Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

your father’s, and a neighbor and that he died of lung disease in 1921. But why don’t you, since you have a year”—because I had won some literary prize or other—“why not write about a really interesting Argentine poet, for example, Lugones.”
    “No,” I said, “I think I can do something better with Carriego,” but as I went on writing the book, after I had written my first chapter, a kind of mythology of Palermo, after I had written that first chapter and I had, well, I had begun reading deeply into Carriego, I felt that my mother was right, that after all he was a second-rate poet and I suppose if you get to the end of the book—I suppose a few people have because it’s quite a short book—you feel that the writer has lost all interest in the subject and he’s doing everything in a very perfunctory kind of way.
    BURGIN: It seems that you began to use your famous image of the labyrinth when you first wrote your handbook on Greek mythology, but I wonder how and when you began to use another of your favourite images, the image of a mirror?
    BORGES: Well, that, that also goes with the earliest fears and wonders of my childhood, being afraid of mirrors, being afraid of mahogany, being afraid of being repeated. There are some allusions to mirrors in
Fervor de Buenos Aires
, but the feeling came from my childhood. But, of course, when one begins writing, one hardly knows where to find the essential things. Look here, has this girl gone?
    BURGIN: Yes.
    BORGES: Well, that’s right. She’s crazy, this girl.
    BURGIN: Why, what happened?
    BORGES: Well, this morning she came; I was in Hiller’s Library. Then, all the time she was aiming that machine at me. And I found out that she has had thirty-six shots and then she popped in a moment ago and wanted to have seventeen more.
    BURGIN: What is she doing with them? Is this for herself, or for any magazine?
    BORGES: No, she says that perhaps she’ll send them to a magazine. She doesn’t know. Thirty-six shots, no?
    BURGIN: You and di Giovanni were working on the translations?
    BORGES: Yes, we were working, yes, but I felt rather, well, I can’t be expected to speak or to talk when anyone is around like that.
    BURGIN: She was doing them about five inches away from your face?
    BORGES: Yes, it was almost a physical assault. Yes, I felt that, I don’t know, that somebody had been aiming a revolver at me, no? That she had been aiming a pistol at me, and she kept on at it. Then di Giovanni had the strange idea to tell her to go to Buenos Aires and there she might find other people to photograph and then she got very interested in the idea.
    BURGIN: She wants to make a book of photographs of writers, is that it?
    BORGES: Writers, yes.
    BURGIN: Of course, a camera is a kind of a mirror.
    BORGES: Yes.
    BURGIN: A permanent mirror.
    BORGES: Because I’m afraid of mirrors, maybe I’m afraid of cameras.
    BURGIN: You didn’t look at yourself much when you could see?
    BORGES: No, I never did. Because I never liked being photographed. I can’t understand it.
    BURGIN: Yet your appearance is always very scrupulous. You always dress very well and look very well.
    BORGES: Do I?
    BURGIN: Yes, of course. I mean you’re always very well groomed and attired.
    BORGES: Oh, really? Well, that’s because I’m very absent-minded, but I don’t think of myself as a dandy or anything like that. I mean I try to be as undistinguished and as invisible as possible. And then, perhaps, the one way to be undistinguished is to dress with a certain care, no? What I mean to say is that when I was a young man I thought that by being careless people wouldn’t notice me. But on the contrary. They noticed that I never had my hair cut, that I rarely shaved, no?
    BURGIN: You were always this way, even when you were younger?
    BORGES: Always. I never wanted to draw attention to myself.
    1 Noted Argentinian writer, close friend and collaborator of Borges.

The living labyrinth of literature; some major work; Nazis; detective stories; ethics, violence, and the problem of time …
    BURGIN: Your writing always, from the first, had its source in other books?
    BORGES: Yes, that’s true. Well, because I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love. I think that reading Berkeley or Shaw or Emerson, those are quite as real experiences to me as seeing London, for example. Of course, I saw London through Dickens and through Chesterton and through Stevenson, no? Many