Jorge Luis Borges (14 page)

BOURNE:
Are there any North American writers that you felt conveyed this local color to you effectively as an outsider to that culture?

BORGES:
Yes, I think that Mark Twain gave me a lot. And then, I wonder if Ring Lardner gave me something else also. You think of him as being very, very American, no?

BOURNE:
And urban …

BORGES:
More urban, yes. And then, what other writers? Of course, I have read Bret Harte. I think that Faulkner was a very great writer—I dislike Hemingway, by the way—but Faulkner was a great writer, despite, well, telling a story the wrong way and mixing up the chronology.

BOURNE:
You translated Faulkner’s
Wild Palms
.

BORGES:
Yes, but I’m not too fond of that book. I think that
Light in August
is far better. And that book that he despised,
Sanctuary
, is a very striking book also. That was the first Faulkner I read, and went onto others. I read his poetry also.

BOURNE:
When you were translating Faulkner and his use
of local color, how did you deal with it, did you stick with straight Spanish or did you try to put it into a type of local Spanish?

BORGES:
No, I think that if one has to translate slang one should translate it into straight Spanish, because you’re not … you get a different kind of local color. For example, we have a translation of a poem of ours called “El gaucho, Martín Fierro.” Now, it has been done into cowboy English. That is wrong, I should say, because you think of cowboys and not of gauchos. I would translate “Martín Fierro,” into as pure an English as I could get. Because though the cowboy and the gaucho may be the same type of man, you think of them in a different way. For example, when you think of a cowboy, well, you think of guns. But when you think of a gaucho, you think of daggers and duels. The whole thing is done in a very different way. I have seen some of it. I have seen an old man, of seventy-five or so, challenge a young man to a duel, and he said, “I’ll be back in no time.” He came back with two very dangerous-looking daggers, one of them with a silver hilt, and one larger than the other. They were not the same size. He put them on the table and said, “Well, now, choose your weapon.” So you see, when he said that, he was using a kind of rhetoric. He meant: “You can choose the larger one, I don’t mind.” And then the younger man of course apologized. The old man had many daggers in his house, but he chose those two on purpose. Those two daggers said, “This old man knows how to handle a dagger, since he can choose the other one.”

BOURNE:
That brings to mind your stories …

BORGES:
Well, of course, I’ve used them for my stories; from telling a person’s experience, comes stories afterward, of course.

BOURNE:
There’s meaning in there, but you don’t have to mention the meaning, you just have to tell what happened.

BORGES:
Well, the meaning is that the man was a hoodlum; he was a sharper. But at the same time he had a code of honor. I mean he would not think of attacking someone without fair warning. I mean he knew the way that those things were done. The whole thing was done very, very slowly. A man might begin by praising another. Then you would want to say that where he came from nobody knew how to fight. You might teach him, perhaps. Then after that, he would interrupt the other with words of praise, and then after that he would say, “Let us walk into the street,” “Choose your weapon,” and so on. But this whole thing was done very slowly, very gently. I wonder if that kind of rhetoric has been lost. I suppose it has. Well, they use firearms now, revolvers, and all that code has disappeared. You can shoot a man from a distance.

BOURNE:
Knife-fighting is more intimate.

BORGES:
It is intimate, yes. Well, I used that word. At the end of a poem I used that word. A man is having his throat cut and then I say, “the intimate end of knife on his throat.”

BOURNE:
You said new writers should begin by imitating old forms and established writers.

BORGES:
I think it’s a question of honesty, no? If you want to renew something you must show that you can do what has been done. You can’t begin by innovation. You can’t begin by free verse for example. You should attempt a sonnet, or any other set stanza, and then go on to the new things.

BOURNE:
When is the time to break away? Can you give some idea from your own experience when you knew it was time to go into a new approach?

BORGES:
No, because I made the mistake. I began by free verse. I did not know how to handle it. Very difficult, and then, I found out that, after all, writing with free verse you have to make your own pattern and change it all the time. Well, prose, prose comes after the poetry of course. Prose is more difficult. I don’t know. I have written by instinct. I don’t think I’m a very conscious poet.

BOURNE:
You said that someone should begin with the more or less traditional forms. Isn’t it though a matter of audience?

BORGES:
No, I never thought of an audience. When I printed my first book I didn’t send it to the bookshops, or to other writers, just gave copies away to friends—some three hundred copies I gave away to friends. They were not on sale. But of course, in those days nobody thought about a writer
being famous, or failure or success. Those ideas were alien to us around 1920, 1930. Nobody thought in terms of failure or success in selling books. We thought of writing as, I would say as a pastime, or as a kind of destiny. And when I read De Quincey’s
Autobiography
, I found out that he always knew that his life would be a literary life, and Milton also, and Coleridge also, I think. They knew it all the time. They knew their lives would be given over to literature, for reading and for writing, which, of course, go together.

BOURNE:
Your short prose piece “Borges and I” and the poem “The Watcher” show your fascination with the Double. Could we let Borges the non-writer speak for a while and give some sort of assessment of the writer Borges’s work, whether he likes it or not?

BORGES:
I don’t like it too much. I prefer original texts. I prefer Chesterton and Kafka.

BOURNE:
So do you think it’s the non-writer’s decision that your library in Argentina doesn’t have any of Borges’s books?

BORGES:
Yes, of course.

BOURNE:
He made himself felt in that situation.

BORGES:
Yes, he did, yes. You won’t find a single book of his around me, because I warned him I’m sick and tired. I warned him of the way I feel. I say, well, here’s Borges back again.
What can I do?—put up with him. Everyone feels that way I suppose.

BOURNE:
A comment that Jean-Paul Sartre made has always fascinated me. He said: “Man is a wizard unto man.” What do you think about that? Would you agree?

BORGES:
Man is a wizard?

BOURNE:
He concocts ideas, he concocts laws of the universe, and tries to make his fellow man believe them. Would you agree with that?

BORGES:
I suppose that would be applied especially to poets and to writers, no? And to theologians of course. After all, if you think of the Trinity, it’s far stranger than Edgar Allan Poe. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and they’re boiled down into one single Being. Very, very strange. But nobody believes in it, supposedly. At least I don’t.

BOURNE:
Myths don’t have to believed to be effective, though.

BORGES:
No, and yet, I wonder. For example, our imagination accepts a centaur, but not, let’s say, a bull with the face of a cat. No. That would be no good, very, very uncouth. But you accept the Minotaur, the centaur, because they are beautiful. Well, at least we think of them as being beautiful. They of course are a part of tradition. But Dante, who had never seen monuments, had never seen coins, he knew the Greek myths
through Latin writers. And he thought of the Minotaur as being a bull with a human bearded face. Very ugly. In the many editions of Dante you see that kind of Minotaur, while you think of him as a man with the face of a bull. But since Dante had read
semi-boven, semi-hominem
, he thought of him in that way. And our imagination can hardly accept that idea. But as I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries. I mean, why should I think of myself as being an Argentine, and not a Chilean, and not an Uruguayan. I don’t know really. All of those myths that we impose on ourselves—and they make for hatred, for war, for enmity—are very harmful. Well, I suppose in the long run, governments and countries will die out and we’ll be just, well, cosmopolitans.

GLORIA LÓPEZ LECUBE:
In addition to writing and having your favorite books read to you, what do you feel compelled to do?

BORGES:
I like to travel, I like to get a feeling for countries, and imagine them; very probably inaccurately because …

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
So your companion describes them to you?

BORGES:
Yes, I travel with María Kodama, she describes things to me and I imagine them, poorly of course.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
Do you imagine them in color?

BORGES:
Yes, usually, and I dream in color too, but when I dream in color the colors are too dazzling. In my waking hours, however, right now for instance, I’m surrounded by a fog, it’s bright, sometimes bluish, sometimes gray, and the shapes aren’t very well defined. The last color to stay with me was yellow. I wrote a book,
The Gold of the Tigers
, and in that book—it was a poem—I said, quite accurately I think, that the first color I ever saw was the yellow of a tiger’s fur. I used to spend hours and hours staring at the tigers at the zoo, and when I began to lose my sight the only color left to me was
yellow, but now I’ve lost that too. The first colors I lost were black and red, which means that I am never in darkness. At first this was a little uncomfortable. Then I was left with the other colors; green, blue and yellow, but green and blue faded into brown and then the yellow disappeared. Now no colors are left, just light and movement.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
You once said that blindness was a gift bestowed upon you so that people would like you.

BORGES:
Well, that’s how I try to think, but believe me …

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
It didn’t make you angry?

BORGES:
Believe me: the benefits of blindness have been greatly exaggerated. If I could see, I would never leave the house, I’d stay indoors reading the many books that surround me. Now they’re as far away from me as Iceland, although I’ve been to Iceland twice and I will never reach my books. And yet, at the same time, the fact that I can’t read obliges me …

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
To connect with the world?

BORGES:
No, not to connect with the world, no. It obliges me to dream and imagine. No, I get to know the world mainly through people.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
But it doesn’t make you angry? Doesn’t being blind make you feel impotent?

BORGES:
No, well, privately it can, but my duty is to …

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
When precisely do you feel that
bronca
³
?

BORGES:
No,
bronca
is too strong a word.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
You never feel
bronca
?

BORGES:
I don’t know,
bronca
is
lunfardo
⁴
for anger isn’t it? I don’t know, no, not anger, sometimes I feel deflated, but that’s natural, and at my age … old age is a form of deflation too, but why be angry about it? It’s no one’s fault.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
Do you remember what your face, body or hands look like?

BORGES:
No.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
Do you touch your face? With your hands?

BORGES:
Well, of course, before or after shaving, but not much. Who knows what sort of old man is watching me through the mirror? I can’t see him, of course. I probably wouldn’t recognize him in the mirror (which I no longer have, of course); the last time I saw myself was around 1957. I fear that I’ve changed greatly; it’s a wrinkled landscape, no doubt.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
But wrinkles are also a sign of experience.

BORGES:
Yes, for example, I used to have chestnut hair and now I suspect that I’m beyond baldness. [
Laughs
.]

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
You have plenty of hair, you can’t complain.

BORGES:
Yes, but it’s strange to be bald and have your hair messed up at the same time.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
You’re blind and yet when I speak to you I feel as though you’re looking at me, why would that be?

BORGES:
Well, it’s a trick. As you describe it, it sounds like a facial lie.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
By me or you?

BORGES:
No, as your voice is coming from over there, I have to look over there, and then you feel as though I’m looking at you. If you like, I can close my eyes, if that would make you feel more comfortable, I can’t tell the difference.