VA: In the past, you've defined the term word as "the fabric we use to dress our thoughts." What is a "book," then?

IS: I've seen analogies between books and bombs, tombs, pharmacies, wineries, and grocery stores. For me a book is a closet where all sorts of customs are stored. It is left to us to pick and choose.

VA: The metaphor of the closet is often used these days, but I had never heard it in relation to the book.

IS: Our present culture gives the impression of moving swiftly away from the printed word. Enter an airport and what do you see? Graphic signs for exits, baggage claim, car rentals, toilets, information. These days it is possible to be monolingual and illiterate and travel from Buenos Aires to Mumbay without obstacle. But the printed word remains the means for traveling, not longitudinally, but through time. Language survives only in books. It is fixed for future generations.

VA: Most of what goes on in life doesn't make it into books, though.

IS: Mercifully. Books should discriminate. And when approaching books, readers should also be choosy. According to the Bowker Annual, in 2003 approximately 190,000 books were published in the United States alone. What on earth could they contain? The vast majority doesn't deserve a place in the library; they belong in the trash dump. Take self-help manuals: their purpose is to make the reader feel good in the here and now. Good books never do that; they are always skeptical of the present.

VA: And "library," how should the word be defined?

IS: Ay, ay, ay. It is a bazaar of ideas, a portal to alternative dimensions, and a space of absolute openness. In the dead of night, when no one is around, I believe books in a library forsake their order, jump out of their shelves and dance around in order to chat and gossip with one another. I imagine pages ceding from their original binding and inserting themselves between other pages in other covers. Were they to meet, what would Spinoza and Maquiavelli talk about? Karl Marx and Oscar Wilde? Langston Hughes and Marina Tsvetaeva? It is a scene reminiscent of Jonathan Swift's "Battle of the Books," of the melee he imagined in 1710 in the library in St. James, except that in my vision there is less of a fight and more of eroticism. Volumes penetrate one another. They toss and turn as they come in contact with their kin.

VA: Ay, ay, ay is right. Let's get back on safe ground, at least for a little while. I like the reference to the bazaar. Today libraries are market oriented.

IS: In the United States, in order to justify the public money they depend on, they have to do everything in their power to bring in bodies, even if those bodies aren't interested in reading. And so they improvise themselves as classrooms, theaters, exhibit areas, lecture halls, play rooms, shopping areas.

VA: Shopping areas?

IS: Just as in the case of museums, in places like the New York Public Library, the store is an essential destination. In a consumer society like ours, this trend is inevitable. Art for art's sake is redundant. So is literature for literature's sake. In order to be worthy, a book has to sell.

VA: We often hear of the decline in reading among the young. Do you agree?

IS: I don't. Reading is a solitary activity. It is also elitist.

VA: Anti-democratic?

IS: No, reading has always been the endeavor of a small, open-minded group of people. There is no need to expand the size of it. Again, success in literature has nothing to do with sales. A good book is a good book even if it has only a couple of readers.

VA: Does that elite include politicians?

IS: Seldom. I have little patience for politicians. My vision of a utopian future excludes them altogether. Yes, just like Plato did to the poets I would do to politicians: make their profession irrelevant.

VA: Is that possible?

IS: Probably not, but this isn't reason enough to stop hoping. At the very least, the model should be Denmark, not the United States.

VA: How so?

IS: Do you know the name of Denmark's prime minister?

VA: I don't.

IS: Neither do I. In truth, I don't even know if that country has a president or a prime minister. That, to me, is a triumph. In America there is an obnoxious cult of political personality, which dates back to the Founding Fathers. Do we need to know every single detail about Thomas Jefferson's life, what he ate for breakfast, what he thought about agriculture, and so on? That idol-worship extends to current presidents and, to a lesser extent, cabinet members. George W. Bush strikes me as a rather insignificant individual, one with whom I wouldn't spend even half an hour. Bill Clinton was slightly more interesting, but not enough to justify a dinner. Anonymity, I'm convinced, is best for politics.

VA: And for literature? Would you be as prolific if your name didn't appear on book covers?

IS: I would be. Yes, anonymity is also recommendable for literature.

VA: You're well known for your eloquent meditations on dictionaries. Is there an analogy between dictionaries and libraries?

IS: Like dictionaries, libraries have concealed information from the public. Think of erotica. Should it have a prominent place in them? As a grad student at Columbia University, I always chuckled while browsing through the periodical section of Butler Library, wondering why there was no subscription to Playboy. For better or for worse, isn't the magazine a record of our dreams? What makes it less useful than say The Onion? Aside from the photographs, it is famous for its in-depth interviews. Shouldn't students have access to this kind of magazine? In other words, libraries, like dictionaries, not only reveal information, they also hide it from their readers. The question of granting Playboy a place in Butler makes me think of Henry Spencer Ashbee, the nineteenth-century English collector of erotica. Like Sir Richard Francis Burton, he sought to rethink the Victorian code of morality — with limited success. Ashbee is also known as the possible author (known as "Walter") of My Secret Life, first published in 1888 and banned in England and the United States for years. It was only in 1966 that Grove Press published it. He also collected Don Quixotes. When the British Library came looking for a donation of the latter, he complied, but only on the condition that his erotica also made it to the stacks.

VA: It was reluctantly received, for it stayed for years hidden in the Private Case Collection and out of the General Catalogue and thus out of reach for most everyone.

IS: Yes, until 1965 Ashbee's collection, as well as the rest of the erotica held by the British Library, was available only to the institution's staff and to those with contacts in high places. But forty years later, the staff is still uncomfortable when anybody asks to see these volumes, for they sure ask a lot of questions before calling these books from the stacks.

VA: Has a library ever been turned into the protagonist of a novel?

IS: Jorge Luis Borges, of course, made the library a centerpiece of his oeuvre. Umberto Eco, in turn, put Borges inside a library in his thriller The Name of the Rose. These are only two references, though. Think of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Shakespeare, Heinrich Heine and Elias Canetti, Avicenna and Walter Benjamin, Edward Gibbon and the Umayyads, and libraries are prominent in Don Quixote and, not surprisingly given his tenure as assistant librarian, in Swift's Gulliver's Travels. And we must not forget Rabelais, where his Pantagruel visits the library of Saint Victor's in Paris, and Poe, who spiced his stories with quotes from a nonexistent library. One of the most erudite and entertaining reference volumes on the topic is Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading. (Its title is a take on Borges's A Universal History of Infamy.)

VA: With full rights to such a license, I might add, for the teenager Manguel read to the blind Borges several afternoons a week — and that's what led him on his path to literature. But you did not fall in love with books in quite the same way. How did your love affair with books begin?

IS: I wasn't a bookish child. Instead, I loved the outdoors: hiking, camping, playing sports. Soccer was my passion. I rooted for El América, a wealthy team owned by Televisa, perhaps its counterpart is Manchester United in the British League. I didn't begin reading in earnest until I was in my late teens.

VA: Which of your books do you cherish the most?

IS: In Mexico I was an assiduous book buyer. Public libraries were a disaster: ill-equipped, atrociously managed. I remember using, on occasion, the one at the Centro Deportivo Israelita. But mostly I bought books. The moment I fell in love with books, the romance was profound. And it was quite possessive, too. I needed to own everything I read: Hermann Hesse, Rabindranath Tagore, Sholem Asch, Pearl S. Buck. I lived in Copilco, in the southern parts of Mexico City. The Librería Gandhi opened sometime in the seventies. It was owned by a Jew whose family was into trade and manufacturing. He was a rebel, interested in intellectual — not in material — culture. I remember the business when it was still in its incipient stages; it was a veritable marketplace of ideas that catered to a middle-class esthetic. I recall reading literary supplements such as Sábado, edited by Huberto Batis and published by the newspaper Unomásuno. I remember running to "La Gandhi" to buy the latest book I had read about: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel. Has anyone ever studied the intellectual impact of a bookstore on a generation? La Gandhi was a bridge between Mexico and the outside world. It made us less nearsighted, more cosmopolitan. Over time, the books began to overwhelm the bookshelves I made at home. So I built more. When I moved to New York City in 1985, I brought with me only a small number. I remember agonizing over the list: which volumes should accompany me on my next stage in life?

VA: The first chapter of On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language is a lyrical description of that turning point. You even offer a list of the titles you chose to bring with you: Joyce, Kafka, Flaubert.

IS: Ironically, I never reopened most of them again — at least not those in translation. They were my companions for years. But my northbound migration was also a journey into different languages. Why read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Spanish if one is able to read it in the original? In subsequent travels, I availed myself of copies of Madame Bovary in French, Tevye the Dairyman in Yiddish, the Divine Comedy in Italian, The Scarlet Letter in English. Again, I began to accumulate volumes. Somehow I believed that possessing books was a statement of identity. My personal library needed to be not only multifarious, but chaotic. Yes, chaotic. I've always admired people able to organize their books. It doesn't come easy to me. The universe is in a permanent disorder, as is — or better, as was — my library. It came to the point that I didn't know how many books I owned. Worse, I didn't know where I had them. In my home in Amherst, Massachusetts, I had over 10,000 volumes. I ought to be honest: I was inspired by them but also overwhelmed. They took much space, externally and inside my mind. Then, in early 2005, a close friend of mine died a tragic death. He was in his early seventies, overweight, a chain-smoker, absolutely careless about his diet. He suffered an aneurism. One of his legs needed to be amputated. He was semi-conscious in the hospital for a couple of weeks. He and I had had a falling out some months before and didn't have time to make peace with each other. His dying was traumatic. To cleanse myself, I abruptly decided to organize my library. But no sooner did I embark on the task than I paid attention to something my wife Alison had been telling me for a long time: with an outstanding library a couple of blocks away from our house, and ready access to the Internet everywhere, did I really need to own all those books? I suddenly made a choice: I would donate 4,000 volumes to the library, and 500 more to launch a special collection devoted to two fields: Jewish-Hispanic relations and Latino culture in the United States. I still have around 4,000 books left. These are my most precious items: a comprehensive collection of Borgeana of around 700 items, another one, twice the size, of dictionaries and lexicography, and a library of translations of Don Quixote of La Mancha into a good number of languages.

VA: You seem obsessed with language.

IS: Of all the obsessions I might think of, this one is rather harmless. It is a gentle madness that doesn't really bother anyone. Nor does it make you really sick. Plus, and it is a plus, it is also all-encompassing. To be obsessed with language is to be obsessed with the universe. Dr. Johnson once said:

My zeal for language may seem, perhaps, rather overheated, even to those by whom I desire to be well esteemed. To those who have nothing in their thoughts but trade or policy, present power or present money, I should not think it necessary to defend my opinions; but with men of letters I would not unwillingly compound, by wishing the continuance of every language, however narrow in its extent, or however incommodious for o purposes, till it is reposited in some version of a known book, that it may be always hereafter examined and compared with other languages, and then permitting its disuse.

VA: In On Borrowed Words, there is a crucial scene in which you make a bonfire with your own books. I quote from pages 7 and 8:

When I began to write, Borges had a decisive influence. His pure, precise, almost mathematical style; his intelligent plots; his abhorrence of verborrea — the overflow of words without rhyme or reason, still a common malady in Spanish literature today. He, more than anyone before him (including the modernista poet from Nicaragua, Rubén Darío), had taught us a lesson: literature ought to be a conduit for ideas. But his lesson was hard to absorb, if only because Hispanic civilization is so unconcerned with ideas, so irritable about debate, so uninterested in systematic inquiry. Life is too rough, too unfinished to be wasted on philosophical disquisition. It is not by chance, of course, that Borges was an Argentine. It couldn't have been otherwise, for Argentina perceives itself — or rather, it used to perceive itself — as a European enclave in the Southern Hemisphere. Buenos Aires, its citizens would tell you in the 1940s, is the capital of the world, with Paris as a provincial second best.

As soon as I discovered Borges, I realized, much as others have, that I had to own him. I acquired every edition I could put my hands on, not only in Spanish but in their French, English, Italian, German, and Hebrew translations, as well as copies of the Argentine monthly Sur, where his best work was originally featured, and all his interviews in journals. My collection began to grow as I embarked on my own first experiences in literature: tight descriptions, brief stories, passionless literary essays. Rather quickly the influence he exerted on me became obvious. In consolation, I would paraphrase for myself the famous line from "Decalogue of the Perfect Storyteller" — in Spanish its title is infinitely better: "Decálogo del perfecto cuentista" — by Horacio Quiroga, a celebrated, if tragic, turn-of-the-century Uruguayan author: to be born, a young writer should imitate his beloved masters as much as possible. The maxim, I realize today, is not without dangerous implications; it has encouraged derivativeness and perhaps even plagiarism in Latin American letters. But I was blind to such views. My only hope as a litterateur was not to be like Borges, but to be Borges. How absurd that sounds now!

Influence turned into anxiety, and anxiety into discomfort. Would I ever have my own voice? One desperate afternoon, incapable of writing a single line I could call my own, I brought down all the Borges titles I owned, piled them in the garage, poured gasoline over them, and set them on fire. It was a form of revenge, a sacramental act of desperation: the struggle to be born, to own a place of one's own, to be like no one else — or, at least, unlike Borges. The flames shot up at first, and eventually, slowly, died down. I saw the volumes, between fifty and seventy in total, turn bright, then brown, then turn to ash. I smiled, thinking, in embarrassment, of Hitler's Germany, Pinochet's Chile, and Mao's China. I thought of Elias Canetti's Auto da Fé and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. I thought of scores of prayer books, Talmuds, and other rabbinical works burnt by the Holy Inquisition in Spain and the New World, in places not far from my home. And I also invoked Borges's own essay, "The Wall and the Books," about Shih Huang Ti, the first emperor of China, a contemporary of Hannibal, whose reign was marked by the construction of the Wall of China, and also by the campaign to burn all history books. Shih Huang Ti saw himself as a new beginning. History needed to start over.

IS: It was a rite of passage, although it doesn't make me less embarrassed.

VA: Did you ever consider becoming a librarian?

IS: Yes. And a rabbi too. And a grave-digger.

VA: I can't possibly let this answer drop. Why a grave-digger, of all occupations?

IS: Perhaps because I love silence. As it happens, the only place where I don't enjoy silence is in libraries.

VA: Why?

IS: It makes me uncomfortable. Why should we be quiet next to books? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Does the human brain function better in quiet? I'm not convinced.

VA: The way a personal library is arranged, you state in Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion, is a key to deciphering the owner's character.

IS: And temperament, too. Reason is our response to nature, just as order is a response to chaos. Recently, I've been interested in the history of libraries. The library in the city of Nineveh, Mesopotamia, around the seventh-century BCE, contained books made of clay. The dream of building a repository devoted to every book imaginable belongs to Alexandria in the first-century CE. Its library is rumored to have contained Aristotle's personal collection (although it is also said that the collection was buried in a hole in Athens). It was the site were Ptolomeic philosophy flourished: Euclid, Strabo, and Galen; and the Septuagint, the translation of the Torah, into Greek, was made there.

VA: How did the libraries of antiquity order their scrolls or codexes?

IS: Mostly in a haphazard fashion, in piles according to author and geographical coordinates (Egyptian, Biblical, Early Catholic, Hellenistic, Byzantine, etc.). The Alexandria collection showcased papyri wrapped with a peg called an umbilicus, featuring the author and title. The thematic order belongs to the Napoleonic age, a time when the French embarked on colonial ventures to Africa and the East and returned with a plethora of artifacts. Cataloguing these artifacts required thought, and the collections also needed a place to be displayed. In response, the museum, as it is conceived today — i.e., a series of thematically related galleries — was implemented. The Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana was structured within a room full of tables. On the left, the sinister side, were books on apostasy, heresy, alchemy, and the profane. On the right, the dexter side, were the righteous books on heavenly themes. Other libraries, owing to economy of space, organized the books according to size and thickness. Some sense of order, however remote, was implemented; otherwise, the library would be ... well, unreasonable. I guess my point is that libraries have specific metabolisms, and it is those that need to be read as well.

VA: How about borrowing books?

IS: It is also a rather recent phenomenon. Books today are, to a large extent, produced in large numbers. This is the result of the invention not only of movable print but, in the early part of the twentieth century, of the hard-cover and paperback formats. Thus, the same novel is available in scores of libraries these days. In ancient times, copies of books were scarce. The copyist did everything by hand, patiently. Errors crept in, which meant that each copy was unique. Libraries stored individual copies and readers read them within the premises. The concept of book-borrowing is linked to the rise of a populist understanding of society. At its core was the principle that class shouldn't be an obstacle; the haves and have-nots should have an equal piece of it. This revolution had a profound effect on society.

VA: How so?

IS: Until the late nineteenth century, writers in the West were, predominantly, members of the upper crust. In our age, literature is the domain of the middle class.

VA: Should we trust librarians?

IS: I'm not sure the word trust is right. I believe skepticism is the best approach to knowledge. Not too long ago, I published the four-volume Encyclopedia Latina, a work of reference on Hispanic culture in the United States. It was a monumental project: a million and a half words, almost seven hundred entries, with more than three hundred contributors from an array of countries. Do you know what aspect of it I enjoyed the most? Not the actual editing, which sucked, nor the writing itself, which became mechanical. The most enjoyable aspect for me was the mapping of the encyclopedia. If you were to embark on a reference book on God, where would you start? Or better yet, were would you end? I needed to survey Hispanic culture north of the Rio Grande from beginning to end. That is, it was up to me to establish a beginning and an end. Because I had constraints of time and space, some elements would eventually need to be left out. But which ones? How to make an encyclopedia where the sum of everything that went in it was far superior to that which was left out? Libraries have a similar task: to include the entire universe inside their walls. But how can this be done if the universe always breaches its levees? By means of selection. Most libraries are deliberately selective: they might concentrate on maritime history, food, or art. Their selectiveness might be the result of their users' requests and tastes. What are people in a certain neighborhood where the library is located interested in, for instance? The librarian makes assumptions and establishes parameters in accordance with the library's scope, audience, and budget. Those parameters might be near-sighted for they might limit people to indulge in what they already know. But that is for us to decide. In any case, we should be grateful for librarians, just as we should be thankful for teachers. They aren't generators, but rather facilitators of knowledge.

VA: In other words, libraries aren't politically neutral spaces.

IS: In 2003, my wife and I built a house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where the population is known for its literary taste. But what kind of taste? Among the first errands I set for myself was the donation of a handful of my books to the local public library. I gave them the three-volume set of Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories as well as The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories. But I also included The Hispanic Condition and Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. In searching through the stacks a year later, I discovered that they had catalogued only the books I had written that dealt with Jewish topics.

VA: Are you implying that the librarian is a censor?

IS: Even though the majority of home owners and renters in Wellfleet are Caucasian with a solid education, the local construction, maintenance, and cleaning crews are Puerto Rican, Brazilian, and Mexican.

VA: What about current cataloguing systems?

IS: The major revolution we're still defined by was sparked by Melvil Louis Dewey, who actually studied in the institution I've taught at since 1993: Amherst College. He graduated around 1872. While he was here, he found himself dismayed by the disorder of books. So he came up with a decimal classification in an attempt to tame the chaos. But he went far beyond. Not only was he instrumental in the founding of the American Library Association, he also went into the office-supply business in order to furnish all American libraries in identical fashion, and designed the curriculum for what we now know as library science. When appreciating his contribution, the key word is efficiency. In this he was American to the core. In the second half of the nineteenth century, just as the nation was moving into an industrial mode, he devised a strategy to make knowledge more easily manageable. Over time, the Dewey system has been replaced by an array of alternative cataloguing methods, including the one used by the Library of Congress, which, since its implementation in the seventies, has been under heavy artillery attack for being not only bureaucratic but needlessly labyrinthine. It juxtaposes letters and numbers in a maddening fashion: JK216.T7 1835. It obviously follows some logical pattern, but to me it looks as arcane as an alchemic formula. The Library of Congress also uses those subject classes popping up on your screen whenever you select a title: "Democracy—United States—Politics and government—Social conditions." I've come across users describing those classes as nearsighted and racist.

VA: What is your connection to the library at Amherst College?

IS: I love it. I wouldn't have become the person that I am, interested in the humanities, if it were not for Frost Library. I spend much time in it. Every so often, I feel Dewey's spirit wandering around the place, appreciating how books are ordered, the reverential attitude students have toward them.

VA: What is the difference between bibliophilia and bibliomania?

IS: Bibliomania is a malady I'm delighted to have overcome, and that is what ailed me before my friend's death. Believe it or not, reducing the number of books around me has granted me a sense of inner freedom. My mind, I get the sense, is less clotted, more spacious.

VA: Richard de Bury was who coined the term bibliophile in the Middle Ages. Have you become a bibliophile?

IS: I was always one, even before I became a passionate reader. And being a passionate reader is more liberating, and thus more rewarding, than being a passionate writer.

VA: In an essay called "The First Book," reprinted in your collection Art and Anger, you reminisce about the Torah as a sacred book.

IS: Literature is about pleasure, whereas religion is about fear. Attending synagogue, I am struck by the ritual of getting the Book out of the aron ha-kodesh, or Sacred Ark, and onto the people. Each time it happens, the entire congregation is on its toes. The Book, dressed up in full regalia, is solemnly carried around the prayer hall, and the faithful rush to kiss it. When I wrote the essay in 1995, I sought to covey the feeling of the transtemporal continuity I sensed in these moments. A decade later, I no longer think quite the same way. It feels as if 9/11 pushed the world to the brink. Everywhere one goes, religion has been emphasized. Not only are Muslims more radical overall, so are Christians and Jews. Look at America: the country is more fearful of God today than it was in the mid-twentieth century. Creationism, or Intelligent Design, has become a force in schools, taught side by side with Evolution, and sometimes replacing it altogether. The text in the Torah is ahistorical; it also has the attribute of perfection. The thought is overwhelming. Whenever I publish a book, I struggle to make it as close to perfect as possible. What do I understand for perfection? The desire to fix it in the best possible way with the capabilities I have at my disposal — talent and technology — at the present time. It will be as free of errors as possible. But if I were to reread it, I know that I would be tempted to improve it, i.e., to make it better according to the views I'll have at that time. Whitman kept on rewriting Leaves of Grass. At times his revisions improved the text; at others they diminished it. Over time, the book became a record, an accumulation, of Whitman's versions of himself. In the end, it is a human book: perfect in its imperfections. Not the Torah, the Qu'ran, and the New Testament, though. Every letter in them, every dot, every empty space has a raison d'être. The Author of Authors is infallible. His existence is a negation of an editorial process. Among the Jews, this approach is expounded by the Kabbalists with particular fervor. The alphabet is a roadmap the Almighty used to create the universe. Before the Tohu Ba-Vohu of Genesis 1:1, the Hebrew language was already fully formed. Furthermore, the Torah itself was written before Creation, making human affairs but a pale repetition.

VA: What book do you covet the most and would wish to own?

IS: If I had enough funds, I would buy Borgeana. A dealer in Boston often puts on the market holographic manuscripts I am in awe even to contemplate: "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," an essay on the defeat of Hitler and the end of World War II.

VA: Would you consider yourself a collector?

IS: No doubt. I would become a collector of Johnsoniana. Samuel Johnson was a polymath for whom I have enormous admiration. His essays on the English poets, his travel writing with Boswell in Scotland, his A Dictionary of the English Language. Another friend, Paul T. Ruxin, a generous Amherst College alum in Chicago, owns such a collection.

VA: Do you think it is bibliophilia or bibliomania that makes Alonso Quijano go mad?

IS: He doesn't quite go mad. Cervantes is careful not to diagnose his protagonist, at least not early on in Part 1 of the novel. He simply tells us that "he fairly lost his wits." That, at least, is the resort English translators often embrace. In Spanish, the reader is told: "y así, del poco dormir y del mucho leer, se le secó el cerebro de manera que vino a perder el juicio." In other words, his brains dried up from too much reading and too little sleep. I'm flabbergasted by this image of water. The opposite is also in evidence: too much fantasy "floods" the mind with nonsense? By this medieval conception, the brain is a sponge filled with liquid, which it pours into the environment as a result of excessive behavior. I remember reading a treatise by the eleventh-century ascetic, Bachya ben Joseph ibn Paquda, called Sefer Hobot ha-Lebabot (Book of the Duties of the Heart), written in Arabic and translated into Hebrew by Yehuda ibn Tibbon, in which the author suggests that crying is good for babies because it empties the brain from needless water that might prevent coherent reasoning. Anyhow, Quixada, or Quesada, starts off as a bibliomaniac. Happily, he ends not as a bibliophile but as an eponymous character in Western literature: a hidalgo described by others as a madman who, in spite of the dryness of his brains, is fully conscious of his role as a fictitious character.

VA: In other words, he knows he lives in a book.

IS: Maybe he is imprisoned in it. By the way, the novel, Cervantes's narrator tells us, was written originally in Arabic. He found the manuscript in Toledo and what we read is a makeshift translation. The topic of translation in Don Quixote is essential: it points to the roots of Iberian identity yet it falsifies those roots. In Part II, Chapter LXII, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, already in Barcelona, enter a printing house. Don Quixote talks to a workman in charge of rendering a book called Le Bagatelle (about which we know nothing) from the Italian into Spanish. Don Quixote asks the translator if he has come across the word piñata (which Tobias Smollett appropriately spells "Pignatta," defined by the Diccionario de la Real Academia, in honor of the portly Sancho, as an "olla panzuda") and wonders how it should be translated. Eventually Don Quixote says, in P. A. Motteaux's translation:

Notwithstanding all your learning, I could almost swear you are hitherto unknown to the world, which is ever averse to remunerate flourishing genius, and works of merit. What talents are lost, what abilities obscured, and what virtues are undervalued in this degenerate age! Yet, nevertheless, a translation from one language to another, excepting always those sovereign tongues the Greek and Latin, is, in my opinion, like the wrong side of a Flemish tapestry, in which, tho' we distinguish the figures, they are confused and obscured by ends and threads, without that smoothness and expression which the other side exhibits: and to translate from easy languages, argues neither genius nor elocution, nor any merit superior to that of transcribing from one paper to another; but, from hence, I would not infer that translation is not a laudable exercise; for, a man may employ his time in a much worse and more unprofitable occupation.

VA: Might Le Bagatelle be an invented book?

IS: Perhaps. It is delicious to visit libraries of nonexistent books. I once went to the one in Sagrurt, Krakozhia, in the Balkans. The librarian, Viktor Navorski, gave us an enlightening tour. I touched a copy of Johann Valentin Andrea's Lesbare und lesenswethe Bemerkungen uber das Land Ukkbar in Klein-Asien. There were also two copies, one in English, the other in Sanskrit (the back cover in poor shape), of A Modest Defense of the Proceedings of the Rabble in all Ages. I found a small bibliography of Guatemalan author Alcina Lubitch Domecq and a version of The Mirror's Mirror: or, Noble Smile of the Dog in French. Furthermore, on the second floor, while the other visitors listened to a lecture, I read a portion of Voyage to England, by a Person of Quality in Terra Australis Incognita. The experience was not unlike spending time in the basement, guided by the director Werner Gundersheimer, of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. He showed me material of actor David Garrick, a quarto of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

VA: In the opening line of Dictionary Days, your eight-year-old son, Isaiah, wonders if words die. Let me ask you now, do books die?

IS: A few weeks ago, I reread Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, of which François Truffaut made a film adaptation in 1966 with Julie Christie. I had first read it in my twenties, along with The Martian Chronicles. It is a rather primitive novel, poorly executed — to use a Truman Capote image, Bradbury didn't as much write it as he typed it. But the message is powerful. Do books die? One hopes they don't, but in fact they do. Books are depositories of memory. As such, they are dangerous artifacts. Politicians, not known as promoters of enlightenment, stage rallies to burn them. Books are shunned, discredited, banned, burned. Or else, they drown them in a pool of misconception. (I dream of a future without governments.) But in a capitalist system, books usually die from neglect. This isn't necessarily bad: far too many books aren't worth a dime. The books that matter, though, the ones we cannot do without — and these are just a few thousand — manage to survive. They come back in unpredictable ways, sometimes mutilated, sometimes reincarnated in atrocious adaptations. Sooner or later, they manage to reconfigure themselves. Yet, there is a certain type of magic to the whole phenomenon, for books are intelligent entities. Their survival depends on humane, merciful readers whose task in life is to preserve the ideas they contain.

VA: You just said that "books are depositories of memory." This brings to mind Aby Warburg's eighty-thousand-volume library. As a motto, Warburg had the name of the mother of all the Muses, Mnemosyne, the Goddess of memory, inscribed over the doors of his library.

IS: George Steiner once called Warburg "one of the seminal figures in modern culture." Warburg heard the goose-stepping all right, and even though he died by the time the Nazis declared in December 1933 the "Jewish Warburg Library" closed to all, especially to scholars, the entire library still managed to take to sea aboard the Hermia and the Jessica. It is now part of the University of London. Mnemosyne must have been pleased with Aby's work, for those eighty thousand books live on.

VA: In 1998, one of your stories, "Xerox Man," was broadcasted worldwide by the BBC in London. The protagonist is a book thief, a bibliokleptomaniac.

IS: An Orthodox Jew, Argentine by birth.

VA: He steals Judaica books from rare rooms like the ones at Yale University and The Jewish Theological Seminary.

IS: He then Xeroxes them but always eliminates one page from the photocopied version. The universe is imperfect, he believes. Why shouldn't books mimic than imperfection?

VA: It's a marvelous story. Its central motif is a genizah.

IS: The Hebrew word genizah means "container," "treasury," "storage," and "archives." Every synagogue has one: the place where sacred texts no longer in use are deposited. Perhaps the most famous one is the Cairo genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fostat, built in 882 CE. On a trip to Egypt in 1890, two learned Scottish women, Agnes Lewis Smith and Margaret Dunlop Wilson, came across old documents in a bazaar. They immediately recognized the importance of their find, so when they got back to England, they met with Solomon Schechter, a Cambridge professor, and showed him the fragments they had acquired. One of those documents — in Hebrew — happened to be from the Wisdom of Ben Sira, dating to the tenth century, which until then was solely available in more modern versions in Greek and Syriac. The Hebrew version deposited on Schechter's desk had been lost for approximately a thousand years. The scholar traveled immediately to Cairo, secured access to the documents in the genizah, and spent years deciphering some of its 250,000 items, including bills, letters, catalogues, calendars, children's primers, dictionaries, glossaries in Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, Persian, and even Yiddish, a whole spectrum of Jewish secular material, not only religious life. (Of these, Schechter rescued some 100,000 fragments.) There were also some sixty holographic documents from Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, known by his Latin name, Maimonides, author of the Mishna Torah and the Guide of the Perplexed. Maimonides was chief physician to the Egyptian Sultan Saladin and died in Cairo in 1204. In any case, as I've said earlier, the Cairo synagogue that housed that highly important genizah was built in the ninth century. It is mentioned four centuries later in the travelogue of Benjamin of Tudela. To this day, Schechter's discoveries haven't been exhaustively studied, but the Cairo genizah material has been the subject of rigorous scholarly work by Shlomo Dov Goitein, who produced a six-volume portrayal of life in the Middle Ages, a magnificent view of the overlapping intellectual and everyday spheres in the Judeo-Islamic world.

VA: Where are the texts from the Ben Ezra genizah housed today?

IS: They are divided between Cambridge University and The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City.

VA: Like the Torah, the Qu'ran cannot simply be discarded.

IS: Think of the tunnels filled with thousands upon thousands of Qu'rans beneath Chiltan Mountain, in the Quetta heights of Pakistan's Baluchistan province. Think of the magisterial cemetery of books discovered in 1972 at the Great Mosque at San'a, in Yemen. How many undisclosed depositories such as these await their Columbus? Not too long ago, there was an international controversy ignited by a Newsweek reportage that claimed American soldiers had flushed copies of the Qu'ran down the toilet. This brings me back to my comments on the essay "The First Book." Why is the image of the Qu'ran in such a context incendiary? I doubt the same reaction would take place if a photograph were released in which someone — say an Afghani, a Peruvian, or a Briton — were caught peeing on a copy of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Literature can be destroyed, but it cannot be desecrated. In prophetic religions, the sacred text is at once reservoir and conduit of heavenly information. To dispose of it in prosaic ways is to violate the rules that distinguish the pure from the impure.

VA: What do Christians do with old Bibles?

IS: Although to my knowledge there isn't a prohibition against discarding them, people just don't do it. Even though to a Christian the artifact is just paper, glue, and ink, there is an important attachment to it. The book itself isn't holy, it is its content, its message that is. One reason for not wanting to discard old Bibles might be that Christians often write on the page, stressing a word, underlining a sentence, and highlighting a passage. It might be because a particular copy has been a close companion in one's spiritual journey. My own view is that, unlike Jews, Muslims, and Hindus, Christians have a different connection to language. Churches don't read Scripture in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek. And though the Pope may still celebrate Mass in Latin, almost everyone else does it in the vernacular. This is because the medium isn't the message. Indeed, the Christian tradition of Biblical translation stresses the fact that the Scriptures need to be understood by the masses.

VA: Are genizot libraries?

IS: Only metaphorically. The library is a house of knowledge. Our modern libraries are quite sanitized. Books are meticulously catalogued, at least in modern times. They circulate under a specific regime. The temperature inside is controlled. There are desks, magazines, computers, etc. One cannot talk out loud in them. But libraries have not been thus always. Often when I go into one I feel I'm entering another realm. Is this good? I'm not sure. These days libraries are like museums: a marketplace of artifacts designed to impress you but not necessarily to make you think. Houses of knowledge are houses of study. Why then speak quietly? Why not debate others in intellectual explorations? I suggest institutionalizing at least one day when "users" — I dislike the term — are allowed to scream and shout in a library about anything they find in a book.

VA: Are book cemeteries found only in the Judeo-Islamic tradition?

IS: They are found elsewhere, too. In the Buddhist kingdom of Ganhara, in eastern Afghanistan, a container was found with some twenty-nine scrolls in Kharoshti script. They date back two millennia. The fragments had been put away near a monastery according to the proper burial rituals. In addition, in 1973 a British archeologist found in north Northumberland a Roman fort called Vindolanda. From its pits, he unearthed some 1,500 texts, among them Carthaginian letters and official documents.

VA: Are there modern book cemeteries?

IS: Time capsules became fashionable in the late twentieth century. NASA designed a couple. The city of Atlanta built a chamber that houses 640,000 thousand-odd pages from eight hundred "classics in the arts and sciences" reproduced in microfilm and sealed in nitrogen gas for preservation. And then there's Oglethorpe University's converted indoor swimming pool known as the Crypt of Civilization completed in 1940 that houses an assortment of artifacts, not just books. That chamber is supposed to remain sealed until 8113, a date the president of the institution and the mastermind of the project, Dr. Thornwell Jacobs, came up with at the time after bizarre calculations based on the first Egyptian calendar. Book cemeteries often become even more fanciful. The New York Times, for example, hired the world-renowned Spanish architect, Santiago Calatrava, to design a massive enclosure, dubbed the Times Capsule, to be opened in the year 3000. It contains a millennium-worth of materials. There are about 10,000 similar capsules throughout the United States. How many of these are likely to be found by the citizens of tomorrow?

VA: Is the cemetery another emblematic metaphor for the library?

IS: How so?

VA: One frequently hears about the death of literature.

IS: In the last few years, I've taken to regularly visit cemeteries in the areas where I've lived: Mexico City, Jerusalem, New York City, Amherst, and Wellfleet. These are quiet, meditative spaces. Popular culture infuses an element of spookiness to them. But they aren't frightening. Instead, I find them appeasing. I carefully study the tombstones, the graphics engraved in them (some even have photographs), the stones and flowers and flags people pay tribute with, the areas designed for "recreation." Yes, I read myself into the place as well. I imagine the lives led by each of those buried in the cemetery, their connection with others buried in the place. Francisco de Quevedo, the sixteenth-century Spanish poet, has an astonishing sonnet, known as soneto 131. It was composed in the town of Torre de Juan Abad in Castilla-La Mancha. Quevedo's voice is notoriously difficult to translate. Elias L. Rivers did a prose version of the sonnet:

Withdrawn into the peace of this desert, having gathered together some books, few but learned, I live in conversation with the deceased and listen with my eyes to the dead. If not always understood, yet always open, they [the books] either correct or fertilize my actions; and in silent musical counterpoint they, awake, speak to the dream [sleep] of life. The great souls which death takes away are freed from the damage of the years, oh great Sir Joseph, by an avenger, the learned printing press. In irrevocable flight the hour flees; but that hour scores the highest which improves us by reading and study.

In any case, what better way to conclude a conversation on books, death, and wisdom than the sublime original:

Retirado en la paz de estos desiertos,
con pocos, pero doctos libros juntos,
vivo en conversación con los difuntos
y escucho con mis ojos a los muertos.

Si no siempre entendidos, siempre abiertos,
o enmiendan, o fecundan mis asuntos;
y en músicos callados contrapuntos
al sueño de la vida hablan despiertos.

Las grandes almas que la muerte ausenta,
de injurias de los años, vengadora,
libra, ¡oh gran don Iosef!, docta la emprenta.

En fuga irrevocable huye la hora;
pero aquella el mejor cálculo cuenta
que en la lección y estudios nos mejora.

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