The Inveterate Traveller

Osvaldo Ferrari: On the eve of your second trip to Japan, taking in Italy and Greece, could you explain what's at the root of this admirable passion of yours for foreign travel, which has grown over the past few years.

Jorge Luis Borges: One reason is my very blindness, for I can get a sense of places even if I can't see them. Besides, if I stay in Buenos Aires my life is the poorer. I have to keep inventing stories and dictating them. When I travel, I absorb new impressions, which in the long run find their way into my writing. I'm not sure there's any point in this, but I try to go on accepting things and being grateful for them. If I were really a poet - and obviously I'm not - I'd feel each moment of life as poetic. It's a mistake to suppose that there are poetic subjects or poetic moments. Any subject can be poetic. Whitman proved this, and in his way so did Gómez de la Serna - the business of seeing the everyday as poetic. It is widely held that reality is stranger than fiction. Chesterton, acutely and in my opinion rightly, says that while we make fiction, reality is much stranger because someone else - the Other, God - makes it. So reality has to be much stranger.

Speaking of the Other, I am reminded that in the first part of the Divine Comedy, the Inferno, the name of God may not be mentioned, so he's called the Other. As the Other wished, says Ulysses. Dante invents the beautiful synonym the Other. This is terrifying too, because it means that one is very distant from this Other, that one is not the Other. In the Divine Comedy the name of God appears in the Purgatorio, because here the spirits are in the fire, which purifies them. The name of God also appears in the Paradiso, of course, but not in the Inferno, where the word Other is always written with a capital, so that there can be no doubt.

- Getting back to this particular journey of yours, what object, or what excuse, have you for making it?

- One excuse is a generous, undeserved doctorate honoris causa that I am to receive from the University of Palermo, in Sicily. So I shall get to know the south of Italy. I already know the admirable north, and I know Rome. Like all Westerners, I can say 'civis romanus sum'. We all are. We were born in exile, somewhat at a distance. And now I shall get to know Magna Graecia. It could be said that it was there that the West began to think. That is, partly in Asia Minor and partly in southern Italy. How strange that philosophy should begin, one might say, on the outer edge of Greece. That's where man began to think, and ever since we have tried to go on thinking. In short, this excellent habit began in Magna Graecia.

The south of Italy stands for other great names as well. Vico, whose cyclical theory of history was often cited by James Joyce. And and even better writer - Croce - who wrote on aesthetics. He too was from southern Italy. And Marino, the greatest poet of the Baroque era, who was Góngora's master. In short, southern Italy conjures up so many great names. I've always wanted to know the south of Italy, but until now it hasn't happened, as with so many other things. If one considers - not even the immensity of the universe but the immensity of the planet - what a man can see is very little. When people tell me I have read a great deal, it isn't so. If one calls to mind all the libraries in the world or even a single library - let's say the Argentine National Library - what has one read? Of all that's been written, one has read only a few pages, no more, and of the world one has seen just a few sights. But one is justified in thinking that those things one has seen embody the others. So, in a platonic sense, one has seen everything and has read all the books, even those written in unfamiliar languages. This is why we can say that all books are but one book. I've often thought that there are but a few literary themes and that each generation seeks slight variations and rewrites in the dialect of the period what has already been written. The differences may be small, but to us they are very important.

Anyway, I'm being awarded this most honourable doctorate in Palermo, in Italy, and then another no less honourable but stranger by a new Greek university, the University of Crete. I've been to Crete, but I never thought of receiving a Cretan doctorate, which in some way brings me closer - well, I don't need to be brought closer - to the labyrinth. And wasn't Doménikos Theotokópoulos, El Greco, also Cretan?

And then I have to attend a congress in Japan, and in June I think I'm am going to receive a doctorate - would you believe it? - from one of the oldest and most famous universities in the world, the University of Cambridge. I'm already a doctor honoris causa of the rival university, Oxford. So I'm going to be doctored by those two famous universities.

We should remember that the earliest European universities were Italian. The very first was Bologna, I think, and after that came the English ones, and then France, and, lastly, the German ones, like Heidelberg.

- The Italians seem to have been enthralled with your work for some time now.

- Yes, although the fact that they enjoy it a lot may mean that they haven't read it, but I believe that in spite of having read it they still appreciate me. Which somewhat astonishes me. Yes, Italy has been very generous to me. In fact, the world has been very generous to me. I don't think I have any personal enemies, and perhaps when one reaches eighty-four one is already more or less posthumous and can be loved without much risk, without great discomfort. This may be one of the forms of old age.

- The Japanese also seem to have a certain strange predilection for essentally Argentine forms of expression - such as our music, for example.

- Yes, for the tango. When I tell them that the tango was almost forgotten in Buenos Aires, that you hear much more rock, they are a bit horrified, even though they too like rock music. The Japanese spirit is very hospitable. You can see how, without rejecting their Oriental culture, they are also experts in Western culture. And to think that the United States, England, and Germany are all alarmed by Japan's industrial advances. The Japanese are better at making everything - and with an aesthetic sense. Japanese tape recorders, Japanese telescopes, Japanese electric razors are lighter and more elegant, to say nothing of their cameras and their cars. They also seem to make better computers.

- There are other things too. Adolfo Bioy Casares made me a gift of a beautiful Japanese book. It was an edition of the Cuentos breves y extraordinarios, written by you and him in 1967 and published in Japan in 1976.

- I never knew that. Yes, we compiled that book more or less at that time, but I'm rather vague on dates. The truth is that I'm losing my memory but I still retain the best parts, which are not my personal experiences but the books I've read. My memory is full of lines of poetry in many languages. I've never tried to learn a poem by heart, but the ones I liked stuck in my mind, and there they still are. I can recite verses in several languages, including Old English, or Anglo-Saxon.

- And a number of Latin verses too, I think, although I don't know whether I can scan them. I might get the syllable count wrong. Anyway, I remember what I've read better than what has happened to me. Clearly one of the most important things that can happen to a man is to read one or another page that moves him. It's a very intense experience, no less intense than others. Montaigne said that reading is an idle pleasure, but I think he was mistaken. In my case reading has not been idle but avid. I imagine it was the same for him, since his essays are full of Latin quotations. These have to be translated today, because Latin, unfortunately, is a dead language. Once it was the common tongue of all educated Europe. A great-grandfather of mine, Dr Haslam, couldn't get into Oxford or Cambridge so he went to the University of Heidelberg, in Germany. After five years, he came back as a doctor of philosophy and letters, without a word of German. He'd taken all his exams in Latin. A very British Latin, no doubt, but sufficient for those exams. Today I don't think you could find a professor able to take those exams, but you could then. A friend of mine, Néstor Ibarra, told me that at home they made him speak Latin during lunch and dinner. All conversation had to be in Latin, which seems to me a good thing.

- In Buenos Aires?

- Yes, in Buenos Aires. And as for Montaigne, I think he had a German tutor who taught him not German - it was a barbaric language at that time - but Latin and Greek. He became skilled in those languages.

- As you know, some writers say that they find travel very dislocating. It ruins their concentration and makes for a violent disruption in their lives and in their writing, which they then find hard to recover from.

- That doesn't happen to me. I return enriched by my travels, not impoverished, and least of all dislocated.

- So for you travel is a positive experience.

- You might say that I'm so chaotic it couldn't be worse. I start out in disorder - that is, in chaos. How strange that the word 'cosmetic' has its root in the word 'cosmos'. The cosmos is the great order of the world, and cosmetic the little order that a person imposes on his face. It's the same root, cosmos = order.

- So these travels of yours have a cosmic, or ordered, element to them.

- Let's hope so. It would be very sad to travel for nothing. In any case, it is so pleasant - above all, waking up. When you wake up you don't quite know where you are but you think, I'm in Nara, the ancient capital of Japan, close to the great statue of the Buddha. This is such a joy even though, for obvious reasons, I can't see the figure. But just the fact of being able to say these things to myself in such a place as Japan is so romantic to me.

- I know the two extremes of the Orient - I know Egypt and Japan, but I'd still like to know China and India, and one day I hope to be able to do so. I'd like to know Persia, now Iran, as well, but that's more difficult. I'd like to get to know the whole world.

- And so you should.