Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

specialized workman.
    BURGIN: And, of course, you wrote a poem about tigers called “The Other Tiger”?
    BORGES: Yes.
    BURGIN: Do you think you’re more gifted in fiction than in poetry or …
    BORGES: I don’t think I’m gifted at all. But I don’t think of them as different, or different species or tasks. I find that sometimes my thinking, or rather my fancy, takes the shape of verse and sometimes the shape of prose, and sometimes it may be a tale or it may be a confession or it may be, well, an opinion. But I don’t think they are different. I mean, I don’t think of them as being in watertight compartments, and I think it’s mere chance that a fancy of mine or even an opinion of mine should find its way into prose or into verse. Those things are not essential. You might as well say, you might as well speak about the fact of a book having a grey or a red binding.
    BURGIN: In the poem “Matthew 25:30,” you say, “And still you have not written the poem.” Do you really feel that way?
    BORGES: But that was an actual experience. I felt that an overwhelming number of things had happened to me, and among these things bitterness and misfortune and disappointment and sadness and loneliness and that, after all, those things are the stuff that poetry is made of, and that if I were a real poet, I should think of my unhappiness, of my many forms of unhappiness, as being really gifts. And I felt that I hadn’t used them. Of course, in the poem there were good things also, no? For example, Walt Whitman, but most of them, at least as far as I can remember the poem, most of them, are really misfortunes. Yet they were all gifts, and the experience was real. When I wrote it, I may have invented the examples I used, but the feeling I had of many things having happened to me and yet of my not having used them for an essential purpose, which to me was poetry, that to me was a very real experience. In fact, it made me forget that that afternoon I had been jilted. Of course, those things happen to all men, no? Yes, of course, all men forsake and are forsaken. But when it happens, it’s quite important. Well, I suppose it must have happened to you or if not, it will happen in time.
    BURGIN: It has.
    BORGES: Well, of course. That’s like falling off a horse in my country—everybody does. We’re a nation of riders and we all fall off our horses, no?
    BURGIN: In a sense then, all men are more alike than they are different.
    BORGES: Yes, the same idea. But that poem’s quite a good one, yes?
    BURGIN: Yes.
    BORGES: I think it’s quite a fair expression of a true experience, because it really happened to me and it happened in that very place on a railway bridge.
    BURGIN: I also love that poem “The Gifts,” which takes place in a library.
    BORGES: That’s a very strange thing—I found out that I was the third director of the library who was blind. Because first there was the novelist José Mármol, who was a contemporary of Rosas. Then there was Groussac who was blind. But when I wrote that, I didn’t know anything about Mármol, and that made it easier. Because I think it was better to have only two, no? And then I thought that perhaps Groussac would have liked it, because I was expressing him also. Of course, Groussac was a very proud man, a very lonely one too. He was a Frenchman who was quite famous in the Argentine because he once wrote that “Being famous in South America does not make one less well-known.” I suppose he must have felt that way. And yet, somehow, I hope he feels, somewhere, that I was expressing what he must have felt too. Because it’s rather obvious, the irony of having so many books at your beck and call and being unable to read them, no?
    BURGIN: Do you have someone read to you now?
    BORGES: Yes, but it’s not the same thing. I was very fond of browsing over books, and if you have a reader, well, you can’t make them browse. I mean, they open the book, they go on reading, if you feel a bit bored you can’t tell them to skip a few pages, but rather, you try to receive what they’re reading you. And the pleasure of walking to a bookshop, of opening books and looking at them and so on, that is denied. I mean I can only ask, “Have you received any new books in Old English or Old Norse?” And then they say no, and then …
    BURGIN: You walk out?
    BORGES: Yes, then I walk out. But before I used to spend perhaps a couple of hours every morning, because there were very fine bookshops in