Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

circumstances and I made a kind of story of it. But all the stories in that book were kind of jokes or fakes. But now I don’t think very much of that book; it amused me when I wrote it, but I can hardly recall who the characters were.
    BURGIN: Would you like
Historia de la eternidad
to be translated, do you think?
    BORGES: With due apologies to the reader, yes, explaining that when I wrote that I was a young man and that I made many mistakes.
    BURGIN: How old were you when you wrote that?
    BORGES: I think I must have been about twenty-nine or thirty, but I matured, if I ever did mature, very, very slowly. But I think I had the luck to begin with the worst mistakes, literary mistakes, a man can make. I began by writing utter rubbish. And then when I found it out I left that kind of rubbish behind. The same thing happened to my friend, Bioy Casares. 1 He’s a very intelligent man, but at first every book he published bewildered his friends, because the books were quite pointless, and very involved at the same time. And he said that he had done his best to be straightforward but that every time a book came out it was a thorn in the flesh, because we didn’t know what to say to him about it. And then suddenly he began writing very fine stories. But his first books are so bad that when people come to his house (he’s a rich man) and conversation is flagging, then he goes to his room and he comes back with one of his old books. Of course, he, well, he hides what the book is, no? And then he says, “Look here, I got this book from an unknown writer two or three days ago; let’s see what we can make of it?” And then he reads it, and then people begin to chuckle and they laugh and sometimes he gives the joke away and sometimes he doesn’t, but I know that he’s reading his own old stuff and that he thinks of it as a joke. He even encourages people to laugh at it, and when somebody suspects, they will remember, for example, the name of a character and so on, they’ll say, “Well, look here, you wrote that,” then he says, “Well, really I did, but after all, it’s rubbish; you shouldn’t think that I wrote it, you should enjoy it for the fun of it.”
    You see what a nice character he is, no? Because I don’t think many people would do that kind of thing. I would feel very bashful. I would have to be apologizing all the time, but he enjoys the joke, a joke against himself. But that kind of thing is very rare in Buenos Aires. In Colombia it might be done, but not in Buenos Aires, or in Mexico, eh? Because in Mexico they take themselves in deadly earnest, and in Buenos Aires also. To suggest, for example, that perhaps—you know that we have a national hero called José de San Martín, you may have heard of him, no? The Argentine Academy of History decided that no ill could be spoken of him. I mean he was entitled to a reverence denied to the Buddha or to Dante or to Shakespeare or to Plato or to Spinoza, and that was done quite seriously by grown-up men, not by children. And then I remember a Venezuelan writer wrote that San Martín “Tenía un aire avieso.” Now
avieso
means “sly,” but rather the bad side, no? And then Capdevila, a good Argentine writer, refuted him in two or three pages, saying that those two words,
avieso
—sly, cunning, no?—and San Martín, were impossible, because you may as well speak of a square triangle. And then he very gently explained to the other that that kind of thing was impossible. Because to an Argentine mind—he said nothing whatever about a universal mind—the two words were nonsensical. And now, isn’t that very strange; he seems to be a lunatic behaving that way.
    BURGIN: What about your book
Evaristo Carriego
?
    BORGES: Well, therein a tale hangs. Evaristo Carriego, as you may have read, was a neighbor of ours, and I felt that there was something in the neighbourhood of Palermo—a kind of slum then, I was a boy, I lived in it—I felt that somehow, something might be made out of it. It even had a kind of wistfulness, because there were childhood memories and so on. And then Carriego was the first poet who ever sang the Buenos Aires slums, and he lived on our side of the woods in Palermo. And I remembered him because he used to come to dinner with us every Sunday. I said, “I’ll write a book about him.” And then my mother very wisely said to me, “After all,” she said, “the only reason you have for writing about Carriego is that he was a friend of