This
interview was conducted in July 1966, in conversations I held with Borges at
his office in the Biblioteca Nacional, of which he is the director. The room,
recalling an older Buenos Aires, is not really an office at all but a large, ornate,
high-ceilinged chamber in the newly renovated library. On the walls—but far too
high to be easily read, as if hung with diffidence—are various academic
certificates and literary citations. There are also several Piranesi etchings,
bringing to mind the nightmarish Piranesi ruin in Borges's story, “The
Immortal.” Over the fireplace is a large portrait; when I asked Borges's
secretary, Miss Susana Quinteros, about the portrait, she responded in a
fitting, if unintentional echo of a basic Borgesean theme: “No importa. It's a
reproduction of another painting.”
