Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

kind of idea, no? Well, suppose we get back to more … because, I don’t know why, I seem to be rambling on.
    BURGIN: But this is probably better than anything because it really enables me to know you.
    BORGES: Yes, but it will not be very surprising or very interesting.
    BURGIN: I mean, people that write about you all write the same things.
    BORGES: Yes, yes, and they all make things too self-conscious and too intricate at the same time, no? Don’t you think so?
    BURGIN: Well, of course it’s hard to write about a writer you like; it’s hard to write anyway. You wrote a poem roughly about that, didn’t you? “The Other Tiger.”
    BORGES: Ah, yes, that one is about the futility of art, no? Or rather not of art but of art as conveying reality or life. Because, of course, the poem is supposed to be endless, because the moment I write about the tiger, the tiger isn’t the tiger, he becomes a set of words in the poem. “El otro tigre, el que no está en el verso.” I was walking up and down the library, and then I wrote that poem in a day or so. I think it’s quite a good poem, no? It’s a parable also, and yet the parable is not too obvious, the reader doesn’t have to be worried by it, or understand it. And then I think I have three tigers, but the reader should be made to feel that the poem is endless.
    BURGIN: You’ll always be trying to capture the tiger.
    BORGES: Yes, because the tiger will always be …
    BURGIN: … outside of art.
    BORGES: Outside of art, yes. So it’s a kind of hopeless poem, no? The same idea that you get in “A Yellow Rose.” In fact, I never thought of it, but when I wrote “The Other Tiger,” I was rewriting “A Yellow Rose.”
    BURGIN: You often speak of stories as echoing other stories you’ve written before. Was that the case also with “Deutsches Requiem”?
    BORGES: Ah, yes. The idea there was that I had met some Nazis, or rather Argentine Nazis. And then I thought that something might be said for them. That if they really held that code of cruelty, of bravery, then they might be, well, of course, lunatics, but there was something epic about them, no? Now, I said, I’ll try and imagine a Nazi, not Nazis as they actually are, but I’ll try and imagine a man who really thinks that violence and fighting are better than making up things, and peacefulness. I’ll do that. And then, I’ll make him feel like a Nazi, or the platonic idea of a Nazi. I wrote that after the Second World War because I thought that, after all, nobody had a word to say for the tragedy of Germany. I mean such an important nation. A nation that had produced Schopenhauer and Brahms and so many poets and so many philosophers, and yet it fell victim to a very clumsy idea. I thought, well, I will try and imagine a real Nazi, not a Nazi who is fond of self-pity, as they are, but a Nazi who feels that a violent world is a better world than a peaceful world, and who doesn’t care for victory, who is mainly concerned for the
fact
of fighting. Then that Nazi wouldn’t mind Germany’s being defeated because, after all, if they were defeated, then the others were better fighters. The important thing is that violence should
be
. And then I imagined that Nazi, and I wrote the story. Because there were so many people in Buenos Aires who were on the side of Hitler.
    BURGIN: How horrible.
    BORGES: It’s awful. They were very mean people. But after all, Germany fought splendidly at the beginning of the war. I mean, if you admire Napoleon or if you admire Cromwell, or if you admire any violent manifestation, why not admire Hitler, who did what the others did?
    BURGIN: On a much larger scale.
    BORGES: On a much larger scale and in a much shorter time. Because he achieved in a few years what Napoleon failed to do in a longer period. And then I realized that those people who were on the side of Germany, that they never thought of the German victories or the German glory. What they really liked was the idea of the blitzkrieg, of London being on fire, of the country being destroyed. As to the German fighters, they took no stock in them. Then I thought, well, now Germany has lost, now America has saved us from this nightmare, but since nobody can doubt on which side I stood, I’ll see what can be done from a literary point of view in favour of the Nazis. And then I created that ideal Nazi. Of course, no Nazi was ever like that, because they were full of self-pity; when they were on trial no one thought of saying,