGIN:
So that was really the first time you wrote out the idea.

BORGES:
No, the first time I wrote it I attributed it to a bogus Uruguayan poet, Julio Hacolo—you’ll find it at the end of the
Obra poética
. That was a rough draft.

BURGIN:
Oh, and that preceded the parable and the long poem.

BORGES:
Yes. Somehow I knew that I had found something quite good, but at the same time I didn’t think anything could be made of it. So I thought, “I’ll jot this down, I can’t do anything with it beyond a few lines,” and I jotted it down, and some ten or fifteen years after I jotted it down, I came to the conclusion that something more could be done, and then I wrote the poem. Now when I published that very short fragment, nobody remarked on it, because they believed in that bogus book I attributed it to. After all, there was a very
good subject, waiting to be picked up by anybody. It was read by most of my friends, I mean by most of the literary men in Buenos Aires, and yet they never discovered the literary possibilities. And so I was given ten or fifteen years, and then I worked it out in a poem that became quite, well, notorious, let us say, or famous in a sense.

So I think those two poems are good. And then there’s another poem that I like and that no one seems to have remarked on, except one poet in Buenos Aires. No one seems to have read it, a poem called “Una rosa y Milton.” It’s a poem about the last rose that Milton had in his hand and then I think of Milton holding the rose up to his face, smelling the perfume, and of course he wouldn’t be able to tell whether the rose was white or red or yellow. I think that’s quite a good poem. Another poem about a blind poet. Homer and Milton. And then I think a poem about the sea is quite good, “El mar.”

BURGIN:
You mention Homer, and of course, Homer keeps cropping up in your writing. For example, you wrote a parable about him called “The Maker.”

BORGES:
I think that when I wrote that I felt that there was romantic content in the fact of his being aware of his blindness and, at the same time, aware of the fact that his
Iliad
and his
Odyssey
were coming to him, no?

BURGIN:
You often speak of a moment when people find out who they are.

BORGES:
Yes, that’s it, well, that would have been Homer’s moment. And then, also, I suppose I must have felt the same thing that I felt when I wrote that poem about Milton. I must have felt the fact that his blindness, in a sense, was a godsend. Because now, of course, that the world had left him, he was free to discover or to invent—both words mean the same thing—his own world, the world of the epic. I suppose those were the two ideas behind my mind, no? First the idea of Homer being aware of his blindness and at the same time thinking of it as a joy, no? And then the idea, also, that, well, perhaps you lose something but at the same time you get something else, and the something else that you get may be the mere sense of loss but at least something is given to you, no? So, maybe, if you’re interested in the parable, I suppose you will find behind the parable, or behind the fable, those three feelings.

BURGIN:
You really love Homer, don’t you?

BORGES:
No, I love
The Odyssey
, but I dislike
The Iliad
. In
The Iliad
, after all, the central character is a fool. I mean, you can’t admire a man like Achilles, no? A man who is sulking all the time, who is angry because people have been personally unjust to him, and who finally sends the body of the man he’s killed to his father. Of course, all those things are natural enough in those tales, but there’s nothing noble in
The Iliad …
Well, you may find, I think there may be two noble ideas in
The Iliad
. First, that Achilles is fighting to subdue a city which he’ll never enter, and that the Trojans are fighting
a hopeless battle because they know that ultimately the city will fall. So there is a kind of nobility, don’t you think so? But I wonder if Homer felt it in that way?

BURGIN:
If I might ask you about one more parable, “Parable of the Palace.”

BORGES:
Well, the “Parable of the Palace” is really the same parable, the same kind of parable as “The Yellow Rose” or “The Other Tiger.” It’s a parable about art existing in its own plane but not being given to deal with reality. As far as I can recall it, if the poem is perfect then there’s no need for the palace. I mean if art is perfect, then the world is superfluous. I think that should be the meaning, no? And besides, I think that the poet never can cope with reality. So I think of art and nature, well, nature and the world as being two different worlds. So I should say that the “Parable of the Palace” is really the same kind of thinking as you get in a very brief way in “The Yellow Rose” or perhaps in “The Other Tiger.” In “The Other Tiger” the subject is more the insufficiency of art, but I suppose they all boil down to the same thing, no? I mean you have the real tiger and “el otro tigre,” you have the real palace, and “el otro palacio,” they stand for the same thing—for a kind of discord, for the inability of art to cope with the world and, at the same time, the fact that though art cannot repeat nature and may not be a repetition of nature, yet it is justified in its own right.

 

Literature as pleasure;
The Maker;
the literature of literature; a change in direction;
Don Quixote
and Cervantes; Hiroshima; death and the problem of infinity; dissolving reality …

BURGIN:
You know, I was thinking of how, during all our talks, you have often emphasized enjoyment, that one should primarily enjoy literature. Do you think pleasure is the main purpose of literature, if it can be said to have a purpose?

BORGES:
Well, pleasure, I don’t know, but you should get a kick out of it, no?

BURGIN:
Yes.

BORGES:
Well, if you allow me to attempt slang, yes I think that should be so. You know I’m a professor of English and American literature and I tell my students that if you begin a book, if at the end of fifteen or twenty pages you feel that the book is a task for you, then lay that book and lay that author aside for a time because it won’t do you any good. For example, one of my favourite authors is De Quincey. Well, as he’s a rather slow-moving author, people somehow don’t like him. So I say, well, if you don’t like De Quincey then let him alone; my task is not to impose my likes or dislikes on you. What I
really want is that you should fall in love with American or English literature, and if you find your way to a few authors or a few authors find their way to you, then that’s as it should be. You don’t have to worry about dates. And I should advise you to read the book, to read the foreword if you care to, and then you might read an article or so in any old edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, because the new ones are no good, no? And then take any history of English literature, it might be Andrew Lang, it might be Saintsbury, though I’m not overfond of him, it might be Sampson, though he’s intruding his likes and dislikes, but I would say any of those three, though Andrew Lang stops at Swinburne, from Beowulf to Swinburne. Now as to American histories of literature, there’s a very amusing book by a man called Lewisohn.

BURGIN:
Ludwig Lewisohn?

BORGES:
Yes, but of course, his work is based on psychoanalysis and I wonder if you can psychoanalyse Edgar Allan Poe or Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jonathan Edwards, no? I think it’s rather late in the day. And if you were a contemporary, it would be far more difficult because you’d have too many facts about them. It’s a pity, no, that that whole book is based on what seems to me a wrong approach? And as I say, as to examinations, I won’t ask you the dates of an author because then you would ask me and then I would fail. But, of course, I think it’s all to the good that you should think of Dr. Johnson as belonging to the eighteenth century and of Milton belonging to the seventeenth, because if not, then you couldn’t
understand them. Now, as to those birth dates, that may or may not be important. As to the dates of their deaths, as they didn’t know them themselves, why should you know them? Why should you know more than the authors did? And as to articles, bibliographies and so on, you don’t have to worry about that. What you have to do is to read the authors. Then, as to histories of literature, they are all more or less copies of one another, with variation.

BURGIN:
If enjoyment is paramount, then what do you suppose it is that gives one a sense of enjoyment from a book?

BORGES:
There may be two opposite explanations to that. The individual is getting away from his personal circumstances and finding his way into another world, but at the same time, perhaps that other world interests him because it’s nearer his inner self than his circumstances. I mean, if I, suppose I take one of my favourite authors, Stevenson, if I were to read Stevenson now, I would feel that, as I was reading the book, I wouldn’t think of myself as being in England or in South America. I would think I was inside the book. And yet that book might be telling me a secret, or half-guessed-at things about myself. But, of course, those explanations go together, no? If you accept one, you don’t have to refuse the other.

BURGIN:
Of all the books you’ve published, do you have a favourite book?

BORGES:
Of all my books, yes. The book called
The Maker
,
El hacedor
. Yes, because it wrote itself. And my English translator, or my American translator, he wrote to me and said that there was no English word for “El hacedor.” And then I wrote him back, saying that “El hacedor” had been translated from the English “The Maker.” But, of course, all words in a foreign tongue have a certain distinction behind them, no? So that “El hacedor” meant more to him than “The Maker.” But when I used “El hacedor” for the poet, for Homer, I was merely translating the Old English or the Middle English word “maker.”

BURGIN:
Some people didn’t take you seriously when you said that
El hacedor
, translated back into English as
Dreamtigers
, would make all your other books unnecessary. But as I read it, I think more and more that perhaps it was more than a joke on your part—saying that.

BORGES:
Well, I know, because the book seems to be slight, but it isn’t really slight.

BURGIN:
It has all your essential themes and motifs and, more important, your voice.

BORGES:
The book may be a slight book, but it isn’t a slight book to me, because when I go back to that book, I find that I’ve said the things I had to say or that I worked out the images I had to work out. And besides, the book has found some favour with the public. It’s not a boring book. In fact, it couldn’t be because it’s so short.

BURGIN:
When were the poems that were in that collection written?

BORGES:
They were written all through my life. My editor told me, “We want a new book from you; there should be a market for that book.” And I said, “I haven’t any book.” And then my editor said to me, “Oh yes, you have. If you go through your shelves or drawers you’ll find odds and ends. Maybe a book can be evolved from them.” So I think I remember it was a rainy Sunday in Buenos Aires and I had nothing whatever to do because, well, there was an appointment that had failed. I had my sight, I wasn’t blind, so I thought, I’ll look over my papers. Maybe I’ll find something in my drawers. I found cuttings, old magazines, and then I found that there was the book all ready for me.

BURGIN:
Of pieces that you had thought were insignificant before?

BORGES:
Yes, and I took them to the editor and said, “I want you to tell me honestly—you don’t have to answer me today or next week—whether you think this book, this kind of crazy-quilt patchwork, can be published; you take ten days or a fortnight or a month over it, and look it over carefully because I don’t want you to be spending money on a book that nobody will buy or that may find some very hard critics.” And then he answered me within a week, saying “Yes.”

BURGIN:
I wanted to ask you about one of your parables in
El hacedor
, your parable about Cervantes.

BORGES:
Ah, yes! I’m very interested in Cervantes. I think—I wonder how you feel about it—when I think of English literature I’m attracted to it, among many other things, because when I’m thinking of it, I’m thinking about men more than about books. I think that English literature, like England, is very personal. For example, if I think of Sir Thomas Browne or Doctor Johnson, George Bernard Shaw or John Bunyan, or the men who wrote the Saxon Elegies. I think of them as
men
even as I might think of the many characters in Dickens or in Shakespeare. While I get the sense, of course I may be wrong, I get the sense that when I’m thinking about Spanish literature, I’m thinking about books rather than about men. Really, because of my ignorance. I’m attracted to Cervantes even as I’m attracted to Dickens and Shaw—because I can imagine him. But in the case of other writers, I can hardly imagine them, I think of their books. I wonder, for example, had I the chance to talk to Lope de Vega, I wonder what we would have spoken about.

BURGIN:
He wrote eighteen hundred plays, or something like that.

BORGES:
Yes, I would think of his plays rather. While if somebody said, “You’ll be having supper with Sir Thomas Browne, or even with Doctor Johnson”—of course, he would have been full of sweeping statements—I would have said, “I’ll enjoy this evening; I can imagine it.” Well, Cervantes is one of the few Spanish authors I can imagine. I know, more or less, what a chat with him would be. I know, for example, how he might apologize for some of the things he’s written. How he
wouldn’t take himself too seriously. I’m sure of it, even as in the case of Samuel Butler or Wells, so one of the reasons why I feel attracted to Cervantes is that I think of him not only as a writer, one of the greatest of novelists, but also as a man. And as Whitman says, “Camerado, this is no book. Who touches this touches a man.” But I hardly ever get that feeling with Spanish books, or with Italian books. But I get that feeling, I get it all the time, when I’m reading American or English literature.

BOOK: Jorge Luis Borges
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