Borges on national literatures

The Paris Review Interviews Vols. I – IV keep giving. In volume I, Borges says in a 1967 interview, “I’m going to deliver a course of lectures on poetry. And as I think that poetry is more or less untranslatable, and as I think English literature—and that includes America—is by far the richest in the world, I will take most, if not all of my examples, from English poetry.”

Now, things may have changed since 1967, and maybe Borges today would have a different opinion than Borges then, but I still think it useful to juxtapose him with Horace Engdahl, who I wrote about in Kundera, Horace Engdahl, and the Nobel Prize. Engdahl said:

Speaking generally about American literature, however, he said U.S. writers are “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” dragging down the quality of their work.

“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”

I think the U.S. is neither too isolate nor too cosmopolitan; it merely is, like the literatures of most other countries. I cannot really comment on Borges’ assertion that English literature is richer or less rich than other literatures because I am not familiar enough with the other literatures to say, but to have such an assertion is to remember that, when making pronouncements of small mindedness, the person with the greatest small mindedness is often the person making the pronouncement.

To me, the vastness of literature in almost any major language is so great that it is probably impossible to experience all of it. Hence the comment I love from Ursula K. Le Guin: “Literature is huge — they can’t fit her even into the Library of Congress, because she keeps not talking English. She is very big, very polyglot, very old, even older than I am by about 3000 years, and she weighs a lot.”

To read the Paris Review Interviews is to be reminded of that, and the vastness of influence, and yet how certain writers keep reappearing over and over. I am probably seeing more in these interviews than in all but a very tiny number of scholarly monographs. To read them is also to be reminded of literature’s evasive quality, and of its habit of squirming away from definition.