I found this Borges
‘quotation when reading the number 39 of The Paris Review of 1966. It was an
interview to him at his office in the Biblioteca Nacional of Buenos Aires when
he was the director of this institution. As it has always happened to me,
Borges' texts seem to be written to me. I have always felt personally alluded
by those texts. The last several years, I have considered if the circumstances
of being involved numerous times in small talks on a number of topics -that I
do not want to list here- have limited my already limited writing skills -even
the reading, the serious reading time has been affected... and, all of the
sudden, Borges again, talking to me, from his blindness, from his library...
"I have known many poets here who
have written well—very fine stuff—with delicate moods and so on—but if you talk
with them, the only thing they tell you is smutty stories or they speak of
politics in the way that everybody does, so that really their writing turns out
to be kind of sideshow. They had learned writing in the way that a man might
learn to play chess or to play bridge. They were not really poets or writers at
all. It was a trick they had learned, and they had learned it thoroughly. They
had the whole thing at their finger ends. But most of them—except four or five,
I should say—seemed to think of life as having nothing poetic or mysterious
about it. They take things for granted. They know that when they have to write,
then, well, they have to suddenly become rather sad or ironic."
