Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

thought of writing as, I would say as a pastime, or as a kind of destiny. And when I read De Quincey’s
Autobiography
, I found out that he always knew that his life would be a literary life, and Milton also, and Coleridge also, I think. They knew it all the time. They knew their lives would be given over to literature, for reading and for writing, which, of course, go together.
    BOURNE: Your short prose piece “Borges and I” and the poem “The Watcher” show your fascination with the Double. Could we let Borges the non-writer speak for a while and give some sort of assessment of the writer Borges’s work, whether he likes it or not?
    BORGES: I don’t like it too much. I prefer original texts. I prefer Chesterton and Kafka.
    BOURNE: So do you think it’s the non-writer’s decision that your library in Argentina doesn’t have any of Borges’s books?
    BORGES: Yes, of course.
    BOURNE: He made himself felt in that situation.
    BORGES: Yes, he did, yes. You won’t find a single book of his around me, because I warned him I’m sick and tired. I warned him of the way I feel. I say, well, here’s Borges back again. What can I do?—put up with him. Everyone feels that way I suppose.
    BOURNE: A comment that Jean-Paul Sartre made has always fascinated me. He said: “Man is a wizard unto man.” What do you think about that? Would you agree?
    BORGES: Man is a wizard?
    BOURNE: He concocts ideas, he concocts laws of the universe, and tries to make his fellow man believe them. Would you agree with that?
    BORGES: I suppose that would be applied especially to poets and to writers, no? And to theologians of course. After all, if you think of the Trinity, it’s far stranger than Edgar Allan Poe. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and they’re boiled down into one single Being. Very, very strange. But nobody believes in it, supposedly. At least I don’t.
    BOURNE: Myths don’t have to believed to be effective, though.
    BORGES: No, and yet, I wonder. For example, our imagination accepts a centaur, but not, let’s say, a bull with the face of a cat. No. That would be no good, very, very uncouth. But you accept the Minotaur, the centaur, because they are beautiful. Well, at least we think of them as being beautiful. They of course are a part of tradition. But Dante, who had never seen monuments, had never seen coins, he knew the Greek myths through Latin writers. And he thought of the Minotaur as being a bull with a human bearded face. Very ugly. In the many editions of Dante you see that kind of Minotaur, while you think of him as a man with the face of a bull. But since Dante had read
semi-boven, semi-hominem
, he thought of him in that way. And our imagination can hardly accept that idea. But as I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries. I mean, why should I think of myself as being an Argentine, and not a Chilean, and not an Uruguayan. I don’t know really. All of those myths that we impose on ourselves—and they make for hatred, for war, for enmity—are very harmful. Well, I suppose in the long run, governments and countries will die out and we’ll be just, well, cosmopolitans.
    2 SC reads Gary Snyder’s “Riprap,” from
Riprap
. San Francisco: Origen Press, 1959.

THE LAST INTERVIEW

INTERVIEW BY GLORIA LÓPEZ LECUBE

LA ISLA RADIO FM RADIO, ARGENTINA, 1985

TRANSLATED BY KIT MAUDE

GLORIA LÓPEZ LECUBE: In addition to writing and having your favorite books read to you, what do you feel compelled to do?
    BORGES: I like to travel, I like to get a feeling for countries, and imagine them; very probably inaccurately because …
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: So your companion describes them to you?
    BORGES: Yes, I travel with María Kodama, she describes things to me and I imagine them, poorly of course.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: Do you imagine them in color?
    BORGES: Yes, usually, and I dream in color too, but when I dream in color the colors are too dazzling. In my waking hours, however, right now for instance, I’m surrounded by a fog, it’s bright, sometimes bluish, sometimes gray, and the shapes aren’t very well defined. The last color to stay with me was yellow. I wrote a book,
The Gold of the Tigers
, and in that book—it was a poem—I said, quite accurately I think, that the first color I ever saw was the yellow of a tiger’s fur. I used to spend hours and hours staring at the tigers at the zoo, and when I began to lose my sight the only color left to me was