Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges: Including a Selection of Poems : Interviews, 1981-1983

by Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Alifano (Other Contributor)

English, Spanish (translation)

Genres: Literature, Nonfiction

157 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph (transl. The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
Born in Buenos Aires, Borges later moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind by the age of 55. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. By the 1960s, his work was translated and published widely in the United States and Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages.
In 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971, he won the Jerusalem Prize. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by the growing number of English translations, the Latin American Boom, and by the success of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. Writer and essayist J.M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists."

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have an insatiable appetite for every word that Borges has ever written, be it in the form of one of his short stories, essays, poems, or even interviews. For over forty years, I have been in thrall to him: He has been my guide and mentor to the world's great literature, and still continues to be so.

Although this set of interviews has its problems, they are mostly in the form of shoddy proofreading, particularly in the brief but excellent of thirty-four poems that follow the interviews. Among them is this little gem, translated by Willis Brownstone:

THAT NOTHING IS KNOWN

The moon can't know it is serene and clear,
Nor can it even know it is the moon;
Nor sand that it is sand. No thing may soon
Or ever know it has a strange form here.
The pieces made of ivory are as far
From abstract chess as is the hand, the key,
That guides them. Perhaps the human destiny
Of brief joy and lingering despair
Is the instrument of the Other. We can't know.
Giving it the name of god does no good.
And fear, doubt, and the midday prayer we could
Not finish—all that is futile. What bow
Could have released the arrow that I am?
What peak can be the target of that hand?

"The human destiny/Of brief joy and lingering despair"—that says it all, doesn't it?

Roberto Alifano is a congenial and exceptionally well-informed interviewer, with the result that Borges opens up to him with an erudition that surprises even me. Discussed are such authors little known to North America and the English-speaking world as Arturo Capdevilla, Ricardo Guiraldes, Evaristo Carriego, Francisco de Quevedo, Pedro Bonifacio Palacios (who called himself Almafuerte), and Leopoldo Lugones.He also continues to add interesting observations on such world literary figures as Virgil, Hawthorne, Cervantes, Dante, Kipling, and Oscar Wilde.

Now I have to return the library book of this edition and go looking for a good copy to add to my own collection of Borges, which continues to grow.

[Marne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one, together with Norman Thomas di Giovanni's superb editing of The Selected Poems of Jorge Luis Borges, first taught me to consider seriously the art of translation, especially of poetry, and enabled me to continue and pursue my parallel art of translating for non-Filipino speakers contemporary Filipino (Tagalog) poetry.

[Kristin McPhillips · Rating 3 out of 5]

This I found in a rental house and I couldn't put it down. It's Borges thoughts on various topics--poetry , various authors, north American literature-- having been a student of Spanish and Latin American literature and a fan of Borges, I found it interesting...not sure how someone who didn't share those interests would feel