Jorge Luis Borges (13 page)

CAPE:
Snyder’s trying to achieve a direct transfer of his state of mind to the reader with as little interference as possible from reasoning. He’s going for the direct transfer of sensation. Does this seem a little extreme for you?

BORGES:
No, but he seems to be a very cautious poet. Where I’m really old and innocent. I just ramble on, try to find my way. People tell me, for example, what message I have. I’m afraid I haven’t any. Well, here’s fable, what’s the moral? I’m afraid I don’t know. I’m merely a dreamer, and then a writer, and my happiest moments are when I’m a reader.

CAPE:
Do you think of words as having effects that are inherent in the word or in the images they carry?

BORGES:
Well, yes, for example, if you attempt a sonnet, then, at least in Spanish, you have to use certain words. There’s only a few rhymes. And those of course may be used as metaphors, peculiar metaphors, since you have to stick to them. I would even venture to say—this of course is a
sweeping statement—but perhaps the word
moon
in English stems from something different than the word
luna
in Latin or Spanish. The
moon
, the word
moon
, is a lingering sound.
Moon
is a beautiful word. The French word is also beautiful:
lune
. But in Old English the word was
mona
. The word isn’t beautiful at all, two syllables. And then the Greek is worse. We have
celena
, three syllables. But the word
moon
is a beautiful word. That sound is not found, let’s say in Spanish.
The moon
. I can linger in words. Words inspire you. Words have a life of their own.

CAPE:
The word’s life of its own, does that seem more important than the meaning that it gives in a particular context?

BORGES:
I think that the meanings are more or less irrelevant. What is important, or the two important facts I should say, are emotion, and then words arising from emotion. I don’t think you can write in an emotionless way. If you attempt it, the result is artificial. I don’t like that kind of writing. I think that if a poem is really great, you should think of it as having written itself despite the author. It should flow.

CAPE:
Could one set of myths be replaced by another when moving from one poet to another and still get the same poetic effect?

BORGES:
I suppose every poet has his own private mythology. Maybe he’s unaware of it. People tell me that I have evolved a private mythology of tigers, of blades, of labyrinths, and I’m
unaware of the fact this is so. My readers are finding it all the time. But I think perhaps that is the duty of a poet. When I think of America, I always tend to think in terms of Walt Whitman. The word
Manhattan
was invented for him, no?

CAPE:
An image of a healthy America?

BORGES:
Well, yes. At the same time, Walt Whitman himself was a myth, a myth of a man who wrote, a very unfortunate man, very lonely, and yet he made of himself a rather splendid vagabond. I have pointed out that Whitman is perhaps the only writer on earth who has managed to create a mythological person of himself and one of the three persons of the Trinity is the reader, because when you read Walt Whitman, you are Walt Whitman. Very strange that he did that, the only person on earth. Of course, America has produced writers important all over the world. Especially New England. You have given the world men that cannot be thought away. For example, all contemporary literature could not be what it is had it not been for Poe, for Whitman, and perhaps Melville and Henry James. But South America, we have many things important to us and Spain, but not to the rest of the world. I do think that Spanish literature began by being very fine. And then somewhere, and already with such writers as Quevado and Gongora, you feel something has stiffened; the language doesn’t flow as it did.

BOURNE:
Does this hold for the twentieth century? There’s Lorca, for example.

BORGES:
But I’m not fond of Lorca. Well, you see, this is a shortcoming of mine, I dislike visual poetry. He is visual all the time, and he goes in for fancy metaphors. But, of course, I know he’s very respected. I knew him personally. He lived a year in New York. He didn’t learn a word of English after a year in New York. Very strange. I met him only once in Buenos Aires. And then, it was a lucky thing for him to be executed. Best thing to happen for a poet. A fine death, no? An impressive death. And then Antonio Machado wrote that beautiful poem about him.

CAPE:
The Hopi Indians are used as an example many times, because of the nature of their language, of how language and vocabulary thought—

BORGES:
I know very little about it. I was told of the Pampas Indians by my grandmother. She lived all of her life in Junín; that was on the western end of civilization. She told me as a fact that their arithmetic went thus. She held up a hand and said, “I’ll teach you the Pampas Indians’ mathematics.” “I won’t understand.” “Yes,” she said, “you will. Look at my hands: one, two, three, four, many.” So, infinity went on her thumb. I have noticed, in what literary men call the
Pampas
, that the people have but little notion of distance. They don’t think in terms of miles, of leagues.

BOURNE:
A friend of mine who comes from Kentucky tells me that they talk of distance there as one mountain, two mountains away.

BORGES:
Oh, really? How strange.

CAPE:
Does changing from Spanish to English to German or Old English seem to offer you different means of viewing the world?

BORGES:
I don’t think languages are essentially synonymous. In Spanish it is very difficult to make things flow, because words are over-long. But in English, you have light words. For example, if you say
slowly, quickly
, in English, what you hear is the meaningful part of the word:
slow-ly, quick-ly
. You hear
slow
and
quick
. But in Spanish you say
lentamente, ràpidamente
, and what you hear is the
-mente
. That is gratis, so to say. A friend of mine translated Shakespeare’s sonnets into Spanish. I said that he needed two Spanish sonnets to a single English one, since English words are short and to the point, but Spanish words are over-long. And English also has a physical quality to it. Well, in English, you can say:
to explain away
. In Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West,” an English officer is pursuing an Afghan horse thief. They’re both on horseback. And Kipling writes: “They have ridden the low moon out of the sky. / Their hooves drum up the dawn.” Now you can’t
ride the low moon out of the sky
in Spanish, and you can’t
drum up the dawn
. It can’t be done. Even such simple sentences as
he fell down
or
he picked himself up
, you can’t do in Spanish. You have to say
he got up the best he could
or some lame paraphrase. But in English you can do much with verbs and positions. You can write:
dream away your life; live up to; something you have to live down
. Those things are impossible
in Spanish. They cannot be done. Then you have compound words. For example you have
wordsmith
. It would be in Spanish
un herrero de palabras
, rather stilted, rather uncouth. But it can be done in German, you can make up words all the time, but not in English. You are not allowed the freedom that the Anglo-Saxons had. For example, you have
sigefolc
, or
victorious people
. Now in Old English, you don’t think of these words as being artificial, but in Spanish it can’t be done. But of course, you have what I think is beautiful in Spanish: the sounds are very clear. But in English you have lost your open vowels.

CAPE:
What was it that attracted you to Anglo-Saxon poetry originally?

BORGES:
Well, I lost my eyesight for reading purposes when I was made chief librarian for the Argentine National Library. I said, I won’t bow down and allow self-pity. I will attempt something else. And then, I remember, I had at home
Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader
and
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
. And I said, We’ll attempt Anglo-Saxon. And then I began; I studied through
Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader
. And then I fell in love with it through two words. Those two words, I can still recall them, those words were the name of London,
Lundenburh
; and then Rome,
Romeburh
. And now I’m attempting Old Norse, which was a finer literature than Old English.

CAPE:
How would you describe a twentieth-century mythology for writers?

BOURNE:
That’s a big question!

BORGES:
I don’t think it should be done consciously. You don’t have to try to be contemporary. You are already contemporary. What one has in mythology is being evolved all the time. Personally, I think I can do with Greek and Old Norse mythology. For example, I don’t think I stand in need of planes or of railways or of cars.

CHARLES SILVER:
I wondered if there were any particular mystical or religious readings you’ve done that have influenced you?

BORGES:
Yes, I have done some reading, of course, in English and in German, of the Sufis. And then, I think, before I die, I’ll do my best to write a book on Swedenborg the mystic. And Blake also was a mystic. But I dislike Blake’s mythology. It seems very artificial.

BOURNE:
You said, “When one reads Whitman, one is Whitman,” and I was wondering, when you translated Kafka did you feel at any time that you were Kafka in any sense?

BORGES:
Well, I felt that I owed so much to Kafka that I really didn’t need to exist. But, really, I am merely a word for Chesterton, for Kafka, and Sir Thomas Browne—I love him. I translated him into seventeenth-century Spanish and it worked very well. We took a chapter out of
Urne Buriall
and
we did that into Quevado’s Spanish and it went very well—the same period, the same idea of writing Latin in a different language, writing Latin in English, writing Latin in Spanish.

BOURNE:
You were the first to translate Kafka into Spanish. Did you feel a sense of mission while you were translating him?

BORGES:
No, that was when I translated Walt Whitman’s
Song of Myself
. “What I’m doing is very important,” I said to myself. Of course I know Whitman by heart.

BOURNE:
Did you feel that in any of your translations that by doing them you’d help the understanding and appreciation of your own work, did they ever seem to justify what you yourself had done?

BORGES:
No, I never think of my own work …

BOURNE:
When you translate …

BORGES:
No, at home, come visit in Buenos Aires, I’ll show you my library, you won’t find a single book of mine. I’m very sure of this—I choose my books. Who am I to find my way into the neighborhood of Sir Thomas Browne, or of Emerson. I’m nobody.

BOURNE:
So Borges the writer and Borges the translator are completely separate?

BORGES:
Yes, they are. When I translate, I try not to intrude. I try to do a fair translation of some kind, and to be a poet also.

BOURNE:
You said that you don’t ever try to put any meaning into your works.

BORGES:
Well, you see, I think of myself as being an ethical man, but I don’t try to teach ethics. I have no message. I know little about contemporary life. I don’t read a newspaper. I dislike politics and politicians. I belong to no party whatever. My private life is a private life. I try to avoid photography and publicity. My father had the same idea. He said to me, “I want to be Wells’s Invisible Man.” He was quite proud of it. In Rio de Janeiro, there, nobody knew my name. I did feel invisible there. And somehow, publicity has found me. What can I do about it? I don’t look for it. It has found me. Of course, one lives to be eighty, one is found out, one is detected.

BOURNE:
About meaning in your work or the absence of meaning in it—in Kafka’s work there is guilt running all the way through, and in your writing everything’s beyond guilt.

BORGES:
Yes, that’s true. Kafka had the sense of guilt. I don’t think I have because I don’t believe in free will. Because what I have done has been done, well, for me or through me. But I haven’t done it really. But I don’t believe in free will, I can’t feel guilty.

BOURNE:
Could this be tied in then with you saying that there is only a finite combination of elements and so actually the conception of ideas is only a rediscovery of the past?

BORGES:
Yes, I suppose it is. I suppose that each generation has to rewrite the books of the past and do it in a slightly different way. When I write a poem, that one has already been written down any amount of times, but I have to rediscover it. That’s my moral duty. I suppose we all attempt very slight variations, but the language itself can hardly be changed. Joyce, of course, tried to do it. But he failed, though he wrote some beautiful lines.

BOURNE:
Would you say then that all of these poems that have been rewritten are the coming back upon the same wall in the labyrinth?

BORGES:
Yes, I would. That’s a good metaphor, yes. Of course it would be.

BOURNE:
Can you give us some guidelines as to when you think using local color is legitimate and when it is not?

BORGES:
I think, if you can do it in an unobtrusive way, it is all for the good. But if you stress it, the whole thing is artificial. But it should be used, I mean, it’s not forbidden. But you don’t have to stress it. We have evolved a kind of slang in Buenos Aires. Writers are, well, abusing it, over-using it. But
the people themselves have little use for it. They may say a word in slang every twenty minutes or so, but nobody tries to talk slang all the time.