Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

a sweeping statement—but perhaps the word
moon
in English stems from something different than the word
luna
in Latin or Spanish. The
moon
, the word
moon
, is a lingering sound.
Moon
is a beautiful word. The French word is also beautiful:
lune
. But in Old English the word was
mona
. The word isn’t beautiful at all, two syllables. And then the Greek is worse. We have
celena
, three syllables. But the word
moon
is a beautiful word. That sound is not found, let’s say in Spanish.
The moon
. I can linger in words. Words inspire you. Words have a life of their own.
    CAPE: The word’s life of its own, does that seem more important than the meaning that it gives in a particular context?
    BORGES: I think that the meanings are more or less irrelevant. What is important, or the two important facts I should say, are emotion, and then words arising from emotion. I don’t think you can write in an emotionless way. If you attempt it, the result is artificial. I don’t like that kind of writing. I think that if a poem is really great, you should think of it as having written itself despite the author. It should flow.
    CAPE: Could one set of myths be replaced by another when moving from one poet to another and still get the same poetic effect?
    BORGES: I suppose every poet has his own private mythology. Maybe he’s unaware of it. People tell me that I have evolved a private mythology of tigers, of blades, of labyrinths, and I’m unaware of the fact this is so. My readers are finding it all the time. But I think perhaps that is the duty of a poet. When I think of America, I always tend to think in terms of Walt Whitman. The word
Manhattan
was invented for him, no?
    CAPE: An image of a healthy America?
    BORGES: Well, yes. At the same time, Walt Whitman himself was a myth, a myth of a man who wrote, a very unfortunate man, very lonely, and yet he made of himself a rather splendid vagabond. I have pointed out that Whitman is perhaps the only writer on earth who has managed to create a mythological person of himself and one of the three persons of the Trinity is the reader, because when you read Walt Whitman, you are Walt Whitman. Very strange that he did that, the only person on earth. Of course, America has produced writers important all over the world. Especially New England. You have given the world men that cannot be thought away. For example, all contemporary literature could not be what it is had it not been for Poe, for Whitman, and perhaps Melville and Henry James. But South America, we have many things important to us and Spain, but not to the rest of the world. I do think that Spanish literature began by being very fine. And then somewhere, and already with such writers as Quevado and Gongora, you feel something has stiffened; the language doesn’t flow as it did.
    BOURNE: Does this hold for the twentieth century? There’s Lorca, for example.
    BORGES: But I’m not fond of Lorca. Well, you see, this is a shortcoming of mine, I dislike visual poetry. He is visual all the time, and he goes in for fancy metaphors. But, of course, I know he’s very respected. I knew him personally. He lived a year in New York. He didn’t learn a word of English after a year in New York. Very strange. I met him only once in Buenos Aires. And then, it was a lucky thing for him to be executed. Best thing to happen for a poet. A fine death, no? An impressive death. And then Antonio Machado wrote that beautiful poem about him.
    CAPE: The Hopi Indians are used as an example many times, because of the nature of their language, of how language and vocabulary thought—
    BORGES: I know very little about it. I was told of the Pampas Indians by my grandmother. She lived all of her life in Junín; that was on the western end of civilization. She told me as a fact that their arithmetic went thus. She held up a hand and said, “I’ll teach you the Pampas Indians’ mathematics.” “I won’t understand.” “Yes,” she said, “you will. Look at my hands: one, two, three, four, many.” So, infinity went on her thumb. I have noticed, in what literary men call the
Pampas
, that the people have but little notion of distance. They don’t think in terms of miles, of leagues.
    BOURNE: A friend of mine who comes from Kentucky tells me that they talk of distance there as one mountain, two mountains away.
    BORGES: Oh, really? How strange.
    CAPE: Does changing from Spanish to English to German or Old English seem to offer you different means of