Annette Haas arrives at the appointment with British punctuality, extends her hand with Germanic cordiality and pronounces her greeting with Castilian words. The place of the meeting was chosen by her: a bar in front of the train station of Constitución, on the Brasil Avenue, where the aroma of the old, so typical of the south of Buenos Aires, can be breathed; a faint tango melody sounds in the background. We sat at the table and ordered coffee.

Annette was born in Germany, but after finishing school she went to study Literature in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland. She specialized in Latin American literature and focused her doctoral thesis on the work of Jorge Luis Borges. She is currently teaching at the University of Dublin, in Ireland. Her visit to Buenos Aires is made within the framework of the presentation of a book of her that has been published in Dublin: The quest for God in the work of Borges, which analyzes in depth the work of Borges and its meeting points with different philosophical and religious doctrines.

—What led you to focus your studies towards Latin American literature?

—In my first contact with the Spanish language, which took place as a result of a vacation I spent with my parents in Barcelona, I was attracted by its sound. Then I began to study it and it did not take long for me to start reading Spanish-speaking authors. The first ones I read were, in fact, Spaniards, like Cervantes and Camilo José Cela; but when I started reading Latin American writers I discovered a world that was new to me in several aspects. I think that is due to the particular Latin American history and geography. There is practically no other part of the world that has suffered such an abrupt cut in its natural course as that which meant the conquest of America carried out by the European invaders. The manifestations of this fracture can be found in every manifestation of Latin American culture, and in particular in its literature. I believe that because of this, the always laborious search for one's own identity acquires a unique aspect in this part of the world. It happens that English knows English from times immemorial, the German does not find greater difficulties to recognize himself in the old Norman towns; But where should the Argentine, the Uruguayan, the Peruvian, the Colombian? The past is not presented to them as the untouched place where they are comfortable with their origin, but they are discovered with the implacable violence of the uncertain, of the indefinite. While in Europe history is a mirror that returns a clear image and works as deception or intellectual palliative against existential angst, in Latin America takes the abominable form of the tail of a scorpion that stings its flesh with crude indifference. My interest in Latin American literature is then easily explained if we take into account that it is from the question about one's identity (what am I?) That we construct our way of interpreting the world, our worldview, what we Germans call the weltanschauung. And, within the Latin Americans, it is Borges who in my opinion has been able to express better that discomfort experienced by the being in the fruitless search for oneself.

—However, Borges has been accused of inhumanity, as if he were no more than an intellect at the service of fiction.

—This appreciation originates in the realization that Borges creates his fictions, mainly drawing on theories and doctrines, which is true, but anyone who approaches his work with a minimum of depth could never call it dehumanizing. In the first place, we can not fail to notice that all intellectual elaboration, no matter how abstract it is, inevitably has its origin in the human being. The philosophical doctrines, and also the religious ones, are human because they come from the human being. And if we take into account that intelligence is what makes us human, what differentiates us from other beasts, should not these detractors, in any case, have described Borges' work as too human? This is more evident if we look at the theories that Borges uses tend to have the human being's problem as its axis. But, in addition, in his texts he does not content himself with explaining or turning over these doctrines, but he always incorporates them in a critical way, discovering in the last instance that all of them are nothing more than a fiction that man creates. At the end of the day he shows us the naked man, stripped of the clothes that can be provided by doctrines and theories. It is clear who prefer those narratives that show a particular person who suffers and struggles against a particular threat, which perhaps deepens in the psychology of the protagonist and ultimately result in a kind of expression of immediate reality. Borges may be far away from this kind of reader, but this feature of Borges' work takes on a profound meaning when one realizes, as he once said, that "the generic can be more intense than the concrete". And, finally, it is true that many stories Borges elaborates from a personal experience as "The South" that arises from a blow that occurred in the head with the frame of a window. Borges himself used to say that his personal suffering and the circumstances that he has had to live have conditioned his work.

—But let's place ourselves in the religious plane. Borges declared himself invariably agnostic, however, God and religion are frequently mentioned in his work. How can this apparent incompatibility be explained between Borges, who in an interview defines himself as an agnostic and the one who names God again and again in poems, stories and essays?

—We must understand, first of all, that when Borges approaches a certain topic and develops it using different theories, it is not necessarily reflecting his thought, his belief or his attitude towards life; but it uses those doctrines, whether metaphysical or theological, as an engine for the creation of fictions and not because it adheres fully to them. His definition of metaphysics is famous as a branch of fantasy literature. Borges does not seem less fictitious than the other, both are products of the imagination; so is God, it is an invention of man, of an idea. But, in addition, however much God is mentioned in his work, it is not the existence or nonexistence of God that is found in it. The mention of God usually takes place so that another topic appears, one that is practically in all its production; I refer to the impossibility that man experiences to comprehend and comprehend the universe. The universe can be visualized as an irreducible and incomprehensible chaos for every human mind, or it can be supposed as the creation of a god and then have a divine order but also unattainable for man. In both cases, man is equally puzzled by the universe that shelters him. The image preferred by Borges to represent this theme is that of a labyrinth of infinite dimensions; but such a labyrinth can not be the work of man himself, with which he sometimes concedes the possibility that some god has intervened in his creation and others suggests that he has not had an origin, that he has existed forever. Here is another fundamental theme for Borges: time and eternity. In the book of essays "History of the Eternity" it deals with depth of it and is present in many of his stories; he is especially interested in the idea of an eternal and cyclical time, that is, everything is repeated over and over again. But returning to the notion of God in Borges, one might think that when he declared himself an agnostic, he would do so thinking more than anything about a personal god, since he seems to have shown more affinity with pantheistic formulas. Borges is the intellectual denial of divinity with a longing for totality. Fruit of this desire are the stories, such as "El aleph" or "The writing of God", in which an object accessible to man contains the vast universe. For a believer that would be the same as having a religious experience, a face-to-face encounter with the deity.

—We will have to conclude that Borges was a believer even if he did not admit it?
—It would be a grave mistake to reduce an author as complex as Borges to the religious aspect. Let us recognize that the simple belief in a supreme being is simplifying, exhausting all intellectual search. The work of Borges is at the antipodes of the complacent attitude of a devout or faithful believer. However, I do not think we should study his work considering that the metaphysical and religious allusions in it have only an aesthetic purpose; I think we should address them seriously to find their truth value.

—Which were the doctrines that most influenced his work?

—There are two philosophers who were clearly influential in him. One was Schopenhauer, Borges learned German only to be able to read it in his original language. His philosophy of the will is present in stories such as "Guayaquil" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". The other significant philosopher for Borges was Berkeley, who postulated that there is no objective reality outside of one's own consciousness, that only what is perceived exists. It could also be mentioned Hume, continuation of Berkeley's idealism. In direct relation to this philosophy, Borges deals in numerous stories and essays with the theme of an illusory universe, the idea that what we call reality is nothing more than an illusion, the product of a dream or a nightmare. Let's also see that his interest in Buddhism is not accidental, as it is well known teaches that the world is illusory.

—You said before that you found in Borges' work some affinity with pantheism, could you point out in what aspects you find it?
—Some of the recurrent themes in Borges are linked to this current of thought. We have already mentioned that of an object, such as a point in space or a coin, which contains in itself the infinite universe; another is that a man is all men, and a third is that a key moment can contain the revelation of a lifetime. These three themes in the background contain a pantheistic conception, the idea that each part is the whole and the whole is each part.

—Which is the story of Borges that most moved you?

—Borges dazzled me from the first reading. The first story I read was "The South" and it had such an impact on me that it led me to enter more and more into his work. Is that Borges is a writer to read and stay in it. This particular story I reread once more just before leaving for here. It is a story in which the subject of courage is clearly discussed, typical of the first stage of Borges in which the world of compadritos and cuchilleros appeared; but it also embodies metaphysical problems and certain games over time. The result is a story, of the fantastic genre, which develops in an undefined between two worlds; In it, what he commented at the beginning of this interview regarding the fruitless search for his own identity becomes clear. The protagonist, Juan Dahlmann, appears as an individual who leads a conflictive existence between two lineages: the civilized one that he inherited from his paternal grandfather (a Protestant pastor of German origin) and the barbarian, whom Borges describes as romantic, which was that of his maternal grandfather (a Creole soldier who died at the hands of the Indians). The life he leads as a librarian corresponds to the first one; but his longing is for the second, a longing that is materialized in the hull of a stay in the south that he had inherited from his maternal family and that he always strove to conserve despite never having gone. The south is identified as the place where civilization, European heritage, gives way to barbarism, that romantic world of knife-makers. There is a lot of biographical in this story: Borges was a librarian when he wrote it and always looked at the world of the Creole suburb with a melancholy air, and also in his ancestors that distinction of origins is found. Both Dalhmann and Borges appreciate old books and rare editions. In addition, the knot of the story is produced from a blow that occurs Dahlmann with the swing of a window, a blow that Borges had suffered and that motivated him to write it. After the coup, Dalhmann must be admitted to a hospital; he has a long and uncomfortable hospitalization, but finally he recovers and is discharged. With joy he receives the news that for his final convalescence he will have to settle in the southern ranch. I had to take the train at the Constitución station. As there was time until the train left, he went to a bar on Brasil Street where a huge black cat "allowed himself to be caressed by people". While caressing the cat, Dahlmann had the thought that this contact with the animal was illusory since while man lives in time, in the succession of instants, the animal experiences an eternal present. Finally he took the train and started the journey to the south. The narrator says: "he could suspect that he traveled to the past and not just to the south"; thus it gives rise to a significant chronotope: to travel to the Argentine south is to return to that romantic past of his maternal lineage. At some point, the train stopped in the middle of the field. The protagonist left and walked until he reached a warehouse where his luck was decided with a knife duel. But at the moment of his death, the story returns for a moment to the hospital; both identities of Dahlmann, that of the civilized librarian and that of the brave Creole, the real and the illusory, emerge with identical force in that final and revealing moment.

The interview concludes leaving the pleasant feeling of having entered for a moment the dazzling borgiano universe. Annette has devoted so many years to the study of the work of our great writer that something of Borges himself seems to be in she. One wonders if it will be casual to handle fluently the same three languages that also Borges dominated: English, Spanish and German. Only when I see her win the exit door, while a cat comes up to me to pet it, I notice her travel bag. Through the window I see her hurry up the stairs of the train station. Going to the south. Going to the past.

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• This post was translated from Spanish. See the original in: https://steemit.com/spanish/@reyvaj/la-borgiana-del-norte-entrevista