Borges and Me: New film tells story of writer's 1970s tour of Scotland

Jay Parini was a student at the University of St Andrews in 1971 when he found himself escorting the blind Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges on a road trip around Scotland.

Borges (1899–1986) was a short-story writer, essayist, and poet, considered one of the most significant writers of the 20th Century.

Educated in Europe, he became a professor in Buenos Aires and in 1955 was appointed director of the country's national library.

Books and libraries occur throughout his fiction, so it's no surprise that, on his trip to Scotland in 1971, he wanted to visit the historic Carnegie Library in Dunfermline.

More than 50 years later, Parini says he'll never forget what happened there.

"We walked into the Carnegie Library and Borges said 'I can't see, show me some books'," he says.

"I brought him the Encyclopaedia Britannica and he asked 'what year?'

"I said 'I think it's 1911'.

"He said: 'Oh, the best year for that Encyclopaedia. Give it to me!'

"And he takes it and starts licking the book and the little old librarian says 'you must not lick the book, sir. You must not lick the books'."

The surreal moment is one of many captured in Parini's 2020 memoir Borges and Me, which has been made into a new film shot entirely in Scotland and featuring a local cast and crew.

It premiered at the weekend at the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF).

Born in Pennsylvania in 1948, Parini is a poet, professor of English at Middlebury College in Vermont, and the author of eight novels.

He came to St Andrews in 1970, and his seven years there helped him avoid the Vietnam War, where one of his oldest friends died.

His time in Scotland introduced him to the country's finest writing and writers.

"I arrived into a kind of renaissance in Scottish writing and poetry. I was lucky to know George Mackay Brown, Alastair Reid, Norman MacCaig, Sydney Goodsir Smith. I even met the great Hugh MacDiarmid," he says.

It was Reid, the Scots poet, translator and writer (played in the film by Alan Cumming) who first introduced Parini to Borges and set their strange road trip in motion.

Borges was close friends with Reid, an expert on South American literature who translated the Argentinian's work.

He was meant to stay with Reid at his cottage, but when the Scot was called away on a family emergency, Parini was brought in to "babysit" the blind author.

"I was just a kid who had never heard of Borges before and I was a little bit afraid that I had been captured by a madman," he says.

Borges invited himself along on Parini's planned trip to Orkney to meet poet Mackay Brown. On the way, they stopped off at Lower Largo, Culloden, Loch Ness and Dunfermline (scene of the notorious book-licking).

Borges liked to imagine himself as the fictional Spanish knight Don Quixote, criss-crossing the Highlands with Parini as his squire and companion Sancho Panza.

He even nicknamed Parini's borrowed Morris Traveller Rocinante, after the clumsy and aging horse from Miguel De Cervantes' 17th Century novel.

The car used in the film was snapped up as a souvenir after filming by Alan Cumming.

Director Marc Turtletaub had previously been to the EIFF with his film Puzzle, which starred Kelly Macdonald as a housewife who becomes a professional jigsaw puzzle solver.

And he was in no doubt that Borges and Me had to premiere there.

"We had a whole cast of wonderful Scottish actors. I'd always wanted to work with Alan Cumming, Peter Mullan and John Gordon Sinclair - since Gregory's Girl," he says.

"Morven Christie, Freya Mavor, this wonderful cast and an all-Scottish crew. It's truly a Scottish movie."

For Parini, it was an even stranger experience to return to his alma mater of St Andrews, transformed to look like it did in the 1970s, and to see the people he remembered come back to life.

"It's amazing how memory is supplanted by reality and pretty quickly the actors took the place of reality," he says.

"Peter Mullan doesn't look that much like George Mackay Brown but he absolutely embodies him. And suddenly I do see Borges as Luis Gnecco and I almost see myself as Fionn Whitehead, although he's a lot nicer looking than I am."

Turtletaub and Parini believe the film offers more than an entertaining Scottish road movie.

"I think that that week with Borges was the foundation of all of my writing because Borges said to me 'you will be my eyes' and he kept urging me to see, to look closely," says Parini.

Turtletaub says: "It's a two-handed road movie of an older man and a younger man coming of age. But there is a second layer which is about how to become an artist.

"As someone who came to directing and producing later in life, it was really fascinating to see how slowly this young gentleman, fifty years ago, began to discover his own voice.

"And now Jay has written close to 40 books, it really shows the process by which creativity began to flourish."

Both hope the film will remind people of the importance of world literature and Scotland's place in it.

"The very first week I was filming here, the guy at the counter in the local grocery store in Glasgow, who was maybe 24 years old, asked about the film I was making and when I told him he said Borges was his favourite writer," says Turtletaub.

"I came back a week later to the same place and another guy said: 'Oh, you're the guy making the movie about Borges. My girlfriend is translating Borges into German'.

"And it continued on like that over the whole time I was here. We kept having these moments where people would know Borges and Alistair Reid and George Mackay Brown.

"We're in the right place to show this film."