Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

Whitman’s
Song of Myself
. “What I’m doing is very important,” I said to myself. Of course I know Whitman by heart.
    BOURNE: Did you feel that in any of your translations that by doing them you’d help the understanding and appreciation of your own work, did they ever seem to justify what you yourself had done?
    BORGES: No, I never think of my own work …
    BOURNE: When you translate …
    BORGES: No, at home, come visit in Buenos Aires, I’ll show you my library, you won’t find a single book of mine. I’m very sure of this—I choose my books. Who am I to find my way into the neighborhood of Sir Thomas Browne, or of Emerson. I’m nobody.
    BOURNE: So Borges the writer and Borges the translator are completely separate?
    BORGES: Yes, they are. When I translate, I try not to intrude. I try to do a fair translation of some kind, and to be a poet also.
    BOURNE: You said that you don’t ever try to put any meaning into your works.
    BORGES: Well, you see, I think of myself as being an ethical man, but I don’t try to teach ethics. I have no message. I know little about contemporary life. I don’t read a newspaper. I dislike politics and politicians. I belong to no party whatever. My private life is a private life. I try to avoid photography and publicity. My father had the same idea. He said to me, “I want to be Wells’s Invisible Man.” He was quite proud of it. In Rio de Janeiro, there, nobody knew my name. I did feel invisible there. And somehow, publicity has found me. What can I do about it? I don’t look for it. It has found me. Of course, one lives to be eighty, one is found out, one is detected.
    BOURNE: About meaning in your work or the absence of meaning in it—in Kafka’s work there is guilt running all the way through, and in your writing everything’s beyond guilt.
    BORGES: Yes, that’s true. Kafka had the sense of guilt. I don’t think I have because I don’t believe in free will. Because what I have done has been done, well, for me or through me. But I haven’t done it really. But I don’t believe in free will, I can’t feel guilty.
    BOURNE: Could this be tied in then with you saying that there is only a finite combination of elements and so actually the conception of ideas is only a rediscovery of the past?
    BORGES: Yes, I suppose it is. I suppose that each generation has to rewrite the books of the past and do it in a slightly different way. When I write a poem, that one has already been written down any amount of times, but I have to rediscover it. That’s my moral duty. I suppose we all attempt very slight variations, but the language itself can hardly be changed. Joyce, of course, tried to do it. But he failed, though he wrote some beautiful lines.
    BOURNE: Would you say then that all of these poems that have been rewritten are the coming back upon the same wall in the labyrinth?
    BORGES: Yes, I would. That’s a good metaphor, yes. Of course it would be.
    BOURNE: Can you give us some guidelines as to when you think using local color is legitimate and when it is not?
    BORGES: I think, if you can do it in an unobtrusive way, it is all for the good. But if you stress it, the whole thing is artificial. But it should be used, I mean, it’s not forbidden. But you don’t have to stress it. We have evolved a kind of slang in Buenos Aires. Writers are, well, abusing it, over-using it. But the people themselves have little use for it. They may say a word in slang every twenty minutes or so, but nobody tries to talk slang all the time.
    BOURNE: Are there any North American writers that you felt conveyed this local color to you effectively as an outsider to that culture?
    BORGES: Yes, I think that Mark Twain gave me a lot. And then, I wonder if Ring Lardner gave me something else also. You think of him as being very, very American, no?
    BOURNE: And urban …
    BORGES: More urban, yes. And then, what other writers? Of course, I have read Bret Harte. I think that Faulkner was a very great writer—I dislike Hemingway, by the way—but Faulkner was a great writer, despite, well, telling a story the wrong way and mixing up the chronology.
    BOURNE: You translated Faulkner’s
Wild Palms
.
    BORGES: Yes, but I’m not too fond of that book. I think that
Light in August
is far better. And that book that he despised,
Sanctuary
, is a very striking book also. That was the first Faulkner I read, and went onto others. I read his poetry also.
    BOURNE: When you were translating Faulkner and his