Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

use of local color, how did you deal with it, did you stick with straight Spanish or did you try to put it into a type of local Spanish?
    BORGES: No, I think that if one has to translate slang one should translate it into straight Spanish, because you’re not … you get a different kind of local color. For example, we have a translation of a poem of ours called “El gaucho, Martín Fierro.” Now, it has been done into cowboy English. That is wrong, I should say, because you think of cowboys and not of gauchos. I would translate “Martín Fierro,” into as pure an English as I could get. Because though the cowboy and the gaucho may be the same type of man, you think of them in a different way. For example, when you think of a cowboy, well, you think of guns. But when you think of a gaucho, you think of daggers and duels. The whole thing is done in a very different way. I have seen some of it. I have seen an old man, of seventy-five or so, challenge a young man to a duel, and he said, “I’ll be back in no time.” He came back with two very dangerous-looking daggers, one of them with a silver hilt, and one larger than the other. They were not the same size. He put them on the table and said, “Well, now, choose your weapon.” So you see, when he said that, he was using a kind of rhetoric. He meant: “You can choose the larger one, I don’t mind.” And then the younger man of course apologized. The old man had many daggers in his house, but he chose those two on purpose. Those two daggers said, “This old man knows how to handle a dagger, since he can choose the other one.”
    BOURNE: That brings to mind your stories …
    BORGES: Well, of course, I’ve used them for my stories; from telling a person’s experience, comes stories afterward, of course.
    BOURNE: There’s meaning in there, but you don’t have to mention the meaning, you just have to tell what happened.
    BORGES: Well, the meaning is that the man was a hoodlum; he was a sharper. But at the same time he had a code of honor. I mean he would not think of attacking someone without fair warning. I mean he knew the way that those things were done. The whole thing was done very, very slowly. A man might begin by praising another. Then you would want to say that where he came from nobody knew how to fight. You might teach him, perhaps. Then after that, he would interrupt the other with words of praise, and then after that he would say, “Let us walk into the street,” “Choose your weapon,” and so on. But this whole thing was done very slowly, very gently. I wonder if that kind of rhetoric has been lost. I suppose it has. Well, they use firearms now, revolvers, and all that code has disappeared. You can shoot a man from a distance.
    BOURNE: Knife-fighting is more intimate.
    BORGES: It is intimate, yes. Well, I used that word. At the end of a poem I used that word. A man is having his throat cut and then I say, “the intimate end of knife on his throat.”
    BOURNE: You said new writers should begin by imitating old forms and established writers.
    BORGES: I think it’s a question of honesty, no? If you want to renew something you must show that you can do what has been done. You can’t begin by innovation. You can’t begin by free verse for example. You should attempt a sonnet, or any other set stanza, and then go on to the new things.
    BOURNE: When is the time to break away? Can you give some idea from your own experience when you knew it was time to go into a new approach?
    BORGES: No, because I made the mistake. I began by free verse. I did not know how to handle it. Very difficult, and then, I found out that, after all, writing with free verse you have to make your own pattern and change it all the time. Well, prose, prose comes after the poetry of course. Prose is more difficult. I don’t know. I have written by instinct. I don’t think I’m a very conscious poet.
    BOURNE: You said that someone should begin with the more or less traditional forms. Isn’t it though a matter of audience?
    BORGES: No, I never thought of an audience. When I printed my first book I didn’t send it to the bookshops, or to other writers, just gave copies away to friends—some three hundred copies I gave away to friends. They were not on sale. But of course, in those days nobody thought about a writer being famous, or failure or success. Those ideas were alien to us around 1920, 1930. Nobody thought in terms of failure or success in selling books. We