CityReads│Borges in Conversation

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Borges in Conversation

The voice of the blind man is the essential Borges. Those who have heard him or read him remain affected for life.

Willis Barnstone, ed. 2013. Borges at Eighty: Conversations. New Directions.

The works of the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges almost defy classification. His stories often read like thoughtful essays, his essays like poems, and his poems like brief narrations. Borges in conversation similarly transcends and transmutes our expectations of the ordinary colloquy.

In the wide-ranging dialogues presented in this volume, Borges at Eighty: Conversations, the author's thoughts are evoked through the perceptive questioning of Willis Barnstone, John Coleman, Alastair Reid, Dick Cavett, and others. The resulting interplay between Borges and his interviewers makes fascinating reading, revealing him as perhaps the premier conversationalist of our time.

Borges’ mid-life blindness seals the union of tongue and pen. He must dictate all his texts, bringing a melodic fluency into every later work. The printed page and spoken word are a composite entity. Borges at Eighty: Conversations is the spoken logos.

Borges’ speech authenticates his writing as his writing does his speech. To hear him is to read him. To read him is to hear that baritone voice. The voice of the blind man is the essential Borges. Those who have heard him or read him remain affected for life.

Willis Barnstone rightly refers Borges as genius of the word. Borges was fluent in several languages. Borges spoke Spanish and English at home. He also mastered Latin, German, French, Italian, Old Norse, etc. In his 80s, he was learning old English and Japanese. “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”.

Borges on languages and poems

In the conversations, Borges gave the audience many verses in Spanish, in English, in Old English, in Latin, in French, in German, some lines in Old Norse also, in Italian. It vividly illustrated his points: Literature is a necessity of the human mind. Poetry and beauty will prevail.

 “on flodes æht feor gewitan“

(“to travel far under the power of the ocean.”)

Old English

 “Jeder Engländer ist eine Insel.”

(“Every Englishman is an island.”)

German poet Novalis

“this great wing of eternity”

Hart Crane

“They have ridden the low moon out of the sky.

Their hooves drum up the dawn.”

The Battle of East and West by Kipling

“Iba el silencio andando como un largo lebrel.”

Leopoldo Lugones

“Por mares nunca de antes navegades”

“O seas never sailed before

Camöes

“Peregrina paloma imaginaria

que enardeces los últimos amores,

alma de luz, de música y de flor,

peregrina paloma imaginaria.”

(Imaginary pilgrim dove

who gives fire to the final loves,

soul of light, of music and of flower,

pilgrim soul imagined.)

By a Bolivian poet

 “Fuggendo a piede e sanguinado il piano.”

Dante’s Purgatorio 

“［que,］huyendo a pie y ensangrentando el llano”

“[who] fleeing on foot left blood on the plain.”

Borges

 “Al fin me encuentro con mi destino sudamericano.”

“I see at last that I am face to face with my South American destiny.”

Borges

“When shall we three meet again/ in thunder, lightning or in rain?”

Shakespeare

“That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.”

Yeats

“Parting is all we know of heaven/ and all we need of hell.”

Emily Dickinson 

“Die Ros’ ist ohn’warum,／sie blühet weil sie blübet.”

“The rose has no why,/ she blooms as she blooms.”

 Angelus Silesius

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

Stevenson

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.

I have outwalked the furthest city light.

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

I have been one acquainted with the night.

Robert Frost “Acquainted with the Night”

“Time flowing through the middle of the night.”

Tennyson

Borges on writing

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.

The stories are told in a very plain way, though the stories themselves are not plain, since there are no plain things in the universe, since everything is complex. I disguise them as simple stories. In fact, I write, I rewrite them some nine or ten times, and then I want to have the feeling that the whole thing has been done in a rather careless way. I try to be as ordinary as possible. If you don’t know my books, there are two books I venture to recommend to your attention. They will take you an hour or so, and that’s that. One, a book of poems, called Historia de la luna, History of the Moon,* and the other, El libro de arena, The Book of Sand.

I suppose life, I suppose the world, is a nightmare, but I can’t escape from it and am still dreaming it. And I cannot reach salvation. It’s shielded from us. Yet I do my best and I find my salvation to be the act of writing, of going in for writing in a rather hopeless way. What can I do? I’m over eighty. I am blind. I am very often lonely. What else can I do but go on dreaming, then writing, then, in spite of what my father told me, rushing into print. That’s my fate. My fate is to think of all things, of all experiences, as having been given me for the purpose of making beauty out of them. I know that I have failed, I’ll keep on failing, but still that is the only justification of my life. To go on experiencing things, to go on being happy, being sad, being perplexed, being puzzled—I am always puzzled by things and then I try to make poetry out of those experiences. And of the many experiences, the happiest is reading. Ah, there is something far better than reading, and that is rereading, going deeper into it because you have read it, enriching it. I should advise people to read little but to reread much.

We were not writing for a minority, for a majority, or for the public. We wrote to please ourselves and to please our friends perhaps. Or perhaps we wrote because we stood in need of getting rid of some idea. Alfonso Reyes, the great Mexican writer, said to me: We publish in order not to go on emending rough drafts.

Borges on death

I read a book written by an English clergyman saying that there is much sorrow in heaven. I believe so. And I hope so. For, after all, joy is unbearable. We can be happy during a moment or so, but an eternity of happiness is unthinkable. But personally I disbelieve in an afterlife. I hope I shall cease. When I feel sorry, when I am worried—and I am being worried all the time—I say to myself: Why worry when at any moment salvation may come in the shape of annihilation, of death? Since I am about to die, since I may die at any moment, why worry about things? What I am looking for is not utter blackness, for blackness is something after all. No, what I want is to be forgotten—and of course I’ll be forgotten. Everything will be forgotten in due time.

When I think of mortality, of death, I think of those things in a hopeful way, in an expectant way. I should say I am greedy for death, that I want to stop waking up every morning, finding: Well, here I am, I have to go back to Borges.

Instead of saying “to wake up,” you say recordarse, that is, to record yourself, to remember yourself. My mother used to say Que me recuerde a las ocho “I want to be recorded to myself at eight.” Every morning I get that feeling because I am more or less nonexistent. Then when I wake up, I always feel I’m being let down. Because, well, here I am. Here’s the same old stupid game going on. I have to be somebody. I have to be exactly that somebody.

Borges on time

The present has something hard and rigid about it. But as to the past, we are changing it all the time. Every time we remember something, we slightly alter our memory. And I think we should be grateful to the whole past, to the history of mankind, to all the books, to all the memories, since, after all, the only thing we have is the past, and the past is an act of faith.

To go back to the past, the past is our treasure. It is the only thing we have, and it is at our disposal. We can change it, think of historical characters as being different, and what is very fine is the fact that the past is compounded not only of things that happened but of things that were dreams.

We have the books, and those books are really dreams, and every time we reread a book that book is slightly different and we are slightly different also. So I think we can fall back safely on that vast emporium, the past. I hope I shall keep on finding my way into it, and add into it my physical experience of life.

The present moment is being weighted down by the past and by the fear of the future. Really, when do we speak of the present moment? For the present moment is as much an abstraction as the past or the future. In the present moment, you always have some kind of past and some kind of future also. You are slipping all the time from one to the other.

When something happens, it has been formed by the profound, by the unfathomable, past, by the chain of causes and effects and of course there is no first cause. Every cause is the effect of another. All things branch out into infinity.

All the past, all the unfathomable past, has been made in order to arrive at the particular moment. Then the past is justified. If there is a moment of happiness, of human happiness, then that is due to many terrible things that have come before, but also to the many beautiful things. The past is making us, making us all the time. I think of the past not as something awful but as a kind of fountain. And all things come from that fountain.

Time is the one essential mystery. Other things may be mysterious. Space is unimportant. You can think of a spaceless universe, for example, a universe made of music.

The problem of time is the problem. The problem of time involves the problem of ego, for, after all, what is the ego? The ego is the past, the present, and also the anticipation of time to come, of the future. So those two enigmas, those two riddles, are the essential business of philosophy, and happily for us they will never be solved, so forever we can go on. We can go on making guesswork—we will call that guesswork philosophy, which is really mere guesswork. We will go on weaving theories, and being very much amused by them, and then unweaving and taking other new ones.

All those things the future had in store for me, all those gifts, and I was quite unaware of it. And now it has come. And I keep on expecting more gifts from the future. Since the one thing we know about the future is that it will be quite unlike the present. People only think of the future in terms of the twentieth century magnified and distorted. But I know firstly that there will be many futures, and secondly that things that we think of as being important will be frivolous and irrelevant in the future.

I think of the world as a riddle. And the one beautiful thing about it is that it can’t be solved. But of course I think the world needs a riddle. I feel amazement all the time.

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