Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

novels, but not without tales or verses. How do you feel about philosophy? Could you envision a world without philosophy?
    BORGES: No. I think that people who have no philosophy live a poor kind of life, no? People who are too sure about reality and about themselves. I think that philosophy helps you to live. For example, if you think of life as a dream, there may be something gruesome or uncanny about it, and you may sometimes feel that you are living in a nightmare, but if you think of reality as something hard and fast, that’s still worse, no? I think that philosophy may give the world a kind of haziness, but that haziness is all to the good. If you’re a materialist, if you believe in hard and fast things, then you’re tied down by reality, or by what you call reality. So that, in a sense, philosophy dissolves reality, but as reality is not always too pleasant, you will be helped by the dissolution. Well, those are very obvious thoughts, of course, though they are none the less true for being obvious.

“BORGES AND I”

INTERVIEW BY DANIEL BOURNE, STEPHEN CAPE, CHARLES SILVER

ARTFUL DODGE , 1980

Jorge Luis Borges is a man of many worlds and moods. A significant figure in modern Spanish literature, he has drawn much of his creative force from the Germanic world: English poetry, Franz Kafka, the warrior mythology of the Old English and Norse. Strongly anti-political and anti-moralistic, this Argentine’s work frequently revolves around the history of South America and the stirrings of the human heart. A storyteller who claims to perform his work in a simple manner, Borges may set his tales in exotic temples or in neighborhood bars; he may describe tigers and knives flashing in moonlight, or the patience of a scholar thumbing an ancient manuscript. Borges’s writings emerge from dreams and from experience. Nothing can be taken for certain; life is powerful, but poorly glimpsed before it overwhelms.
    The result of Borges’s continual crossing of linguistic, mythological, and social boundaries is a body of work—essays, tales and poetry—which has earned recognition the world over. In 1960, he shared the World Publisher’s Prize with the French playwright Samuel Beckett, and he is often predicted to be a future recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although Borges began publishing in Buenos Aires in the 1920s, and his important collection of prose,
Ficciones
, came out in 1944, it was not until the appearance in 1961 of
Labyrinths
(New Directions), an anthology of his earlier stories, essays, and poetry, that his work spread to America and other English-speaking lands. A translation of
Ficciones
appeared in 1962, and subsequent translations have included
A Personal Anthology
(1967),
The Aleph and Other Stories
(1972), and
In Praise of Darkness
(1974), the latter four translated by or under the direction of Norman Thomas di Giovanni, with whom Borges worked closely.
    To talk closely to Jorge Luis Borges is to track him through a labyrinth of his past experiences and attitudes, and the walls that one encounters in the search might be painted in unexpected ways. These may furnish clues or merely diversions in the pursuit, but to understand Borges at least partially is to realize that these clues and diversions are the
Borges
. We must not expect to find Borges the same each time. There is not one Borges, but many.
    This is the Jorge Luis Borges whom the
Artful Dodge
encountered on April 25, 1980.

JORGE LUIS BORGES: First let me say: straightforward questions. Not, for example, “What do you think of the future?” when there are so many futures and quite different from each other, I suppose.
    DANIEL BOURNE: Let me ask you about your past, then, your influences and so on.
    BORGES: Well, I can tell you about the influences I have received, but not about the influence I may have had upon others. That’s quite unknown to me and I don’t care about it. But I think of myself primarily as a reader, then also a writer, but that’s more or less irrelevant. I think I’m a good reader, I’m a good reader in many languages, especially in English, since poetry came to me through the English language, initially through my father’s love of Swinburne, of Tennyson, and also of Keats, Shelley and so on—not through my native tongue, not through Spanish. It came to me as a kind of spell. I didn’t understand it, but I felt it. My father gave me the free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I