I found this little book in my new favorite used book store, on the “books about books” shelf. Borges on Writing is a transcription of the closed sessions that Columbia University hosted with the author and their graduate writing students in 1971. Borges and his translator comment in three sessions on fiction, poetry, and translation. If you don’t like Borges or aren’t familiar with some of his works and biography, this book wouldn’t appeal very much. The gems are scattered fairly generously throughout the book, but the format, is, after all, a Q&A session, an interview, which is precisely what you get.
At the end of the book is a short address from Borges to the university called “The Writer’s Apprenticeship.” Here is the first paragraph, an example of the gems to be panned from this little book.
The poet’s trade, the writer’s trade, is a strange one. Chesterton said: “Only one thing is needful – everything.” To a writer this everything is more than an encompassing word; it is literal. It stand for the chief, for the essential, human experiences. For example, a writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer – to be living a kind of double life.
8.0 / 10.0.
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