Daymares [antikvár]

FOREWORD by John Robert Colombo I. When Robert Zend informed mc that he was flying to Argentina to record an interview with Jorge Luis Borges, he asked me what question I would ask the great Argentine fantasist if I were interviewing him. I replied, "Ask him what he thinks about when he thinks about Canada." "What do you think about when you think about Canada?" he asked Borges a week later sitting in the latter's cluttered study in his flat in Buenos Aires. Borges thought for a moment, then replied, "Canada is so far away it hardly exists." II. I remember Robert Zend with a feeling of fondness. The feeling has grown fonder over the last five years. Sometime soon it will probably reach its fondest peak. The feeling is certainly more profound than it was while Robert was still alive. . . nervously alive, exasperatingly alive, frenetically alive, irritatingly alive. Robert had a way of energizing or galvanizing people. He seldom left them feeling indifferent. I do not now recall fondly cherishing him then, but I fondly cherish his memory now. We worked closely together for some months at a stretch during two different periods of time on his first two books. I elected to play the role of midwife to the man and the manuscripts. He chose to play the part of the artiste in giving birth to the versions of the poems and stories we shaped and worked into the forms they take in those books. There were discussions and disagreements aplenty, matched with laughter and light-hearted probings of the world's intricacies. He had a number of irritating habits. He seldom arrived on time, he sometimes arrived unbidden. But he had a matching number of