Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges by Fernando Sorrentino

Author:Fernando Sorrentino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Published: 2012-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

sixth

conversation

The Dictionary of Argentinisms — The First Book — Evaristo Carriego — Twentieth-Century Spanish Writers — Alfonso Reyes — The Library and the Poultry Market — Benefits of Peronism — Discépolo’s Fame — Conan Doyle: The Kittens and the Loaves — The Strawberry Roan — Facundo vs. Martín Fierro — The Cheshire Cat — Kafka and Henry James — The Short Story and the Novel

F.S. Why do you dislike poems such as “El general Quiroga va en coche al muere” (General Quiroga Goes to His Death in a Carriage)?

J.L.B. The poem—let’s use that term—“El general Quiroga va en coche al muere” now seems to me a kind of decalcomania. I don’t even know how I had the nerve to write a poem on a subject that had already been definitively treated by Sarmiento, who invented Facundo Quiroga—more or less.1 I exaggerated its gaucho flavor when I wrote it, and had to modify that in later editions.2 For example, I had written:

las ánimas en pena de fletes y cristianos

(both broncos and baptized like unshriven souls)

Later, as I re-read it, I thought that business of broncos and baptized came across like a man of letters attempting to sound like a gaucho, and so I changed it to “de hombres y de caballos” (men and horses), which I thought was more natural. In addition, I think that poem has one essential defect: it was written to be picturesque, which is to say it was written from the outside. On the other hand, I believe there’s another poem of mine—with an analogous theme, a poem on the death of Francisco Narciso de Laprida, entitled “Poema conjetural” (Conjectural Poem)—in which we have a historical theme minus any overabundance of ponchos, mustangs, and all the other devices of the Buenos Aires writer when he wants to sound like a gaucho, and which is written the other way around; that is, I try to feel what the man felt, might have felt, or must have felt. That poem, like another—which I believe is even worse, if it’s possible to imagine anything worse—“La fundación mítica de Buenos Aires” (The Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires), is the exercise in picturesqueness of a fledgling writer, and I’ve always thought it strange that anyone might take it seriously, except as mere entertainment.

F.S. Then you mean it was difficult for you to come to your present linguistic convictions.

J.L.B. Yes. The truth is that to reach the point of writing in a more or less uncluttered manner, a more or less decorous manner, I’ve had to reach the age of seventy. Because there was a time when I wanted to write in Old Spanish; later I tried to write in the manner of those seventeenth-century authors who, in turn, were trying to write like Seneca—a Latinized Spanish. And then it occurred to me that it was my duty to be Argentinean. So I acquired a dictionary of Argentinisms and devoted myself to being a professional died-in-the-wool Argentinean to such an extent that my

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