While quoting some of V.Nabokov’s opinions about good readers and good writers, where he emphasizes the fundamental novelty of an author’s world and his brand of reality, I came across an old newspaper cutting by L.F.Veríssimo, “Mentirosos” (Liars) mingling lies and truths with his particular distorting mirror. I’m submitting a rough translation to the List, wishing I had more talent in my rendering of an author’s ideas and style.     

LIARS - Luiz Fernando Veríssimo

During their endless conversations in Heaven, Jorge Luiz Borges, Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Calvino like to talk about God – as long as he isn’t around – and everybody else. The other day they were speaking ill of their own species, the writers.  According to Calvino, writers are a bad example for the young because they are liars who are paid for their lies. They write about occurrences that never took place and give fantastic versions of events: they not only sign what they write but, when they distribute autographs, they’ll sign it more than once!

For Borges the only honest writers are those that use a pen-name since they are thereby confessing to their falseness while protecting their family’s reputation. Nevertheless for Nabokov good writers are those that invent stories to pass their time since this resource is the only way that stops them from exerting their true vocation, their non-confessed volupty, of falsifying works which actually determine life on Earth: dictionaries, encyclopedias, constitutions, manuals, leaflets, sentences… In Nabokov’s opinion, the complete works of Shakespeare are simply the consequence of his frustration of not having written the Bible.

It was when Borges came to confess that all his life he had dreamed of writing a fictional telephone directory. He actually had the entire book already in his mind, from Aabilongo,Alvaro to Zoroastra,Matilde, with special attention to a section of Besundres, a family constituted only of widows, seventeen widows who lived in the same address, but each with her own telephone. Only one of them, Besundres, Iriago had her name in bold letters, a griever’s name. Borges’ telephone directory comprised numbers and addresses in an imaginary Buenos Aires, but it also included names such as Bell, Alexander Graham (telephone number:1) and…

Silence overcame the trio when an angel arrived with tea. A poet had died unpublished and they wanted to show him their respect.

“Mentirosos”, by LF VERÍSSIMO, Jornal do Brasil, November 25,1990.