Jorge Luis Borges (9 page)

BURGIN:
Yes, I do.

BORGES:
I dislike that kind of thing. And another thing I dislike is if people ask me, for example, “Do you admire Shaw?” “Yes.” “Do you admire Chesterton?” “Yes.” “And if you had to choose between them?” “But I don’t.” They stand for different moods, don’t you think so? I mean, you might say that Chesterton as a weaver of tales was cleverer than Shaw, but that on the whole I think of Shaw as a wiser man than Chesterton. But I’m not thinking of a kind of duel between them. Why not have both?

BURGIN:
Things get back to a duel again. Everyone seems to have to prove he’s the best.

BORGES:
Well, that’s a kind of football mind, no? Or they live a boxing match.

BURGIN:
I don’t like boxing. Do you?

BORGES:
Yes. At least, when I had sight, I enjoyed seeing a boxing match … but as to football, I know so little about it that I could never tell who was who or who was winning or who was losing. The whole thing seemed meaningless to me, and besides, it’s so ugly, the spectacle. While a cockfight—you’ve seen cockfights, no?

BURGIN:
No, I haven’t. They’re banned in America.

BORGES:
Well, they’re banned also in my country, but you see them. Besides, a cockfight is a fair fight because both cocks are thoroughly enjoying it, enjoying it, of course, in their own hellish way. I’ve seen bullfights, also. But to an Argentine, there’s something very unfair about a bullfight.

The Spaniards told me that no one thought of danger in a bullfight, because no bullfighters ever run any dangers. They thought of it as sheer technique, and things had to be done in a very elegant way, and that a bullfighter had to be very skillful about it. But that nobody ever thought of a man risking his life, or of a bull being killed, or of the horses being murdered, that those things were not seen. That it was really a game of skill. I said, “Yes, but it’s not very skillful to have a bull and some ten or twelve people killing him.” “Yes,” they said, “because you’re thinking of the idea of a fair fight, but the idea of a fight isn’t there at all. What is really important is that things should be done in a very deft way; it’s a kind of dance.” And they said, “I see you don’t understand anything about bullfighting if you are thinking of it as a dangerous sport or if you’re thinking of a man risking his life.”

BURGIN:
I think we’re constantly trying to block out our distant animal past, and a bullfight is one of the many forms of that idea.

BORGES:
It might be that, but not a very fair form. When my father was a boy, he knew a man, or rather, he knew
several men whose job it was to kill jaguars. They were called
tigreros
because a jaguar is called a tiger, no? Even though it’s smaller. The same thing might be found in Venezuela or in Colombia or in southern Brazil. This was in Buenos Aires, I think.

Well, the man’s job was to kill jaguars. He had a pack of dogs with him, he had a poncho (a cloak with a hole in it) and a long knife. The dogs would make the jaguar come from his den. Then the man would hold up the poncho in his left hand, moving it up and down. The jaguar would spring, because the jaguar was a kind of machine; it always did the same thing. The jaguar was the same jaguar over and over again, an everlasting jaguar, no? Then he would jump, and as the poncho could hardly defend the man’s hands, his hands were scratched by the claws of the jaguar, but at that moment the jaguar laid himself bare to the man’s knife and the man killed him with an upward thrust.

I asked my father if the
tigreros
were especially admired and he said no, they did that job even as other men might be cattle drovers or might break in horses or might do any other job, but it was the one thing they did. And they did it skillfully; after all, there were not too many jaguars and sometimes they led a very lazy kind of life. And then men would find out that the sheep or the cattle had been killed by jaguars and they would call the
tigrero
. The
tigrero
would perform that particular job and go on to his own quiet life again. But nobody thought of him as a hero. He was a man who, well, as you might think of a skillful carpenter, or weaver, or sailor. He was a specialized workman.

BURGIN:
And, of course, you wrote a poem about tigers called “The Other Tiger”?

BORGES:
Yes.

BURGIN:
Do you think you’re more gifted in fiction than in poetry or …

BORGES:
I don’t think I’m gifted at all. But I don’t think of them as different, or different species or tasks. I find that sometimes my thinking, or rather my fancy, takes the shape of verse and sometimes the shape of prose, and sometimes it may be a tale or it may be a confession or it may be, well, an opinion. But I don’t think they are different. I mean, I don’t think of them as being in watertight compartments, and I think it’s mere chance that a fancy of mine or even an opinion of mine should find its way into prose or into verse. Those things are not essential. You might as well say, you might as well speak about the fact of a book having a grey or a red binding.

BURGIN:
In the poem “Matthew 25:30,” you say, “And still you have not written the poem.” Do you really feel that way?

BORGES:
But that was an actual experience. I felt that an overwhelming number of things had happened to me, and among these things bitterness and misfortune and disappointment and sadness and loneliness and that, after all, those things are the stuff that poetry is made of, and that if I were a real
poet, I should think of my unhappiness, of my many forms of unhappiness, as being really gifts. And I felt that I hadn’t used them. Of course, in the poem there were good things also, no? For example, Walt Whitman, but most of them, at least as far as I can remember the poem, most of them, are really misfortunes. Yet they were all gifts, and the experience was real. When I wrote it, I may have invented the examples I used, but the feeling I had of many things having happened to me and yet of my not having used them for an essential purpose, which to me was poetry, that to me was a very real experience. In fact, it made me forget that that afternoon I had been jilted. Of course, those things happen to all men, no? Yes, of course, all men forsake and are forsaken. But when it happens, it’s quite important. Well, I suppose it must have happened to you or if not, it will happen in time.

BURGIN:
It has.

BORGES:
Well, of course. That’s like falling off a horse in my country—everybody does. We’re a nation of riders and we all fall off our horses, no?

BURGIN:
In a sense then, all men are more alike than they are different.

BORGES:
Yes, the same idea. But that poem’s quite a good one, yes?

BURGIN:
Yes.

BORGES:
I think it’s quite a fair expression of a true experience, because it really happened to me and it happened in that very place on a railway bridge.

BURGIN:
I also love that poem “The Gifts,” which takes place in a library.

BORGES:
That’s a very strange thing—I found out that I was the third director of the library who was blind. Because first there was the novelist José Mármol, who was a contemporary of Rosas. Then there was Groussac who was blind. But when I wrote that, I didn’t know anything about Mármol, and that made it easier. Because I think it was better to have only two, no? And then I thought that perhaps Groussac would have liked it, because I was expressing him also. Of course, Groussac was a very proud man, a very lonely one too. He was a Frenchman who was quite famous in the Argentine because he once wrote that “Being famous in South America does not make one less well-known.” I suppose he must have felt that way. And yet, somehow, I hope he feels, somewhere, that I was expressing what he must have felt too. Because it’s rather obvious, the irony of having so many books at your beck and call and being unable to read them, no?

BURGIN:
Do you have someone read to you now?

BORGES:
Yes, but it’s not the same thing. I was very fond of browsing over books, and if you have a reader, well, you can’t make them browse. I mean, they open the book, they go on
reading, if you feel a bit bored you can’t tell them to skip a few pages, but rather, you try to receive what they’re reading you. And the pleasure of walking to a bookshop, of opening books and looking at them and so on, that is denied. I mean I can only ask, “Have you received any new books in Old English or Old Norse?” And then they say no, and then …

BURGIN:
You walk out?

BORGES:
Yes, then I walk out. But before I used to spend perhaps a couple of hours every morning, because there were very fine bookshops in Buenos Aires. Now somehow they’ve died out. Well, the whole city is decaying.

BURGIN:
You think so?

BORGES:
Oh yes, we all feel that we are living in a very discouraged, skeptical and hopeless country. Perhaps the only strength our government has lies in the fact that people think that any other government would be quite as bad, no? That doesn’t make for real strength.

BURGIN:
You once wrote the lines, “To have seen nothing or almost nothing except the face of a girl from Buenos Aires, a face that does not want you to remember it.”

BORGES:
I wrote that when I was in Colombia. I remember a journalist came to see me, and he asked me several questions about the literary life in Buenos Aires, my own output and so
on. Then I said to him, “Look here, could you give me some five minutes of your time?” And he said, he was very polite, and he said “Very willingly.” And then I said, “If you could jot down a few lines.” And he said. “Oh, of course.” And I dictated those lines to him.

BURGIN:
They used it as the epilogue in the
Labyrinths
book.

BORGES:
Yes.

BURGIN:
But the reason I mention that to you, well I don’t want to over-explicate, but it seems to say that love is the only thing that man can see or know.

BORGES:
Yes, it might mean that, but I think it’s not fair to ask that because the way I said it was better, no? But when I was composing that poem, I wasn’t thinking in general terms, I was thinking of a very concrete girl, who felt a very concrete indifference. And I felt very unhappy at the time. And, of course, after I wrote it, I felt a kind of relief. Because once you have written something, you work it out of your system, no? I mean, when a writer writes something he’s done what he can. He’s made something of his experience.

BURGIN:
I’ve been wondering. I know you like “The Gifts” and “The Other Tiger.” Do you have any other favourite poems?

BORGES:
The poems I’ve written or the poems I’ve read?

BURGIN:
No, the poems you’ve written.

BORGES:
Yes, I think that quite the best poem is the poem called “El golem.” Because “El golem,” well, first, Bioy Casares told me it’s the one poem where humour has a part. And then the poem is more or less an account of how the golem was evolved, and then there is a kind of parable because one thinks of the golem as being very clumsy, no? And the rabbi is rather ashamed of him. And in the end it is suggested that as the golem is to the magician, to the cabalist, so is a man to God, no? And that perhaps God may be ashamed of mankind as the cabalist was ashamed of the golem. And then I think that in that poem you may also find a parable of the nature of art. Though the rabbi intended something beautiful, or very important, the creation of a man, he only succeeded in creating a very clumsy doll, no? A kind of parody of mankind. And then I like the last verses:

I think that’s one of my best poems. And then another
poem I like that’s quite obvious is “Límites.” But I think I can give you the reason. The reason is, I suppose, that it’s quite easy to write an original poem, let’s say, with original thoughts or surprising thoughts. I mean, if you think, that’s what the metaphysical poets did in England, no? But in the case of “Límites,” I have had the great luck to write a poem about something that everybody has felt, or may feel. For example, what I am feeling today in Cambridge—I am going tomorrow to New York and won’t be back until Wednesday or Thursday and I feel that I am doing things for the last time.

And yet, I mean that most common feelings, most human feelings, have found their way into poetry and been worked over and over again, as they should have been, for the last thousand years. But here I’ve been very lucky, because having a long literary past, I mean, having read in many literatures, I seem to have found a subject that is fairly new and yet a subject that is not thought to be extravagant. Because when I say, especially at a certain age, that we are doing things for the last time and may not be aware of it—for all I know I may be looking out of this window for the last time, or there are books that I shall never read, books that I have already read for the last time—I think that I have opened, let’s say, the door to a feeling that all men have. And then, of course, other poets will do far better than I do, but this will be one of the first poems on the subject. So I’m almost as lucky as if I were the first man to write a poem about the joy of spring, or the sadness of the fall or autumn.

BURGIN:
And yet it’s the same idea as that parable of yours,
“The Witness,” where you talk about the infinite number of things that die to the universe with the death of each man.