Read Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview for Free Online

account because, after all, those people are like shapes in a dream, no? While the only people who can really hurt you, except in a physical way, by stabbing you or shooting you, are the people you care for. A friend was saying to me, “But you haven’t forgiven so and so, and yet you have forgiven somebody who has behaved far worse.” I said, “Yes, but so and so was, or I thought he was, a personal friend and so it’s rather difficult to forgive him, while the other is an utter stranger so whatever he does, he can’t hurt me because he’s not that near to me.” I mean if you care for people they can hurt you very much, they can hurt you by being indifferent to you, or by slighting you.
    BURGIN: You said the highest form of revenge is oblivion.
    BORGES: Oblivion, yes, quite right, but, for example, if I were insulted by a stranger in the street, I don’t think I would give the matter a second thought. I would just pretend I hadn’t heard him and go on, because, after all, I don’t exist for him, so why should he exist for me? Of course, in the case of the students walking into my room, walking into my classroom, they knew me, they knew that I was teaching English literature; it was quite different. But if they had been strangers, if they had been, well, brawlers in the street, or drunkards, I suppose I would have taken anything from them and forgotten all about it.
    BURGIN: You never got into any fights as a child?
    BORGES: Yes, I did. But that was a code. I had to do it. Well, my eyesight was bad, it was very weak and I was generally defeated. But it had to be done. Because there was a code and, in fact, when I was a boy, there was even a code of dueling. But I think dueling is a very stupid custom, no? After all, it’s quite irrelevant. If you quarrel with me and I quarrel with you, what has our swordsmanship or our marksmanship to do with it? Nothing—unless you have the mystical idea that God will punish the wrong. I don’t think anybody has that kind of idea, no? Well, suppose we get back to more … because, I don’t know why, I seem to be rambling on.
    BURGIN: But this is probably better than anything because it really enables me to know you.
    BORGES: Yes, but it will not be very surprising or very interesting.
    BURGIN: I mean, people that write about you all write the same things.
    BORGES: Yes, yes, and they all make things too self-conscious and too intricate at the same time, no? Don’t you think so?
    BURGIN: Well, of course it’s hard to write about a writer you like; it’s hard to write anyway. You wrote a poem roughly about that, didn’t you? “The Other Tiger.”
    BORGES: Ah, yes, that one is about the futility of art, no? Or rather not of art but of art as conveying reality or life. Because, of course, the poem is supposed to be endless, because the moment I write about the tiger, the tiger isn’t the tiger, he becomes a set of words in the poem. “El otro tigre, el que no está en el verso.” I was walking up and down the library, and then I wrote that poem in a day or so. I think it’s quite a good poem, no? It’s a parable also, and yet the parable is not too obvious, the reader doesn’t have to be worried by it, or understand it. And then I think I have three tigers, but the reader should be made to feel that the poem is endless.
    BURGIN: You’ll always be trying to capture the tiger.
    BORGES: Yes, because the tiger will always be …
    BURGIN: … outside of art.
    BORGES: Outside of art, yes. So it’s a kind of hopeless poem, no? The same idea that you get in “A Yellow Rose.” In fact, I never thought of it, but when I wrote “The Other Tiger,” I was rewriting “A Yellow Rose.”
    BURGIN: You often speak of stories as echoing other stories you’ve written before. Was that the case also with “Deutsches Requiem”?
    BORGES: Ah, yes. The idea there was that I had met some Nazis, or rather Argentine Nazis. And then I thought that something might be said for them. That if