With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires A Memoir

In an engaging series of contending, amusing, and philosophically poignant conversations, Willis Barnstone offers a fresh and touching portrait of Jorge Luis Borges in his later years. Against the backdrop of Argentina's Dirty War and the tragedy of los desaparecidos, we accompany Borges as he walks the streets of Buenos Aires, being greeted by well-wishers. We sit in as he teaches a class in Old English, at the end of which students are asked to read aloud from James, or Whitman, or from Poe's "visionary and atrocious wonders". Borges expresses his opinions on the Malvinas/Falklands war ("a struggle between two old bald men, fighting over a comb") and on poets from T S. Eliot ("a good poet but a stuffy critic") and Robert Frost ("a fine poet but a terrible farmer") to Ezra Pound ("I have one word for Ezra Pound. Fraud"). Readers learn why Borges said of Robert Lowell, "I might like his poems - but only if he keeps his trousers on". Whether expressed in the familiarity of his own apartment, the intimacy of adjoining airplane seats, or the formality of an address to a throng of academics, Borges's words are captured here in context. The blindness and the unique vision for which he is renowned are evident throughout, both in his prodigious feats of textual memory and in his recounting of dreamlike narratives that later would be transferred to paper and print. As Barnstone chronicles events in Argentina and the United States, Maria Kodama's role as Borges's reader and travel companion becomes abundantly clear. The book contains a moving portrait of their marriage in Switzerland, when Borges was on his deathbed.