Borges on his mother

FERRARI. But other translations by your mother also come to mind, which were exceptional, like the one of D. H. Lawrence’s stories.

BORGES. Yes, the story that gives the book its title is ‘The Woman who Rode Away’ and she translated it, accurately I think, as ‘La mujer que se fue a caballo’. And then (why not admit it) she translated, and I later revised—I barely altered anything—that novel, The Wild Palms, by William Faulkner. She also translated other books from French, from English, and they were excellent translations.

FERRARI. Yes, but perhaps you didn’t agree with her taste for D. H. Lawrence? I’ve never heard you talk about D. H. Lawrence.

BORGES. . . . No. She liked D. H. Lawrence but I, in the end, I haven’t had much luck with him. Well, when my father died, she started translating, and then she thought of a way of getting closer to him, or of seeming to get closer to him, which was to acquire a deeper knowledge of English.

FERRARI. Ah, what a lovely story.

BORGES. Yes, and in the end she enjoyed it so much that she couldn’t read Spanish any more, and she was one of the many people here who reads English. . . . There was a time when all society women read English, and as they read a lot, and read good authors, it meant that they could be witty in English. Spanish, for them, was rather, I don’t know, what Guaraní would be for a woman in Corrientes or Paraguay, no? A household language. So that I’ve known a lot of women here who were effortlessly witty in English but dreadfully banal in Spanish. Of course, the English that they’d read was a literary English while the Spanish they knew was only a household Spanish.

FERRARI. I always thought, Borges, that being witty in English was one of your best-kept secrets.

BORGES. No. Goethe said that one shouldn’t admire French writers too much because ‘The language writes poetry for them.’ He thought that the French language was immensely resourceful. But I think that if someone writes a good page of French or English, that doesn’t permit any judgement on them—they’re languages that are so refined that they almost write themselves. On the other hand, if someone manages to write a good page of Spanish, they’ve had to get around so many problems, so many forced rhymes, so many ento sounds which combine with ente, so many unaccented compound words. . . . To write a good page of Spanish, some literary ability is essential. In English or in French that’s not the case, they’re languages that have been so well crafted that they almost write themselves.
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FERRARI. Talking about that—courage seems to be another of her characteristics. One has to remember the telephone calls!

BORGES. Yes, she once received a telephone call and a duly coarse, menacing voice said to her, ‘I’m going to kill you and your son.’ ‘Why señor?’ my mother asked with a rather surprising courtesy. ‘Because I’m a Peronist.’ ‘Well,’ my mother said, ‘as far as my son is concerned, he leaves the house at 10 every morning. All you have to do is wait for him and kill him. As for me, I’m now (I don’t remember what age she was) 80-something years old—I would advise you not to waste your time talking on the telephone! Because if you don’t hurry, I’ll die before you get to me.’ Then the voice put the phone down. I asked her the day after, ‘Did someone call last night?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘some fool called me at two in the morning,’ and then she repeated the conversation. After that there were no more calls. Of course, that nuisance-caller terrorist must have been so shocked that he didn’t dare repeat his offence.
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FERRARI. And tell me, do you think that your preoccupation over the years with ethics, with morality, could have been passed on to you by your mother in particular?

BORGES. And . . . I’d like to think so. I think that my father was also an ethical man.

FERRARI. Both of them, of course.

BORGES. And they’re disciplines that have been lost in this country, no? I’m proud of not being a criollo schemer—I’m criollo, but the most credulous criollo, it’s easy to fool me, I allow myself to be fooled. . . . Of course, every person who allows himself to be fooled is in some way an accomplice of the people doing the fooling.

FERRARI. That’s entirely possible. As for your mother’s familiarity with literature . . .

BORGES. Yes, the love that she had for literature is remarkable. And then, her literary intuition. More or less around the years of the centenary celebrations of independence, she read Queirós’ novel The Illustrious House of Ramires. Queirós was unknown at that time, at least here, because he died in the last year of the century. And she said to my father, ‘It’s the best novel I have read in my life.’ ‘And who’s it by?’ my father asked. And she said, ‘It’s by a Portuguese author, who is called Eça de Queirós.’ And she’s been proved right, it seems.

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