OSVALDO FERRARI. Every now and then, we have recalled two writers who have dealt essentially with the sea. The first is ... 

JORGE LUIS BORGES. Joseph Conrad? 

FERRARI. Joseph Conrad, and the second is the author of Moby-Dick.
 

BORGES. Yes, and they have nothing in common, nothing at all. Conrad cultivated an oral style or, rather, a fictitiously oral style. Of course they are the stories of that gentleman Marlowe, the narrator of nearly all of them. On the other hand, Herman Melville, in Moby-Dick ... though it's a very original book it reveals two influences-two men are projected onto that book in a favorable way ... or, better put, two voices resound in him: one voice belongs to Shakespeare and the other to Thomas Carlyle. I believe you can detect these two influences in his style. And he has benefitted from them.
    In Moby-Dick, the theme is surely the dread of whiteness. He could have been led, he could have first thought that the whale that mutilated the captain had to be singled out from the other whales. Then he must have thought that he could render it different by making it white. But that is a very mean hypothesis. It's better to suppose that he felt a dread of whiteness. The idea that white could be a terrible color. Usually we associate the idea of terror with the dark, with what is black, then with red and blood. But Melville saw that the color white may be terrible too. Perhaps he found a hint of it in a book he was reading ... reading is no less vivid than any other human experience.
    I think that he found the idea in Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Because the theme of that novel's last pages, which begins with the water of the islands, that magical water, that veined water, is by the end about the dread of white. And that's explained by the Antarctic land which was once invaded by white giants which is hinted at in the last pages. Pym declares that anything that is white terrifies those people. And Melville took advantage of that for Moby-Dick (‘took advantage' is a pejorative phrase I lament using). Anyway, that's what happened. And there's that especially interesting chapter called 'The Whiteness of the Whale' where he eloquently expands-an eloquence I cannot repeat here-on whiteness as terrible. 

FERRARI. And as immense, perhaps. 

BORGES. And immense. Well, I have said white and, as I like etymologies so much, I will remind you of a fact not sufficiently divulged about the English word 'black', the Spanish blanco and, of course, the French blanc, the Portuguese branco and the Italian bianco - these words have the same roots. In English I believe that an Anglo-Saxon word was the origin of both 'bleak' and 'black'. And 'black' in English and blanco in Spanish have the same root. Initially, 'black' in English and blanco in Spanish did not mean black but something without color. In English, this not having color suggested darkness or 'black' while in the Romance languages it suggested light and clarity. Thus bianco in Italian, blanc in French and branco in Portuguese, meaning white. It's odd that this word branched out into two opposite meanings- we tend to see white as opposed to black. But the word it proceeds from means 'without color'. So, as I've said, in English it suggested the dark, meaning black and in Spanish clarity, meaning white.

FERRARI. There's chiaroscuro in the etymology. 

BORGES. That's right, chiaroscuro, an excellent observation. A while ago, more or less when I discovered La Divina Commedia I also discovered that great book Moby-Dick. I believe that the latter, upon publication, remained invisible for some time. I have an old and excellent edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the eleventh edition published in 1912. In it there's a not-too-long paragraph about Melville, describing him as a writer of travel novels. And though it mentions Moby-Dick, it is not distinguished from the rest of his books. It's in the list but there is no mention that Moby-Dick is far more than a traveler’s tale or a book about the sea. It's a book referring to something essential. It amounts, according to some, to a struggle against evil but taken on in a mistaken way which is Captain Ahab's manner. But what is curious is that he imposes his madness onto his crew, onto everyone in the whaling boat. And Melville was a whaler who knew that life thoroughly and intimately. Although he came from a great New England family, he was a whaler. And in many of his stories speaks, for example, about Chile, islands close to Chile, that is, he knew the seas.
    I would like to make another observation about Moby-Dick, something I don't think has been pointed out, although almost everything else has been said about it - Moby-Dick's last page repeats in a more wordy fashion that famous canto from Inferno in which, alluding to Ulysses, Dante says that the sea closed over them. And the last line of Moby-Dick says exactly the same thing though with different words. Now I don't know if Melville had this line from the Ulysses episode in mind, that is, the ship that sinks, the sea that closes over the ship, but you do find it in the last page of Moby-Dick as you do in the last line of that canto (I can't recall which one), the one in which the Ulysses episode, the most memorable in La Divina Commedia, is narrated. Although, what isn't memorable in La Divina Commedia? Everything is, but if I had to choose a canto, and there's no reason to have to, I would pick the Ulysses episode. That moves me more than the Paolo and Francesca episode, because there's something so mysterious in the fate of Dante's Ulysses. Of course, he's in the circle that corresponds to swindlers and fraudsters, to the deceit of the Trojan horse. But you feel that that is not the real reason.
    I have written an essay in my book Nueoe ensayos dantescos in which I state that Dante must have felt that what he had committed was perhaps forbidden to men because, for literary ends, he had to foresee decisions that Divine Providence would take on the day of the Last Judgment. Somewhere in La Divina Commedia Dante says that no one can predict God's decisions. But he does just that in his book when he condemns some to Hell, some to Purgatory and some others to Paradise. He could have thought that what he was doing was not blasphemous but it was not completely licit either that a man take those decisions. And so, in writing that book, he took on something forbidden.
    In the same way, Ulysses, wanting to explore the southern hemisphere and navigating by the stars, was doing something forbidden for which he was then punished. If not for this reason, then I do not know why. So I suggest that, consciously or unconsciously, there's a link, an affinity between Ulysses and Dante. And I reached that through Melville who doubtless knew Dante. During the long American Civil War, the greatest war in the nineteenth century, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translated Dante's La Divina Commedia into English. I first read Longfellow's version; much later I dared to read the Italian. I had the very mistaken notion that Italian wasn't very different from Spanish. Well, when spoken it is, but not when read. In any case, you have to read it as slowly as required by the book. The editions of the Commedia are excellent and if you do not understand a line, you can refer to the commentary. In the best editions, there's a note for each line, so it's hard not to understand the two (both laugh). Goodness, we have moved away from Melville ...
    Melville is evidently a great writer, in Moby-Dick and in his stories. A few years ago, in Buenos Aires, a book was published on the best short story. The title was obviously commercial. Four Argentine writers-Manuel Mujica Lainez, Ernesto Sabato, and perhaps Julio Cortazar and I-chose a story each. Sabato picked Melville's 'Bartleby', I picked Hawthorne's 'Wakefield'. I think someone picked a Poe story. That is, there were three American writers. I think Mujica Lainez picked a Japanese or Chinese story. They were published in a volume with our photographs and the reasons for our choice. It was rather successful and revealed four admirable stories. 

FERRARI. Yes, a great idea. 

BORGES. A great publisher's idea. 

FERRARI. As for Conrad-you once told me that his stories reminded you not only of the sea but, to be specific, of the Parana Delta. 

BORGES. In Conrad's first books, when he resorted to Malayan landscapes, I used my memories of Tigre as illustrations. Thus when I read Conrad, I slipped in or inserted remembered landscapes from Tigre, as it was the most similar. By the way, Buenos Aires is an odd case-a great city that has an almost tropical or Malayan archipelago near it. That's very rare, isn't it? and with reeds. I was recently in Brazil and rediscovered something that Eca de Queiroz's novels had revealed to me. Something called Bengala, doubtless due to the Bengala reeds. Someone once said to me 'Your bengala,' which is Irish-made, and handed me my walking stick, and I remembered that word (laughs). It seemed so lovely that a walking stick is called bengala, because 'walking stick' doesn't recall anything in particular. In Spanish, a bastón suggests clubs, a long ace of clubs. While bengala brings back a whole region; and in Bengali, the word 'bungalow' is also derived from bengala. 

FERRARI. Borges, I see that the sea, through Conrad and Melville, is very close to you, that you often bear it in mind.

BORGES. Yes, always. It's so lively and mysterious-the theme of Moby-Dick's first chapter, the theme of the sea as something alarming, something alarming in a terrible as well as in a beautiful way ... 

FERRARI. Beauty creates this sense of danger. 

BORGES. Yes, danger is created by beauty and beauty is, in any case, one of the forms of danger and anxiety. 

FERRARI. Especially if we recall Plato's phrase from The Symposium: 'Facing the immense sea of beauty'. 

BORGES. Ah, what a lovely phrase. Yes, important words. 

FERRARI. The sea. 

BORGES. The sea, yes, that's so present in Portuguese literature and so absent in Spanish literature. For example, Quixote ... 

FERRARI. Set on a tableland. 

BORGES. The Portuguese, on the other hand, the Scandinavians and-yes-the French since Hugo, feel the sea. Baudelaire felt it; Rimbaud in his 'Le Bateau ivre' felt a sea that he had never seen. Coleridge wrote 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' without having seen the sea; when he did see it, he felt betrayed. And Rafael Cansinos Assens wrote an admirable poem about the sea. I congratulated him and he answered, 'I hope one day to see it.' That is, the sea in Assens' imagination and the sea in Coleridge's imagination were superior to the mere sea of geography (laughs). 

FERRARI. As everyone's noticed; for once we have strayed from the plains. 

BORGES. That's true.