Sunday, September 29

For Bomarzo, Mujica Lainez has received First Place in the National Prize for Literature. I read to Borges the statement of the award:

"We are for many---perhaps the majority---a curious breed, an absurd lot, idolators of words, minstrels of images, inventors of labyrinths, those who take harsh reality and mold it and adapt it to the laws of its random games; and we are also---perhaps for only a few---those who carry out the most difficult and subtle tasks, most passionately humane, the only who dare to descend, with their tiny torchlights, to the most frightening, pathetic and beautiful inner depths of the souls who surround us....Accompanying me is my Duke of Bomarzo, so inseparable that its bulk is like my shadow cast over the marbles and tapestries of the 16th century."

BORGES: "No? It says that? You're making that up." And he bursts out laughing.

He tells me he has corrected his book on the Antiguas literaturas germánicas, for a translation: "They don't pay me more to correct it. According to Silvina and Peyrou, I shouldn't....What's important to me is to tell the truth."