Interview by Lucrecia Beatriz Porto Bucciarelli

In my memory I always see Borges behind the lectern, as professor of English Literature at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of the University of Buenos Aires. A strange, absent-minded teacher during the examinations, which one passed very easily; for this reason, and by contrast with his exceedingly severe colleagues, some students called him “the unicorn.” Those were his last years of teaching.
After a long time, on the telephone, I heard again that unmistakable voice, a little monotone perhaps. Now I introduce myself to him, recalling that distant period. We agree to meet at his home; he hastens to warn me that the lift is not working.
I arrive somewhat early at the calle Maipu and climb the rather dark stairs until I stand before a door with a bronze plate bearing the surname Borges; I would learn later that it is the plate they had in the Geneva flat. I am received by the classic maid of the Argentine bourgeois families, wary and distant; she asks my name and points me to an armchair where I may wait; the noises of the street arrive muffled. The wait allows me to observe the setting around me. The wide rectangular space beyond the small entrance serves as dining room and sitting room. There is a great deal of nineteenth-century English mahogany furniture, a table where, he will tell me, he works and where he eats alone, a corner bookcase whose open shelves reveal his habitual reading, a sideboard with some silver and, above it, a painting by his sister Norah and various family photographs, most of them yellowed by time. Beside the windows a sofa and two armchairs, a small cabinet with a marble top and a writing desk that had been his mother’s make up the furnishings of the sitting room.
It is hot; guided by the maid, Borges arrives, a little shabby in his dress, leaning on a stout black cane. He settles slowly onto the sofa. His body has not been spared by age, but his face can still express surprise; he has a candid smile, the pale blue eyes, now almost extinguished, barely move, the voice is fainter, but it revives in the course of the interview.

Jorge L. Borges A dialogue? I remember the words George Bernard Shaw said – he would have given anything for a few hours of dialogue with Oscar Wilde, and that in such a dialogue, contrary to his habit, he would have spoken little and listened a great deal.

Porto Bucciarelli Would you have liked a dialogue with Dante?

B. Perhaps yes, a dialogue with Dante would have been pleasant, but perhaps with Ariosto it would have been more pleasant still.

The name of Ariosto is no surprise on Borges’s lips, for he admires the Ferrarese poet’s capacity to escape his everyday world through poetic dreams; Borges too, immersed in his reading of the Orlando Furioso, would flee the monotonous life of the librarian. For him the reading of Ariosto was the road opened toward the fantastic and the dream, an adventure never again abandoned.

P.B. You came to Dante late, why?

B. I thought, like so many people, that the Italian language was a barrier; if you do not know it, you cannot read Dante. So I began with a small bilingual edition. I read one page in Italian and one page in English; I read very carefully in English and then read slowly in Italian and compared each line of the text with the English text: more or less when we had reached the summit of the Purgatorio I realised that I could already do without the English text and read directly in Italian. I also had an experience that delayed my encounter with Italian. Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo and I went to see a play by Pirandello; after the first act we looked at one another and left, because nothing could be understood; the next day I looked for the play, which I had at home, and read it, and I realised that even if I did not understand a word, I could understand a sentence and even a page. It is a mistake to translate Italian. A few years ago there was a new translation of the Divina Commedia, but it is a poor version. A friend of mine told me he had found more than a hundred lines with faulty metre in the first canto of the Inferno. I do not understand how a person who has no good ear can set about translating Dante.

P.B. So the translation of a poet must be made by another poet?

B. There is no need. It must at least be made by a person who has a musical ear. Mitre’s first translation was dreadful, yet it is already a great deal that a general translated the Divina Commedia, which is extremely difficult. Speaking of generals, do you know how many generals are on active service in Argentina? eighty-two, and I do not know whether there were that many in the Second World War.

P.B. Is this one of our country’s problems?

B. Yes, but now I believe we have a right, at the very least, to trust, do we not? And that is already a great deal. I was in Madison, Wisconsin. It was halloween, “the day of the witches”, which there is like a carnival, and people dress up as skeletons, animals, extraterrestrial beings, vampires; and since I had received a prize at the University, and everyone, students and professors, had put on costumes, I thought that if I did not dress up I would look like a spoilsport, though I must say that I am afraid of masks and of carnival. So for two dollars I bought a large wolf’s head, very shaggy, of foul-smelling rubber; I pulled it on like a hood and entered the hall, which was full of skulls, of real and fantastic animals, shouting and howling “homo homini lupus”. Someone took me by the arm and said, “Alfonsin has won”. This was a Monday, and Alfonsin had won on the Sunday. I thought that if the curious miracle of seeing myself disguised as a wolf had come about, why should another, far greater miracle not come about in favour of my homeland. Two wonderful things, one of no importance whatever, like my wolf’s head, the other, which may be an important date in Argentine history; this last meant the triumph of good sense, of wisdom, of will, of morality after an irresponsible government.
Once the Argentine peso was a strong currency; in 1897 my father bought a house, it was very far off, in a depopulated village, Palermo, on the outskirts, where there were few houses. My father, my sister recounts, bought a house with an entrance hall, a dining room, a sitting room, a library, several bedrooms and servants’ rooms, two patios (inner courtyards), a parra (a pergola), a garden, a mill, a palm tree, many rose bushes, all for 13,000 pesos, paid in thirteen monthly instalments. Today with 13,000 pesos whether old or current, nothing can be done. What was once a small fortune is spent today in three or four days.

P.B. How do you see the immediate future of Argentine fiction?

B. Literature has nothing to do with situations of crisis. Poetry is something eternal; politics is something in continual change.

P.B. Do you have contact with young writers?

B. Well, I was born in 1899, and there are many young people who do not forgive my old age.

P.B. But you have an active old age, I would almost say a marvellous one…

B. No old age is marvellous; longevity is the longest of illnesses. My mother died at ninety-nine, terrified of reaching a hundred. I used to tell her that the decimal metric system is a convention, that in another system she would not have turned a hundred but six; in any case the fear remained. She believed, I did not, and every night she asked God to take her while she slept, in the morning; when she woke she wept because she had not died during the night, until one morning she did not wake. She had reached ninety-nine.

P.B. In Europe there is much talk of Latin American literature. What do you think of it?

B. I believe there is too much talk of it, and I do not know whether it is worth speaking in general of Latin American literature, because I believe we are still poor on the literary plane. The United States, on the other hand, have given a great deal; they have given a Poe, an Emerson, a Melville, all of them from New England, which is a relatively small state but which has produced so many men of genius, Henry James, William James, while other states have given almost nothing. I am an honorary citizen of Texas and I cannot recall a single Texan writer; I believe there is none.
Perhaps, of the Latin American literatures the Argentine is the richest, above all in the last century: Almafuerte, Lugones, and others less known as well, such as Banchs, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada. The fact is that this is a cosmopolitan city; it has that good fortune. Whereas if you travel through South America, there are countries that are very queribles such as Peru, Colombia, but they are very provincial countries. Buenos Aires, on the other hand, is a city open to Europe; other countries are more Spanish or indigenous, whereas here there have been many waves of immigration, a strong Jewish immigration too; half the population of Buenos Aires is of Italian origin; I, who as I said have no Italian blood, have recently learned that I am the descendant of an Italian mercenary captain, named Gibeo or Cibeo or Chibeo, who served under the command of Mendoza in the second founding of Buenos Aires. So a distant drop of Italian blood I too must have, besides another of guarani blood, because I descend from one of the concubines of Irala, who founded Asuncion.

References to his ancestors are never lacking in Borges: surnames that people his stories and invade his reflections like obstinate ghosts. As a man of thought he does not hide his admiration for men of action, resolute and valorous, the true protagonists of history.

B. Argentine history has been very troubled, and this situation is reflected in the work of many writers, such as Sarmiento in the Facundo, Ascasubi and Hernandez. But I do not believe that this is the function of literature. I believe the true function is to invent, and what else can I do? I live alone, I know few people, I do not like very crowded gatherings. Dialogue, on the other hand, I enjoy; for example, right now I am talking with you and it seems to me a very pleasant way of spending the morning; but in gatherings of thirty or forty people I grow a little dazed, because one has dialogues of three or four minutes and at once the interlocutor turns into another person, like Proteus. Do you live in Italy?

P.B. Yes, why?

B. You know, I know the north and I know Rome; Chesterton, a writer I admire greatly, said that if one goes to Rome and is not convinced of having in some way “returned to Rome”, the journey is useless. Whoever goes to Rome must think “I return to Rome”, ego romanus sum. Culture came out of there.

P.B. It is a city one never finishes getting to know; someone has said it is like an onion, one does nothing but peel away the layers without ever reaching the end, the heart…

B. That reminds me of Peer Gynt by Ibsen, when he searches for himself and compares himself to an onion.

P.B. Giorgio Bassani, when he came to Argentina for the Book Fair, said that in his view there is in this country a crisis of identity and that Borges is the poet of that crisis. What do you think?

B. Perhaps, but I do not know whether I am really so important.

P.B. Is there a crisis of identity in Argentina?

B. No, I do not think so, because we have the advantage of possessing less local colour than other countries.

P.B. But is it not precisely our cosmopolitanism that gives us a particular character?

B. Yes, that is the advantage; a politician has said that foreign interference must be avoided. But everything here is foreign; to begin with, we speak Spanish, which is a dialect of Latin, and we are certainly not indios. All Americans, and in saying American I am thinking also of the United States, of Canada, and not only of Colombia or Uruguay or Argentina, all of us, I believe, are Europeans in exile. I, for example, am mostly of Spanish blood, but I am not Spanish; at times I think that understanding Europe is easier for us than for the Europeans. Here we can accept the whole past of Europe, and the Orient too, since Greece, Rome and Israel all play their part in Western culture.

The past always returns in his conversation, the present flows past like a fleeting instant, and within these walls the dearest presences go on living.

P.B. What is your concept of Poetry?

B. Poetry is timeless; you read Ariosto and feel him to be of the present, poetry is eternal. I used to believe that the possibility of metaphors had been exhausted, but then I found some that surprised me, and they were ancient. No doubt when Shakespeare speaks of the milk of human kindness it is not a metaphor, but it works well, does it not? A Persian poet said “the moon, mirror of time”: how beautiful, no? The moon, that thing so fragile and yet eternal, and moreover it has the shape of a mirror, it is a mirror. Just now I am reading a book on India in which I found a metaphor that left me astonished. You know that the Hindus venerate that terrible god, Shiva, who is the god of death and of creation. In that book it is written that “the Himalayas are the smile of Shiva”: how beautiful, no? The terrible mountains represent the smile of a terrible god, the joy of a terrible god; this metaphor is splendid, and it matters not at all whether it was written in this century or ten centuries ago.

P.B. When can a writer call himself such?

B. Someone said that one ought to write three or four books before saying: good, now I can publish; and that is what I did. My father used to tell me not to be in a hurry. So I wrote and tore up at least four books; some contained ultraist poems, very bad things. One day, when I was twenty-four, I told my father that I had written one that I would like to publish, but I wanted him to read it and make a few corrections: “No – he said – no one can save anyone; no doubt there are things I could correct, but it is you who must do it, you must commit your errors yourself”. So I published it, in 300 copies that never went on sale, and this cost 300 pesos.

P.B. What memory do you have of that book today?

B. I gave it away to friends and not a single copy remained to me; my father, however, kept one without telling me anything, and I discovered it, deeply moved, a long time afterwards. I do not believe he liked it much, because I found that it had pages entirely crossed out and many adjectives and verbs altered. The book was called Fervor de Buenos Aires and I have respected those corrections in the republication of my works.

P.B. Have you repented of anything you have published?

B. Yes, of almost everything; I believe that in truth I have published only one book, El libro de arena (Il libro di sabbia, Rizzoli, Milan 1977), and another, El informe de Brodie (Il manoscritto di Brodie, Rizzoli, Milan 1971 and 1984), that might be saved, and also another, La cifra. The others can be forgotten and will be forgotten.

P.B. Which of your stories satisfies you most?

B. There is the story “Il rito” and another, “El congreso”, which is found in El libro de arena. “El sur” from El informe de Brodie which I still like, as I do “Funes el memorioso” and “Juan Murana” too.

P.B. And “Venticinque agosto 1983”?

B. I will tell you the story of that story; I wrote it several years ago, perhaps in 1977, and took it to “La Nacion”, and they did not publish it. It cannot be worth much, I thought, and I sent another story, and that one was accepted. Last year, since it had a certain topicality, they published it, and people thought I had written it at that moment; in fact I had chosen that date at random, only because it seemed to me very far off, and when they published it I could hardly recognise it.

P.B. Why do you save El libro de arena?

B. Because it is written in a simple way, because the tales it tells are interesting, because it can be read in an hour, because there are no difficult words. When I began to write we were all influenced by Lugones; we all wrote in a very baroque manner, with many metaphors; it seemed to us that to write well was to write like Lugones, whereas today the simpler, less artificial way of writing is preferred, and saying simpler things; that was one splendid possibility of Spanish, but there were still others.

P.B. What memory do you have of Lugones?

B. Personally, a disagreeable one; he was a very authoritarian man, but my memory is full of Lugones’s lines:

Ligeros suenos de los crepusculos suaves

el jardin con sus intimos retiros

darà a tu alado ensueno fàcil jaula

donde la luna te abrirà su aula

[Light dreams of the soft twilights / the garden with its intimate corners / will give your winged dreams an easy cage / where the moon will open its schoolroom to you][1]

The slow music of Lugones:

el cerro azul estaba fragante de romero

y en los profundos campos silbaba la perdiz

[the blue hill was fragrant with rosemary / and through the deep fields whistled the partridge][2]

Nowadays one senses a certain rejection of Lugones’s style.

P.B. In your view, what is Lugones’s most important moment?

B. The modernist moment is the least personal, while I believe the later period, less influenced by Rubén Dario, is the more important.

Borges’s relationship with the writer Leopoldo Lugones, the most representative figure of modernism in Argentina, was always a conflicted one, made of praise and of broad reservations toward the indisputable master who loved vague landscapes and the musicality of the line. Like all the young ultraists of his generation, Borges was reacting in this way against modernism and its stylistic formulas, its exoticisms; he openly declared himself “anti-modernist”. Perhaps his rebellion has more natural, psychological roots: his mother admired Lugones almost unconditionally, and the young writer’s attitude is also a way of asserting, within the family circle, his independence, the autonomy of his intellectual thought; with time this position was revised, and a veiled rapprochement with certain modernist proposals can be seen: the Oriental themes of some of his stories, for example, are indicative. Nor, on the other hand, can the polemic against Rubén Dario and modernism cause surprise, if one interprets that school as infrancesata, Frenchified. Borges’s well-known anglophilia kept him far from that sensibility.

P.B. What is the word for you?

B. I believe the word is many things; first of all it is a means of communication, words are symbols corresponding to certain conventional images; moreover, words have a magical virtue, the one I seek in my poetry, and it depends perhaps less on the words than on the cadence: that is, on the music of the words.

P.B. Do words wear out?

B. I do not think so. I do not know whether words have importance: I would say that a line is not its meaning but its sound; for example, in the first canto of the Purgatorio:

dolce color di oriental zaffiro / che s’accoglieva nel sereno aspetto / del mezzo puro infino al primo giro

I believe the sound is more important, that slow music, and not the comparison between the Orient and a precious gem. Poetry is first of all musicality, and for this reason I do not know whether poetry is translatable. Concepts are translated, the sense of the words, and perhaps the sounds themselves must be translated, as Ezra Pound did with certain poems of the ninth century; when I read the translation I did not find them beautiful, but later, studying Anglo-Saxon, I realised that Pound translated the sounds.

In these answers we find a Borges unwittingly modernist and closer to Lugones, to whom he would dedicate a study and his book El hacedor [L’artefice, Rizzoli, Milan 1963]. It is not so much the narrative thread that interests him in poems as their musicality. In this swerve, an existence spent in the shadows must surely have played its part.

P.B. And when they translate a poem of yours?

B. Sometimes they modify it and improve it, other times they do not improve it, and when they translate it literally nothing remains. In poetry meaning matters less than in prose; poetry is sound.

P.B. Are you writing at present?

B. Yes, I go on writing stories and poems. What else remains? I have few friends, I am blind, I have books I cannot read, I must dictate what I write; I compose more poetry because prose is harder to remember, the sonnet is more portable and for this reason I have returned to regular verse, because I can remember it better.

P.B. What would you have liked to write that you have not written?

B. I would have liked to live what I have written: what other destiny remains to me now if not the literary one: I am eighty-four, I cannot seek another destiny, and besides I think the literary destiny is no poorer than the others, no? Above all as regards reading: writing may be a mistake, but reading is a pleasure, a happiness… and writing too… even if afterwards one does not like what one has written.

One may think of a literary destiny as a destiny of life: living life through the creatures one has created, bearers of the author’s dreams and fantasies. Borges has not changed; he has left the garden of the old house in Palermo for this other, more sheltered space of his flat, where together with his visitors he receives the news of the world, avid for details with which to feed his fantasies. Despite his age he travels a great deal and recalls his journeys with enthusiasm, but in solitary reading the man enters other dimensions, grasps other semblances, and in knowledge he finds once more the full happiness of thought. It is thus that he overcomes or forgets suffering and moves in a realm of uncontaminated happiness.

P.B. What relation do you have with the book?

B. The book is very important.

P.B. More important than the relation with human beings?

B. No, but perhaps equal: reading is like talking; Emerson said that a library was a kind of magic cabinet full of dead men, but when one opens a book, these dead wake and speak to us. Besides, there exists the possibility of rereading and of evoking other sensations.
I wrote a story about an infinite library, “La biblioteca di Babele”, but another story could be written, and I have written it, about a single word that keeps changing its meaning and is likewise infinite: it is called Undr which in Icelandic means wonder; it is related to wonder in English and Wunder in German, but Undr as a word is more beautiful, does it not seem so to you? Now I should like to dictate to you a poem I began the day before yesterday and wanted to continue today, if you have ten minutes for me.

Respect for the master moves me to switch off the recorder, but I shall not forget the sensations of these moments. He asks me to accompany him to his room, small, with a narrow iron bed, a bedside table, a small glass case holding various books, and a cluttered desk. I then notice some souvenirs of travel, a small bronze reproducing the equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, memento of a journey to Venice, and an hourglass, a copy of one Kipling kept in his study. Then he shows me the figure of a fantastic tiger with a strange mantle made of clouds and palms, of ceramic I believe. Where better than in Borges’s room could this blue, white and green tiger stand? He tells me, by the way, that he has always liked tigers and still dreams of them today.
From a drawer he takes a typewritten sheet, hands it to me and has the maid bring in the typewriter. I prepare to write, and meanwhile Borges sits down beside me, the cane between his legs, his hands resting on his knees.
I must read slowly, one line after another.
From the first line I realise that Borges is in his own world; I remain outside, receiving its signs. Some lines he repeats in a suave, declamatory tone without changing them; others, after a few moments of silence, in which his face wears the absorbed expression of one absent, are changed. The brief rite of dictation over, a light tyranny to which he subjects all his guests, he accompanies me to the entrance for the farewell; the outstretched hand is tremulous.

Buenos Aires, 14 January 1984

Notes

[1] Lines from Luna crepuscular by Leopoldo Lugones.
[2] Lines from Salmo pluvial by Leopoldo Lugones.

Lucrecia Porto Bucciarelli was born in Buenos Aires, where she taught Italian. Having lived in Italy for many years, she went on to teach Spanish language and literature at the University of Perugia. She is currently a lecturer in Spanish at the University of Macerata, and the author of numerous articles on language teaching as well as of schoolbooks for children. The interview we publish first appeared in “Uomini e libri”, no. 99, June/July 1984.