Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

Aires, and that the whole thing happened some fifty or sixty years ago. And yet, there’s nothing picturesque about it. There are, of course, a few Argentine words, but they are not used because they are picturesque but because they are the exact words, no? I mean, if I used any other, I would make the whole thing phony.
    BURGIN: What about “Death and the Compass”? Do you like the way you treat the local colour in that story?
    BORGES: Yes, but in “Death and the Compass,” the story is a kind of nightmare, no? It’s not a real story. While in “La intrusa” things are awful, but I think that they are somehow real, and very sad also.
    BURGIN: You’ve quoted Conrad as saying that the real world is so fantastic that it, in a sense,
is
fantastic, there’s no difference.
    BORGES: Ah, that’s wonderful, eh? Yes, it’s almost an insult to the mysteries of the world to think that we could invent anything or that we needed to invent anything. And the fact that a writer who wrote fantastic stories had no feeling for the complexity of the world. Perhaps in the foreword to a story called “The Shadow Line,” a very fine story in Everyman’s Library—I think he wrote a foreword to that story—there you’ll find the quote. Because, you see, people asked him whether “The Shadow Line” was a fantastic story or a realistic story, and he answered that he did not know the difference. And that he would never try to write a “fantastic” story because that would mean he was insensitive, no?
    BURGIN: I’m curious also about the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”
    BORGES: One of the best stories I ever wrote, eh?
    BURGIN: You didn’t include it in your
Personal Anthology
.
    BORGES: No, because a friend of mine told me that many people thought of me as writing cramped and involved tales and she thought that since the real aim of the book was to bring readers nearer to me, it might on the whole be wiser if that story was left out. Because though she liked the story, she thought that it conveyed the wrong idea about me. That it would scare people away from reading the other stories. She said, “For this
Personal Anthology
, you want to make things easier for the reader. While if you give him, well, such a mouthful, you may scare him away and he won’t read any of the others.” Perhaps the only way to make people read “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is to make them read other stories first. In Buenos Aires, I mean there are many people who write well, but most of them are trying their hand at realistic stories, no? So this kind of story, of course, falls outside the common expected. That’s why I left it out, but it’s one of my best stories, perhaps.
    BURGIN: You work in your friend Casares again.
    BORGES: Yes, well, yes, that’s a kind of stock joke we have of working in imaginary and real people in the same story. For example, if I quote an apocryphal book, then the next book to be quoted is a real one, or perhaps an imaginary one, by a real writer, no? When a man writes he feels rather lonely, and then he has to keep his spirits up, no?
    BURGIN: Of course, it must be much more difficult for you to write now because of your blindness.
    BORGES: It’s not difficult, it’s impossible. I have to limit myself to short pieces. Yes, because I like to go over what I write; I’m very shaky about what I write. So before I used to write any amount of rough drafts, but now, as I can’t do them, I have to imagine drafts. So then, walking up and down the streets or walking up and down the National Library, I think what I want to write, but, of course, they have to be short pieces because otherwise, if I want to see them all at once—that can’t be done with long texts. I try to shorten them as much as I can, so I write sonnets, stories maybe one or two pages long. The last thing I wrote, rather a long short story, well, it was six pages.
    BURGIN: “La intrusa.”
    BORGES: “La intrusa,” yes. I don’t think I’ll ever go any farther than that. No, I don’t think I’ll be able to do it. I want to see at one glance what I’ve done … that’s why I don’t believe in the novel because I believe a novel is as hazy to the writer as to the reader. I mean a writer writes maybe a chapter, then another, then another one, and in the end he has a kind of bird’s eye view of the whole thing, but he may not be very accurate.
    BURGIN: Have you written anything since you’ve been in America?
    BORGES: I wrote