Jorge Luis Borges Read online

  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:

  En la hora de angustia y de luz vaga,

  en su Golem los ojos detenía.

  ¿Quién nos dirá las cosas que sentía

  Dios, al mirar a su rabino en Praga?

  At the hour of anguish and vague light,

  He would rest his eyes on his Golem.


  Who can tell us what God felt,

  As He gazed on His rabbi in Prague?

  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.

  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 li
ke 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.