Borges at Eighty: Conversations Read online

  to William Cagle

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOREWORD Willis Barnstone

  1. The Secret Islands

  2. When I Wake Up

  3. It Came Like a Slow Summer Twilight

  4. I Stand Simply for the Thing I Am

  5. A Crowd Is an Illusion

  6. But I Prefer Dreaming

  7. A Writer Is Waiting for His Own Work

  8. Time Is the Essential Mystery

  9. I Always Thought of Paradise As a Library

  10. The Nightmare, That Tiger of the Dream

  11. I Always Stood in Fear of Mirrors

  AFTERWORD: Genius of the Word Willis Barnstone

  ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The conversations presented here as numbers 1, 10, and 11, and the readings and commentary included as number 4 constituted the William T. Patten Foundation Lectures for Spring 1980. In 1931 Mr. William T. Patten of Indianapolis made a gift to Indiana University for the establishment of the Patten Foundation. Under the terms of the bequest, there is chosen each year a Patten Professor, who is in residence for one semester or a part of a semester. Additional funds are used to invite Patten Lecturers, who are on campus for a shorter period of time and who are asked to deliver one or two public lectures. Jorge Luis Borges was the Patten Professor for Spring 1980.

  The conversation presented as number 2 in this book first appeared as “Thirteen Questions: A Dialogue with Jorge Luis Borges” in Chicago Review 31, no. 3, copyright © 1980 by Chicago Review and is reprinted with minor revisions by permission of Chicago Review.

  Portions of “The Dick Cavett Show,” May 5, 1980, are reproduced as conversation number 3 by permission of Daphne Productions.

  I am grateful to EMECE Editores, S.A., for permission to reprint the Spanish texts of Borges’ “G. L. Bürger,” “La luna,” “Endimión en Latmos,” “Las causas,” “Un libro,” “Mi vida entera,” “El mar,” “Fragmento,” and “Poema conjetural.”

  For permission to reprint translated works by Borges, I am indebted to the following: Bantam Books, Inc., for “Remorse” and “Camden 1982,” tr. Willis Barnstone, from Modern European Poetry, ed. Willis Barnstone, copyright © 1966, 1977 by Bantam Books, Inc.; Chicago Review for “The Other Tiger,” tr. Willis Barnstone, from Chicago Review 27, no. 4, copyright © 1976 by Chicago Review; Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence for “Fragment,” tr. Norman Thomas di Giovanni, and “The Sea,” tr. John Updike, from Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Poems 1923–1967, ed., with an intro. and notes, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, copyright © 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972 by Jorge Luis Borges, EMECE Editores, S.A., and Norman Thomas di Giovanni; Grove Press, Inc., and Jonathan Cape Ltd for “A Yellow Rose,” tr. Anthony Kerrigan, from Jorge Luis Borges, A Personal Anthology, ed. Anthony Kerrigan, copyright © 1967 by Grove Press, Inc., with rights held in British Commonwealth except Canada by Jonathan Cape Ltd; Anthony Kerrigan for “Conjectural Poem” and “My Entire Life,” tr. Anthony Kerrigan, from Poems: Jorge Luis Borges (Dublin: New Writers’ Press, 1969), copyright © 1969 by Anthony Kerrigan; New Directions Publishing Corp. and Penguin Books Ltd for “Borges and I,” tr. James E. Irby, from Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, copyright © 1962, 1964 by New Directions Publishing Corp., with rights held in British Commonwealth except Canada by Penguin Books Ltd.

  FOREWORD

  On Christmas night in 1975 in Buenos Aires, in an atmosphere of civil tension, Borges and I shared a Christmas dinner. Borges was very grave. We ate the good food, drank good wine and talked, but the underlying national gloom was in our minds. Finally, it was time to go. Since there was a bus and taxi strike, we had to walk, and, being a gentleman, Borges insisted on first accompanying his companion María Kodama home, although she lived at the far end of the large city. But this was not a burden to the blind seventy-five year old poet, for he loved to walk, especially at night, and it gave him an excuse for conversation. In that windy, alert half-light, we slowly crossed the city. As the hours passed Borges seemed to be more and more awake to every oddity in the streets, to the architecture which his blind eyes somehow knew, to the few passersby. Suddenly a bus appeared and María hopped on it, and we headed back to Borges’ flat.

  Now that María was, we hoped, safely on her way home, there was no way of hurrying Borges. At first I thought he might not know his way, for he stopped every few steps when he made some important point and circled about as if we were lost. But no, he wanted to talk about his sister Nora and their childhood, about the black man he saw shot on the Brazil-Uruguay border some forty years earlier, and about his military ancestors who fought in the civil wars of the nineteenth century. Often his cane would hit against a hole or small ditch in the broken pavement, and each small event offered him the chance to pause, to stretch his cane and to extend his arms and legs in the posture of an actor. As always, I felt that Borges’ character and personal talk were at least as profound and witty as his writing and because of this confirmed—at least for me—the writing itself. By dawn we reached his building. Another long night of conversation was over.

  The following afternoon we went together to the Saint James Café and for three hours spoke of nothing but Dante and Milton. By the time evening came, I began to feel a curious melancholy. We were now leaving his apartment to go to the restaurant Maxine’s for supper. I said to him: “Borges, I will always remember vaguely your words, my animation, but really none of the words.” Borges took me by the arm and, in typical paradoxical consolation, said: “Remember what Swedenborg wrote, that God gave us a brain so that we would have the capacity to forget.”

  It is impossible for me to remember the words of so many hours on planes, in cars, in streets, in restaurants, and in living rooms, but, at least in this slightly more formal way, his amazing candor, bewilderment, and intelligence are recorded for us all. In my experience nobody’s conversation has held such Socratic qualities, the profound and amusing meditation and retort. How lucky we are to have a record of his thought, of a few hours of the conversations which he has shared with others throughout his life in his much esteemed art of friendship.

  For three days in 1976 Jorge Luis Borges was at Indiana University in order to participate in a series of public conversations on his life and writings. For a month in the spring of 1980 he returned to Indiana University as a Patten Professor under the joint auspices of the William T. Patten foundation, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Office of Latino Affairs.

  Also during his 1980 visit, Borges traveled to Chicago, New York, and Boston for other talks. He spoke to a large group at the University of Chicago. At the PEN American Center, he was interviewed by Alastair Reid and John Coleman. He appeared on the Dick Cavett show. In the Butler Library at Columbia University he addressed a vast, alert audience. There he said: “a crowd is an illusion. No such thing exists. I am talking to you personally.” From New York Borges went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he participated in a discussion sponsored by Boston University, Harvard University, and MIT. This was Borges’ first visit to Cambridge since 1967, when he had been the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard.

  The photographs of Borges included in this volume were taken in Buenos Aires, 1975–76.

  WILLIS BARNSTONE

  1

  The Secret Islands

  Indiana University,

  March 1980 Why not speak of another secret island? Why not speak of Manhattan? When one thinks of Manhattan, one thinks of New York as being a public city. Yet you are blinded by it as you are blinded by the sun. The sun of course is secre
t. Only eagles, we are told, are allowed to look at the sun. And I cannot look on New York, not because I am blind, but because I am blinded by it. At the same time I love it. When I speak of New York, I think instantly of Walt Whitman.

  JORGE OCLANDER: Everyone sitting in this audience wants to know Jorge Luis Borges.

  JORGE LUIS BORGES: I wish I did. I am sick and tired of him.

  OCLANDER: Would you take us on a voyage through your own library? Which books did you enjoy reading when you were a young man?

  BORGES: Those books are the books I enjoy now. I began reading Stevenson, reading Kipling, reading the Bible, reading the Arabian Nights in the Edward William Lane translation, and later the Burton version, and I am still rereading those books. I have done but little reading in my life and much rereading. My eyesight left me for reading purposes, left me in 1955, and since then I have attempted no contemporary reading. I don’t think I have read a newspaper in my life. We can know the past but the present is hidden from us. The present will be known by the historians or by the novelists who will call themselves historians. But as to what is happening today, that is part of the general mystery of the universe.

  So I have preferred to reread. In Geneva I was taught French, I was taught Latin, and even, as I said in a poem, having forgotten Latin is a possession. And in a sense I am speaking a kind of dog Latin, since I am speaking in Spanish, but I always look back with yearning, a kind of homesickness, for Latin. And this is what so many writers have felt the world over. Samuel Johnson, one of my heroes, attempted, very successfully, to write Latin in English. Quevedo and Saevedra Fejardo and Góngora wrote very fine Latin in Spanish. In a sense we should go back to Latin and we are all doing our best to do so. Forgive the digression of going on and on. In Geneva I taught myself German, because I wanted to read Schopenhauer in the original. And I found a very pleasant way of doing so. I recommend it to all of you if you have no German. The procedure is this. Get hold of a copy of Heine’s Buck der Lieder—that should be easily done—get hold of a German-English dictionary, and then begin to read. You may be puzzled at first, but after two or three months you will find yourself reading the finest poetry in the world and perhaps not understanding it but feeling it, which is far better, since poetry is not meant for reason but for the imagination.

  When I lost my eyesight for reading purposes, I said: This should not be the end. “I will not abound”—as one of the writers I should have mentioned said—“in loud self-pity.” No, this should prove the beginning of a new experience. And then I thought: I will explore the language my forefathers spoke. They may have spoken it in Mercia, in Northumbria, now called Northumberland. I will go back to Old English. And so, with a small group, among whom was María Kodama, we began the study of Old English. I know many pieces by heart. Very fine poetry. Not a sentimental line in it. A speech for warriors, for priests, for sailors also, and you find that, some seven centuries after Christ, the English were already looking at the sea. In the early poetry you find the sea around the corner all the time. This happens in England. You find wonderful lines like on flodes æht feor gewitan “to travel far under the power of the ocean.” And I have traveled far from the power of the ocean, and here I am, very happily, in the center of your continent, and my continent also, for I am a mere South American. My continent is America.

  After that I went on to study Icelandic, and I had already begun that study when I was a boy because my father gave me a copy of the Volsung Saga as done into English by William Morris. I enjoyed it greatly and then my father gave me a handbook of Germanic mythology. But the book should really have been called Scandinavian mythology, since Germany, England, the Netherlands, continental Scandinavia had forgotten all about the gods. The memory was kept alive in Iceland. Two years ago I was on a pilgrimage to Iceland—I think William Morris called it the “Holy Land of the North”—but I had already begun that pilgrimage when as a boy I had read Morris’ Volsung Saga and that handbook of Germanic mythology. Iceland has kept for us the memory of the North. We are all indebted to Iceland. I could hardly tell you what I felt when I landed there. I thought of the sagas, of the eddas. When I was thinking about the eddas, I thought of a poem called “The Greenland Poem.” That poem was written or chanted in Greenland by a Norseman; a poem on Attila by the Saxons called “Atle” by the Norseman and “Etzel” by the Germans. I have mentioned Iceland. I have told you the way I felt when I went there, when I saw the men, when I saw those very amiable giants surrounding me. And we talked of course about the sagas and the eddas of the Old North.

  I have mentioned this almost secret island. Now I will go on to a second, also secret, island—I suppose all islands are secret. Last year I was in Japan, and I found something quite alien to me. I was, believe it or not, in a very civilized country, an experience which hardly comes to us outside the East. Now, in Japan people have two civilizations—our Western civilization and their own. A man who is a Buddhist can also be a Shintoist, and he may also be a Methodist, as my forefathers were, or a Lutheran, or anything of the kind. People talk about Japanese, or perhaps Chinese, urbanity, but that urbanity goes deep down. I spent some thirty-odd days in Japan. I made many good friends. They never inflicted any anecdotes on me. They told me nothing of their private lives—their lives were indeed private—I told them nothing of mine, and I felt that we were friends because we could talk, not of our mere circumstances, but about real subjects—for example, religion and philosophy.

  I have spoken of Iceland, of Japan, now we come, perhaps, to the most secret of all islands, a country I greatly love—it runs in my blood. I’m talking of course of England. I remember what Novalis said: Jeder Engländer ist eine Insel “Every Englishman is an island.” Of course he is an islander compared to Paris, compared to Buenos Aires. London is a private city, a secret city, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I think of the English language and of English literature as being among the greatest adventures of mankind.

  Why not speak of another secret island? Why not speak of Manhattan? When one thinks of Manhattan, one thinks of New York as being a public city. Yet you are blinded by it as you are blinded by the sun. The sun of course is secret. Only eagles, we are told, are allowed to look at the sun. And I cannot look on New York, not because I am blind, but because I am blinded by it. At the same time I love it. When I speak of New York, I think instantly of Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman was one of those men who cannot be thought away. And you can say that of many American writers. Literature would not be what it is today had there been no Edgar Allan Poe, no Walt Whitman—I mean the myth created by Whitman, not the man himself—no Herman Melville, no Thoreau, and no Emerson. I love Emerson and I am very fond of his poetry. He is to me the one intellectual poet—in any case, the one intellectual poet who has ideas. The others are merely intellectual with no ideas at all. In the case of Emerson he had ideas and was thoroughly a poet. He influenced Emily Dickinson, perhaps the greatest lady writer and the greatest poet that America—I’m thinking of our America also—has as yet produced.

  So I have mentioned four islands. I’ve spoken of Iceland, I’ve spoken of Japan—I know I’ll keep thinking back on Japan all my life—England, and New York. But why should we keep talking about islands? Let us expect a different question and I hope a quite different answer, though I keep saying the same things over and over. I’m an old man, forgive me.

  WILLIS BARNSTONE: When Hart Crane wrote “this great wing of eternity” on the typewriter, he realized he had typed by mistake “this great wink of eternity,” which was much better, and he left it that way.

  BORGES: Wink is better than wing? No. I don’t think so. I don’t agree with you. How can you prefer wink to wing? Oh, look here, you can’t go on this way.

  BARNSTONE: In any case, Hart Crane made a mistake either on his typewriter or in his judgment, and my question to you is that we make many mistakes—

  BORGES: I prefer wings to winks.

  BARNSTONE: Mistakes personal, professional, and literar
y. Some of them lead us to disaster, some to good things.

  BORGES: My life has been an encyclopedia of mistakes. A museum.

  BARNSTONE: To use Frost’s words, which path in the wood do we take? When you took the wrong roads in your life, could you tell us of the disasters or the good things that came as a result?

  BORGES: You mean the wrong books I have written?

  BARNSTONE: Yes, and the wrong women you have loved, the wrong days you have spent.

  BORGES: Yes, but what can I do about it? All those things, the wrong women, the wrong actions, the wrong circumstances, all those are tools to the poet. A poet should think of all things as being given him, even misfortune. Misfortune, defeat, humiliation, failure, those are our tools. You don’t suppose that when you are happy you can produce anything. Happiness is its own aim. But we are given mistakes, we are given nightmares, almost nightly, and our task is to make them into poetry. And were I truly a poet I would feel that every moment of my life is poetic, every moment of my life is a kind of clay I have to model, I have to shape, to lick into poetry. So that I don’t think I should apologize for my mistakes. Those mistakes were given me by that very complex chain of causes and effects, or rather, unending effects and causes—we may not begin by the cause—in order that I might turn them into poetry. And I have a fine tool, the Spanish language, and I have of course the presents of English, the memory of Latin, and another language I greatly love, German. Now I’m studying Old English and doing my best to know something of Japanese, and I hope to go on and on. Of course I know that I am eighty. I hope I may die at any moment, but what can I do about it but to go on living and dreaming, since dreaming is my task? I have to be dreaming all the time, and then those dreams have to become words, and I have to tackle them and do my best or my worst with them. So I don’t think I should apologize for my mistakes. As for my own writings, I have never reread them. I don’t know them. When I write something it is because I have to. Then once it’s published I do my best, very easily, to forget it. Since we are among friends, I will tell you something. When you come to my house—and I hope you all come in due time, to my house on Calle Maipú, on the north side of Buenos Aires—you’ll find quite a good library but not a single book of mine, because I don’t allow them to have a place in my library. My library is compounded of good books. And who am I to be a neighbor to Virgil or Stevenson? So there is no book of mine in my house. You need not fear a single copy.