Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

books that I shall never read, books that I have already read for the last time—I think that I have opened, let’s say, the door to a feeling that all men have. And then, of course, other poets will do far better than I do, but this will be one of the first poems on the subject. So I’m almost as lucky as if I were the first man to write a poem about the joy of spring, or the sadness of the fall or autumn.
    BURGIN: And yet it’s the same idea as that parable of yours, “The Witness,” where you talk about the infinite number of things that die to the universe with the death of each man.
    BORGES: About that Saxon?
    BURGIN: Yes. It’s the same kind of idea. Which did you write first?
    BORGES: No, I think I wrote that parable, that story of the Saxon, first.
    BURGIN: So that was really the first time you wrote out the idea.
    BORGES: No, the first time I wrote it I attributed it to a bogus Uruguayan poet, Julio Hacolo—you’ll find it at the end of the
Obra poética
. That was a rough draft.
    BURGIN: Oh, and that preceded the parable and the long poem.
    BORGES: Yes. Somehow I knew that I had found something quite good, but at the same time I didn’t think anything could be made of it. So I thought, “I’ll jot this down, I can’t do anything with it beyond a few lines,” and I jotted it down, and some ten or fifteen years after I jotted it down, I came to the conclusion that something more could be done, and then I wrote the poem. Now when I published that very short fragment, nobody remarked on it, because they believed in that bogus book I attributed it to. After all, there was a very good subject, waiting to be picked up by anybody. It was read by most of my friends, I mean by most of the literary men in Buenos Aires, and yet they never discovered the literary possibilities. And so I was given ten or fifteen years, and then I worked it out in a poem that became quite, well, notorious, let us say, or famous in a sense.
    So I think those two poems are good. And then there’s another poem that I like and that no one seems to have remarked on, except one poet in Buenos Aires. No one seems to have read it, a poem called “Una rosa y Milton.” It’s a poem about the last rose that Milton had in his hand and then I think of Milton holding the rose up to his face, smelling the perfume, and of course he wouldn’t be able to tell whether the rose was white or red or yellow. I think that’s quite a good poem. Another poem about a blind poet. Homer and Milton. And then I think a poem about the sea is quite good, “El mar.”
    BURGIN: You mention Homer, and of course, Homer keeps cropping up in your writing. For example, you wrote a parable about him called “The Maker.”
    BORGES: I think that when I wrote that I felt that there was romantic content in the fact of his being aware of his blindness and, at the same time, aware of the fact that his
Iliad
and his
Odyssey
were coming to him, no?
    BURGIN: You often speak of a moment when people find out who they are.
    BORGES: Yes, that’s it, well, that would have been Homer’s moment. And then, also, I suppose I must have felt the same thing that I felt when I wrote that poem about Milton. I must have felt the fact that his blindness, in a sense, was a godsend. Because now, of course, that the world had left him, he was free to discover or to invent—both words mean the same thing—his own world, the world of the epic. I suppose those were the two ideas behind my mind, no? First the idea of Homer being aware of his blindness and at the same time thinking of it as a joy, no? And then the idea, also, that, well, perhaps you lose something but at the same time you get something else, and the something else that you get may be the mere sense of loss but at least something is given to you, no? So, maybe, if you’re interested in the parable, I suppose you will find behind the parable, or behind the fable, those three feelings.
    BURGIN: You really love Homer, don’t you?
    BORGES: No, I love
The Odyssey
, but I dislike
The Iliad
. In
The Iliad
, after all, the central character is a fool. I mean, you can’t admire a man like Achilles, no? A man who is sulking all the time, who is angry because people have been personally unjust to him, and who finally sends the body of the man he’s killed to his father. Of course, all those things are natural enough in those tales, but there’s nothing noble in
The Iliad …
Well, you may find, I think there may be two noble