Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

people are apt to think of real life on the one side, that means toothache, headache, travelling and so on, and then you have on the other side, you have imaginary life and fancy and that means the arts. But I don’t think that that distinction holds water. I think that everything is a part of life. For example, today I was telling my wife, I have travelled, well, I won’t say all over the world, but all over the west, no? And yet I find that I have written poems about out-of-the-way slums of Buenos Aires, I have written poems on rather drab street corners. And I have never written poems on a great subject, I mean on a famous subject. For example, I greatly enjoy New York, but I don’t think I would write about New York. Maybe I’ll write about some street corner, because after all so many people have done that other kind of thing.
    BURGIN: You wrote a poem about Emerson, though, and Jonathan Edwards and Spinoza.
    BORGES: That’s true, yes. But in my country writing about Emerson and Jonathan Edwards is writing perhaps about rather secret characters.
    BURGIN: Became they’re occult, almost.
    BORGES: Yes, more or less. I wrote a poem about Sarmiento because I had to and because I love him, but really I prefer minor characters or if not if I write about Spinoza and Emerson or about Shakespeare and Cervantes, they are major characters, but I write about them in a way that makes them like characters out of books, rather than famous men.
    BURGIN: The last time I was here we were talking about your latest book in English,
A Personal Anthology
. Those pieces you decided not to include in it you relegated to a kind of mortality, for yourself anyway. Do you feel you’re your own best critic?
    BORGES: No, but I believe that some of my pieces have been over-rated. Or, perhaps, I may think that I can let them go their way because people are already fond of them, no? So, I don’t have to help them along.
    BURGIN: For example, “The Theologians.” You didn’t want to include that?
    BORGES: Did I include that?
    BURGIN: No, you didn’t.
    BORGES: Yes, but there the reason was different. The reason was that although I liked the story, I thought that not too many people would like it.
    BURGIN: A concession to popular taste.
    BORGES: No, but I thought that since these stories are going to be read by people who may not read the other books, I’ll try—and besides, people are always saying that I’m priggish and hard and that is something that is very mazy about me—I’ll do my best not to discourage them, no? Instead, I’ll help them along. But if I offer them a story like “The Theologians,” then they’ll feel rather baffled, taken aback, and that may scare them away.
    BURGIN: Was that how you felt about “Pierre Menard”—was that why you also excluded it from
A Personal Anthology
?
    BORGES: You know, that was the first story I wrote. But it’s not wholly a story … it’s a kind of essay, and then I think that in that story you get a feeling of tiredness and skepticism, no? Because you think of Menard as coming at the end of a very long literary period, and he comes to the moment when he finds that he doesn’t want to encumber the world with any more books. And that, although his fate is to be a literary man, he’s not out for fame. He’s writing for himself and he decides to do something very, very unobtrusive, he’ll rewrite a book that is already there, and very much there,
Don Quixote
. And then, of course, that story has the idea, what I said in my first lecture here, that every time a book is read or reread, then something happens to the book.
    BURGIN: It becomes modified.
    BORGES: Yes, modified, and every time you read it, it’s really a new experience.
    BURGIN: Since you see the world’s literature as constantly changing, as continuously being modified by time, does this make you feel a sense of futility about creating so-called original works of literature?
    BORGES: But not only futility. I see it as something living and growing. I think of the world’s literature as a kind of forest, I mean it’s tangled and it entangles us but it’s growing. Well, to come back to my inevitable image of a labyrinth, well it’s a living labyrinth, no? A living maze. Perhaps the word labyrinth is more mysterious than the word maze.
    BURGIN: Maze is almost too mechanical a word.
    BORGES: Yes, and you feel the “amazement” in the word. With labyrinth you think of Crete and you think of the Greeks. While in