On Argentine Identity

Osvaldo Ferrari: I have been intrigued for some time by your ideas on what it is to be Argentine. In your view, our identity is still evolving. According to you, with our limited history yet with roots in a long history like that of Europe, we have a whole new potential. We are whatever we want to be, whatever we can make of ourselves.

Jorge Luis Borges: Yes, indeed. I think that the fact of being displaced Europeans is an advantage insofar as we are not tied to any particular place or tradition. We can inherit, we do inherit, all the West - and in saying all the West I include the East, since what's called Western culture is, when you come down to it, half Greece and half Israel. What I mean is that we Argentines are Easterners too, that we must try to be all we can. We are not tied to any tradition but are the recipients of a vast heritage, which we must try to enrich and follow in our own way. For myself, I have tried to embrace all I can, but since the world is in fact infinite no individual can embrace more than a particle. I sometimes think that literature is like an endless library - 'The Library of Babel', as I put it in a story of mine - and that each individual can only read a few pages of this vast library. But maybe in those few pages lies all that is essential. Maybe literature is forever reiterating the same things with a slightly different emphasis and some variations. Anyway, I think that my duty as a writer is not to find new subjects or to invent anything but to repeat - obviously in the dialect of my country and my time - certain poems that are continually being repeated, with slight variations that may or may not be elegant.

- Octavio Paz has said that your Europeanism is very New World and that it's one of the ways we Latin Americans have of being ourselves or, rather, of inventing ourselves. What do you think?

- It's a clever remark but it may also be true, since our destiny - above all here in South America - is more our future destiny than our past destiny. I would say this holds for North Americans as well. The fact is that the languages we speak - Spanish, Portuguese, English - which are also traditions, were certainly not invented by the redskins or the Incas or our own Pampas Indians.

- Paz adds that our Europeanism is not an uprooting nor a return to the past but an attempt to create a time-bound space in the face of timeless space, and thus, he says, to create ourselves.

- It's a nice idea, and I think it's true. I feel the same thing. I feel that I'm a European in exile, but that this exile allows me to be European in a broader sense than someone who has only been born in Europe. Is anyone born in Europe or are people born in England, in Italy, in Spain, in Norway, in Iceland? Europe is a very broad concept. On the other hand, we Latin Americans can feel all these different legacies, we can forget political boundaries, the frontiers between one country and another, and we must try to be worthy of this vast and very rich continent which we have somehow inherited, precisely because we were not born of it but of another continent.

- This makes for a very rich potential.

- I think it does, and I think Emerson thought so as well. In his essay 'The American Scholar', he is not talking about the redskins but about the whole tradition of what we now call Western civilization.

- The literary movement known as Modernism was perhaps the first to acknowledge the European elements of our makeup.

- Yes, and that movement was born - this is quite significant - on this side of the Atlantic, not the other. Rubén Darío, Ricardo Jaimes Freyre, and Leopoldo Lugones, all came before the great Spanish poets they inspired across the sea. I remember a conversation I once had with the great Andalusian poet Juan Ramón Jiménez. He spoke of how moved he felt when he held in his hands a first edition of Lugones's Las montañas de oro. The volume dates from 1897, two years before my birth. He was dumbstruck by this book, which arrived from Buenos Aires, a city he barely knew by name. We now know the huge effect that Modernism had on Spain. It renewed everything; subject matter, metre, everything was made new. In the shadow of Hugo and Verlaine, of course. How strange that the Spaniards were farther from France than we were, but the fact is that French poetry of the nineteenth century was revealed to Spain by Latin America and above all by Rubén Darío.

- On this occasion, America renovated Europe.

- Yes. I only talked to Lugones five or six times in my life. He was a rather sad man and not at all easy to talk to. In fact, conversation with him was all but impossible. But I remember that on each of these occasions he avoided conversation by talking in his Córdoban accent about 'my friend and master Rubén Darío'. Darío was loved by everyone, while Lugones was admired and respected but not loved, which must have been very sad for him.

- Getting back to Argentine identity, I think your memory and imagination reach beyond this country to other latitudes, to the history and mythologies of other countries and races. Yet the style in which you narrate your stories is a particularly sober one that suits Argentine subjects.

- One of the differences between the Spanish of Spain and the Spanish of, say, Buenos Aires or Montevideo, is that the Spaniards tend to interjections and exclamations. We, on the other hand, say and explain things but we don't keep exaggerating and contradicting in the assertive way Spaniards do. We Argentines talk in more even tones, without raising our voices.

- Bioy Casares once said that the simple way country people here speak taught him a great deal about our language.

- Another thing I've noted is that people in the Argentine countryside are capable of irony. Whether this is so in other countries, I don't know. They are also capable of what the English call understatement, which is the opposite of Spanish hyperbole.

- By understatement you mean stating with restraint.

- Yes, stating with restraint.

- Apropos of this, I'd like to point out our inclination to look outwards, a tendency I believe is part of the Argentine spirit.

- It's only natural that this should be so in Buenos Aires, since half the population is Italian and half Spanish. Moreover, we have the great advantage of being a country of middle-class people, a cosmopolitan country, in fact.

- Could we go back to another member of that important Modernism movement.

- Yes, I would like to recall the great Bolivian poet Ricardo Jaimes Freyre, who was a professor in Tucumán. He left us a poem that doesn't say anything and that doesn't attempt to say anything, but which I find unforgettable. The first four lines go like this:

Peregrina paloma imaginaria
que enardeces los últimos amores,
alma de luz, de música y de flores,
peregrina paloma imaginaria.

This says nothing, I don't think the lines even suggest anything, but they seem to me perfect.

- Yes, they are lovely lines.

- They are, and it's his best poem. He also wrote a history of Spanish metrics, which Lugones, who was a friend of his, mentions in the foreword of his memorable Lunario sentimental. In his book, Ricardo Jaimes Freyre says that the octosyllabic line, which seems so natural to us now, sounds hesitant and clumsy in the early romances, and he points out that to literate Spaniards, such as Cristóbal del Castillejo, the eight-syllable line was tantamount to an outrage. Even the hendecasyllablic line now seems natural; it flows, and everyone can hear how it flows. Although I have the impression that we are losing our ear and that we no longer hear lines of verse, not even the familiar eight-syllable line of the copla.

- I would say yes and no. We have lost our ear to some extent but by no means totally.

- Well, that's good news, and I'm glad you reminded me of Ricardo Jaimes Freyre, an unjustly forgotten poet, as you have seen from those four incomparable lines.