Jorge Luis Borges: Sometimes, walking down the street, I feel unaccountably happy. I don’t know where this happiness comes from. Still it should be welcomed.
William F. Buckley: You have been compared to both Milton and Homer.
Borges: Well, yes, in the sense of being blind.
WFB: In other senses too.
Borges: There have been three hundred books written about me. I have only read one. I think the writers should choose a better subject.
WFB: The comparisons with Milton and Homer are in terms of a highly illuminated internal vision.
Borges: To have known Latin and to have forgotten it, is a gift. It sticks to you. I find English a far finer language than Spanish.
WFB: Why?
Borges: Firstly, English is both Germanic and Latin. Both registers. For any idea, you have two words. But they do not mean exactly the same thing.
If I say regal, I can also say kingly. If I say fraternal, I can also say brotherly. Dark, and obscure. Those words are different. The Holy Spirit, and the Holy Ghost. Ghost is a fine, dark Saxon word, whereas Spirit is a light, Latin word.
Secondly, English is the most physical of all languages. “He looked over.” You can’t very well say that in Spanish.
Also, you can do almost anything with verbs and prepositions: to laugh off, to dream away, to live down, to live up to something. You can’t say those in Spanish.
If you take English adverbs: Slowly, quickly. The stress falls on the significant part of the word. That’s not the case in Spanish, which makes it a cumbersome language.
WFB: Do you write in English?
Borges: No. I respect English too much, I write in Spanish.
WFB: Is Shakespeare successfully translated into Spanish?
Borges: No. He abounds in verbal music, in word-craft. I attempted a translation of Macbeth. But I couldn’t do it. Macbeth is my favourite. It’s very tense. It begins at full speed, and it goes on like that until the end, no?
WFB: Which is the philistinism to which you have a special allergy?
Borges: I hate nationalism. I hate the word Argentinian. There is no such word. The word should be Argentine, an adjective.
As an Argentine I can’t be a nationalist. Our history is only a hundred years old. A Chinaman, or a Japanese man, or a European can be a nationalist. Even an American perhaps. But not me.
In the case of Kipling, he needed that faith in the British Empire in order to write his books. Like Pablo Neruda needed communism, or Dante needed the Roman Catholic Church.
WFB: It was a catalyst of his talent?
Borges: Why not? That’s allowable.
WFB: Then why do we not have any good literature coming out of the Soviet Union, celebrating communism. Why isn’t it a catalyst of anything beautiful?
Borges: Because people are bullied into it. If you take the United States, you have Poe, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James, and Frost.
WFB: You consider six people in two hundred years a profusion of genius, and aridity the rule of thumb?
Borges: I should say so. Art happens, or it doesn’t.
In my teaching, I avoid the history and sociology of literature. Dates. Places. This is teaching literature badly. If a line is beautiful, the context can be safely forgotten. If I say, “the moon is the mirror of time.” That’s a fine metaphor. Were I to add that it came from a Persian poet, why would it add to the beauty?
James Neophytou
