Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

his reception was equally enthusiastic. In Cambridge, writers like Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Yves Bonnefoy, John Updike and Bernard Malamud attended his lectures and lined up to meet him. John Barth said Borges was the man “who had succeeded Joyce and Kafka.”
    Borges’s response to his long overdue success in America was one of delight and gratefulness, yet he remained, as he will always remain, the most humble and gracious of men. I remember the day I came to see him at the larger and brighter apartment he had just moved in to. After ringing his bell, I hesitated in the lobby, a lobby that seemed like a labyrinth to me, with hallways going in every direction and cryptic numbers with arrows underneath them on each wall. But Borges had anticipated my difficulty and, with the aid of his cane, had walked down three flights of stairs to help me find my way. I was touched, but felt terrible that he had come all the way downstairs on my account. Borges smiled and extended his hand.
    —Richard Burgin

A childhood of books; blindness and time; metaphysics;
Cervantes; memory; early work; mirrors and appearances …
    BURGIN: Was there ever a time when you didn’t love literature?
    BORGES: No, I always knew. I always thought of myself as a writer, even before I wrote a book. Let me say that even when I had written nothing, I knew that I would. I do not think of myself as a good writer, but I knew that my destiny or my fate was a literary one, no? I never thought of myself as being anything else.
    BURGIN: You never thought about taking up any career? I mean, your father was a lawyer.
    BORGES: Yes. But after all, he had tried to be a literary man and failed. He wrote some very nice sonnets. But he thought that I should fulfill that destiny, no? And he told me not to rush into print.
    BURGIN: But you were published when you were pretty young. About twenty.
    BORGES: Yes, I know, but he said to me, “You don’t have to be in a hurry. You write, you go over what you’ve written, you destroy, you take your time. What’s important is that when you publish something you should think of it as being pretty good, or at least as being the best that you can do.”
    BURGIN: When did you begin writing?
    BORGES: I began when I was a little boy. I wrote an English handbook ten pages long on Greek mythology, in very clumsy English. That was the first thing I ever wrote.
    BURGIN: You mean “original mythology” or a translation?
    BORGES: No, no, no, no, no. It was just saying, for example, well, “Hercules attempted twelve labors” or Hercules killed the Nemean Lion.”
    BURGIN: So you must have been reading those books when you were very young.
    BORGES: Yes, of course, I’m very fond of mythology. Well, it was nothing, it was just a, it must have been some fifteen pages long … with the story of the Golden Fleece and the Labyrinth and Hercules—he was my favourite—and then something about the loves of the gods, and the tale of Troy. That was the first thing I ever wrote. I remember it was written in a very short and crabbed handwriting because I was very shortsighted. That’s all I can tell you about it. In fact, I think my mother kept a copy for some time, but as we’ve travelled all over the world, the copy got lost, which is as it should be, of course, because we thought nothing whatever about it, except for the fact that it was being written by a small boy. And then I read a chapter or two of
Don Quixote
, and then, of course, I tried to write archaic Spanish. And that saved me from trying to do the same thing some fifteen years afterwards, no? Because I had already attempted that game and failed at it.
    BURGIN: Do you remember much from your childhood?
    BORGES: You see, I was always very shortsighted, so when I think of my childhood, I think of books and the illustrations in books. I suppose I can remember every illustration in
Huckleberry Finn
and
Life on the Mississippi
and
Roughing It
and so on. And the illustrations in the
Arabian Nights
. And Dickens—Cruikshank and Fisk illustrations. Of course, well, I also have memories of being in the country, of riding horseback in the estancia on the Uruguay River in the Argentine pampas. I remember my parents and the house with the large patio and so on. But what I chiefly seem to remember are small and minute things. Because those were the ones that I could really see. The illustrations in the encyclopedia and the dictionary, I remember them quite well.
Chambers