Jorge Luis Borges'
influence on modern writing is immeasurable. It is so ubiquitous
that many authors don't even realise that what they are writing is
Borgesian. (From Brain Pickings:
'Jorge Luis Borges was the most celebrated and influential
Latin-American author of the twentieth century ... In 1972, when
Borges was in his seventies and completely blind, a bright and
earnest young Argentinian man of letters by the name of Fernando
Sorrentino, only thirty at the time, sat down with the beloved
author for seven afternoons ... Published in 1974 as Seven
Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (public library) ...
(it) couldn’t be commercially distributed until the overthrow of
Isabel Perón in 1976 ...')Here are some extracts, but you should really read all of it. (I found some parts really funny.)
-
Writing as amusement: A writer’s work is the product
of laziness, you see. A writer’s work essentially consists of
taking his mind off things, of thinking about something else,
of daydreaming, of not being in any hurry to go to sleep but
to imagine something . . . And then comes the actual writing,
and that’s his trade. That is, I don’t think the two things
are incompatible. Besides, I think that when one is writing
something that’s more or less good, one doesn’t feel it to be
a chore; one feels it to be a form of amusement.
-
Literary schools; I no longer believe in literary
schools now; I believe in the individual.
-
Psychological literature: I believe in psychological
literature, and I think that all literature is fundamentally
psychological.
-
Anecdotes and jokes: Each year a person hears four or
five anecdotes that are very good, precisely because they’ve
been worked on. Because it’s wrong to suppose that the fact
that they’re anonymous means they haven’t been worked on. On
the contrary, I think fairy tales, legends, even the off color
jokes one hears, are usually good because having been passed
from mouth to mouth, they’ve been stripped of everything that
might be useless or bothersome. So we could say that a folk
tale is a much more refined product than a poem by Donne or by
Góngora or by Lugones, for example, since in the second
case the piece has been refined by a single person, and in the
first case by hundreds.
-
Shakespeare: I think of Shakespeare above all as a
craftsman of words. For example, I see him closer to Joyce
than to the great novelists, where character is the most
important thing.
-
Publishing: Alfonso Reyes said that one published what
he had written in order to avoid spending his life correcting
it: one publishes a book in order to leave it behind, one
publishes a book in order to forget it.
-
Ageing: To reach the point of writing in a more or
less uncluttered manner, a more or less decorous manner, I’ve
had to reach the age of seventy.
-
Judging a writer: A writer should always be judged by
his or her best pages.
