Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

think in terms of the books I read.
    BOURNE: You are indeed a bookman. Can you give us a notion of how your librarianship and antiquarian tastes have helped your writings in terms of freshness?
    BORGES: I wonder if my writing has any freshness. I think of myself as belonging essentially to the nineteenth century. I was born in the last but one year of the century, 1899, and also my reading has been confined—well, I also read contemporary writers—but I was brought up on Dickens and the Bible, or Mark Twain. Of course I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past.
    I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past, after all, is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me. I think that I owe much to many writers, perhaps to the writers I have read or who were really part of their language, a part of tradition. A language in itself is a tradition.
    STEPHEN CAPE: If we could, let’s turn to your poetry.
    BORGES: My friends tell me that I am an intruder, that I don’t really write when I attempt poetry. But those of my friends who write in prose say that I’m no writer when I attempt prose. So really I don’t know what to do, I’m in a quandary.
    CAPE: One modern poet, Gary Snyder, describes his poetic theory in a short poem called “Riprap.” 2 His ideas seem to have some things in common with your poetry, and I’d like to quote a short section of it which describes his attitudes towards words in poems.
    BORGES: Yes but why a short section, a large section would be better, no? I want to enjoy this morning.
    CAPE: The title “Riprap” refers to making a path of stones on slippery rock, to get pack horses up a mountain, a small inter-connected path.
    BORGES: Of course, he writes with varied metaphors, and I don’t, I write in a simple way. But he has the English language to play with, and I haven’t.
    CAPE: His idea seems to be comparing placing words in a poem with building the inter-connected trail where each piece is dependent on the piece on either side. Do you agree with that type of approach towards the structure of a poem, or is it just one of many?
    BORGES: Well, I think as Kipling said, “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, / and-every-single-one-of-them-is-right”—and that may be one of the right ways. But mine is not at all like that. I get—it’s some kind of relation, a rather dim one. I’m given an idea; well, that idea may become a tale or a poem. But I’m only given the starting point and the goal. And then I have to invent or concoct somehow what happens in between, and then I do my best. But generally, when I get that kind of inspiration, I do all I can to resist it, but if it keeps bothering me, then I have to somehow write it down. But I never look for subjects. They come to me in a cage, they may come when I’m trying to sleep, or when I wake up. They come to me on the streets of Buenos Aires, or anywhere at anytime. For example, a week ago I had a dream. When I awoke—it was a nightmare—I said, well, this nightmare isn’t worth telling, but I think there’s a story lurking here. I want to find it. Now when I think I found it, I write it within five or six months. I take my time over it. So I have, let’s say, a different method. Every craftsman has his own method, of course, and I should respect it.
    CAPE: Snyder’s trying to achieve a direct transfer of his state of mind to the reader with as little interference as possible from reasoning. He’s going for the direct transfer of sensation. Does this seem a little extreme for you?
    BORGES: No, but he seems to be a very cautious poet. Where I’m really old and innocent. I just ramble on, try to find my way. People tell me, for example, what message I have. I’m afraid I haven’t any. Well, here’s fable, what’s the moral? I’m afraid I don’t know. I’m merely a dreamer, and then a writer, and my happiest moments are when I’m a reader.
    CAPE: Do you think of words as having effects that are inherent in the word or in the images they carry?
    BORGES: Well, yes, for example, if you attempt a sonnet, then, at least in Spanish, you have to use certain words. There’s only a few rhymes. And those of course may be used as metaphors, peculiar metaphors, since you have to stick to them. I would even venture to say—this of course is