Jorge Luis Borges Read Online Free PDF

story has the idea, what I said in my first lecture here, that every time a book is read or reread, then something happens to the book.
    BURGIN: It becomes modified.
    BORGES: Yes, modified, and every time you read it, it’s really a new experience.
    BURGIN: Since you see the world’s literature as constantly changing, as continuously being modified by time, does this make you feel a sense of futility about creating so-called original works of literature?
    BORGES: But not only futility. I see it as something living and growing. I think of the world’s literature as a kind of forest, I mean it’s tangled and it entangles us but it’s growing. Well, to come back to my inevitable image of a labyrinth, well it’s a living labyrinth, no? A living maze. Perhaps the word labyrinth is more mysterious than the word maze.
    BURGIN: Maze is almost too mechanical a word.
    BORGES: Yes, and you feel the “amazement” in the word. With labyrinth you think of Crete and you think of the Greeks. While in maze you may think of Hampton Court, well, not very much of a labyrinth, a kind of toy labyrinth.
    BURGIN: What about “Emma Zunz,” a story of a living labyrinth?
    BORGES: It’s very strange, because in a story like “The Immortal” I did my best to be magnificent, while the story “Emma Zunz” is a very drab story, a very grey story, and even the name Emma was chosen because I thought it particularly ugly, but not strikingly ugly, no? And the name Zunz is a very poor name, no? I remember I had a great friend named Emma and she said to me, “But why did you give that awful girl my name?” And then, of course, I couldn’t say the truth, but the truth was that when I wrote down the name Emma with the two
m
’s and Zunz with the two
z
’s I was trying to get an ugly and at the same time a colourless name, and I had quite forgotten that one of my best friends was called Emma. The name seems so meaningless, so insignificant, doesn’t it sound that way to you?
    BURGIN: But one still feels compassion for her, I mean, she is a kind of tool of destiny.
    BORGES: Yes, she’s a tool of destiny, but I think there’s something very mean about revenge, even a just revenge, no? Something futile about it. I dislike revenge. I think that the onlypossible revenge is forgetfulness, oblivion. That’s the only revenue. But, of course, oblivion makes for forgiving, no?
    BURGIN: Well, I know you don’t like revenge, and I don’t think you lose your temper much either, do you?
    BORGES: I’ve been angry perhaps, well, I’m almost seventy, I feel I’ve been angry four or five times in my life, not more than that.
    BURGIN: That’s remarkable. You were angry at Perón, certainly.
    BORGES: Yes. That was different.
    BURGIN: Of course.
    BORGES: One day when I was speaking about Coleridge I remember four students walked into my class and told me that a decision had been taken by an assembly for a strike and they asked me to stop my lecturing. And then I was taken aback and suddenly I found that without knowing it I had walked from this side of the room to the other, that I was facing those four young men, telling them that a man may make a decision for himself but not for other people, and that were they crazy enough to think that I would stand that kind of nonsense. And then they stared at me because they were astounded at my taking it in that way. Of course, I realizedthat I was an elderly man, half blind, and they were four hefty, four husky young men, but I was so angry that I said to them, “Well, as there are many ladies here, if you have anything more to say to me, let’s go out on the street and have it out.”
    BURGIN: You said that?
    BORGES: Yes, and then, well, they walked away and then I said, “Well, after this interlude, I think we may go on.” And I was rather ashamed of having shouted, and of having felt so angry. That was one of the few times in my life that thing has happened to me.
    BURGIN: How long ago was this?
    BORGES: