PROFESSOR BORGES

A COURSE ON
ENGLISH LITERATURE

JORGE LUIS BORGES

EDITED, RESEARCHED, AND ANNOTATED

MARTÍN ARIAS AND MARTÍN HADIS
TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY KATHERINE SILVER

A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

CLASS 1 The Anglo-Saxons. Genealogy of the Germanic kings. Poetry

and kennings.

CLASS 2 Beowulf. Description of the Germans. Ancient funeral rites.

CLASS 3 Beowulf. Bravery and boastfulness: Beowulf as compared to

the compadritos.

CLASS 4 The Finnsburh Fragment. The Vikings. Anecdotes from

Borges’s trip to York. “The Battle of Brunanburh.” Tennyson’s translation.

CLASS 5 “The Battle of Maldon.” Christian poetry. “Caedmon’s

Hymn.” The runic alphabet. Characteristics of Anglo-Saxon elegies.

CLASS 6 The origins of poetry in England. The Anglo-Saxon elegies.

Christian poetry: “The Dream of the Rood.”

CLASS 7 The two books written by God. The Anglo-Saxon bestiary.

Riddles. “The Grave.” The Battle of Hastings.

CLASS 8 A brief history until the eighteenth century. The life of Samuel
Johnson.

CLASS 9 Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, by Samuel Johnson. The legend

of the Buddha. Optimism and pessimism. Leibniz and Voltaire.
 CLASS 10 Samuel Johnson as seen by Boswell. The art of biography.
Boswell and his critics.

CLASS 11 The romantic movement. The life of James Macpherson. The

invention of Ossian. Opinions about Ossian. Polemic with Johnson.
Reappraisal of Macpherson.

CLASS 12 Life of William Wordsworth. The Prelude and other poems.

CLASS 13 The life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A story by Henry

James. Coleridge and Macedonio Fernández, compared. Coleridge and
Shakespeare. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote.

CLASS 14 Coleridge’s final years. Coleridge compared to Dante

Alighieri. Coleridge’s poems. “Kubla Khan.” Coleridge’s dream.

CLASS 15 The life of William Blake. The poem “The Tyger.” Blake and
Swedenborg’s philosophy, compared. A poem by Rupert Brooke. Blake’s
poems.

CLASS 16 Life of Thomas Carlyle. Sartor Resartus by Carlyle. Carlyle,

precursor of Nazism. Bolívar’s soldiers, according to Carlyle.

CLASS 17The Victorian era. The life of Charles Dickens. The novels of
Charles Dickens. William Wilkie Collins. The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by
Dickens.

CLASS 18 The life of Robert Browning. The obscurity of his work. His
poems.

CLASS 19 Robert Browning’s poems. A chat with Alfonso Reyes. The

Ring and the Book.

CLASS 20 The life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Evaluation of Rossetti as

a poet and a painter. The theme of the double (fetch). A book of exhumed
poems. Rossetti’s poems. History cyclically repeated.

CLASS 21 Rossetti’s poem. Rossetti as seen by Max Nordau. “The

Blessed Damozel,” “Eden Bower,” and “Troy Town.”

CLASS 22 The life of William Morris. The three subjects worthy of

poetry. King Arthur and the myth of the return of the hero. Morris’s interests.
Morris and Chaucer. “The Defence of Guenevere.”

CLASS 23 “The Tune of the Seven Towers,” “The Sailing of the

Sword,” and The Earthly Paradise, by William Morris. The Icelandic sagas.
The story of Gunnar.

CLASS 24 The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, by William Morris. The life
of Robert Louis Stevenson.

CLASS 25 The works of Robert Louis Stevenson: New Arabian Nights,

“Markheim,” The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Jekyll and Hyde
in the movies. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. “Requiem,” by
Stevenson.

EPILOGUE

AFTERWORD, by Martín Arias

BORGES IN CLASS, by Martín Hadis

ENDNOTES

INDEX
 “I know, or rather I’ve been told because I cannot see, that more
and more students keep coming to my classes, and that many of them
are not even registered. So, I guess we can assume they want to listen
to me, right?”

Jorge Luis Borges, interview with B.D., 1968,

published in Clarín on December 7, 1989
 Citations from Literaturas germánicas medievales [Medieval
Germanic Literature] and Breve antología anglosajona [Brief Anglo-
Saxon Anthology] refer to the 1997 edition of Obras completas en
colaboración [Complete Collaborative Works] (OCC) published by
Emecé Editores.

Other citations from other works by Borges refer to the edition of

his Obras completas [Complete Works] (OC), published by Emecé
Editores in Buenos Aires in 1997.

When a chapter number of a saga is indicated in a note, this

always corresponds to the edition that appears in the Bibliography, at
the end of this volume.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: In certain passages, we have retained

Borges’s translations into Spanish of poetry originally written in
English. We have added alongside, in brackets, the corresponding lines
of the English original except when those lines appear in the text
nearby.
 ABOUT THIS BOOK

These classes were recorded by a small group of students of English

literature so that other students, who couldn’t attend class because they were
working, would be able to study the material. The transcriptions of these
recordings, produced by the same students, form the basis of this book.
The tapes have been lost; they were probably used to tape other
classes, in other subjects. Such carelessness might seem unpardonable to us
today. However, we need to understand that in 1966—the year these lectures
were given—Jorge Luis Borges was not yet considered the indisputable
genius he is today. With the constant political changes in Argentina, his
statements about current events received more publicity than his literary
work. For many of the students in his class, Borges—though an eminent
writer and director of the National Library—must have simply been one more
professor. The transcriptions of the classes, therefore, were made for the
purposes of studying the material, and were probably done quickly in order to
prepare for the exam.
We might, in fact, be grateful for this: there was no attempt to modify
Borges’s spoken language, nor edit his sentences, which have reached us
intact with their repetitions and their platitudes. This fidelity can be verified
by comparing Borges’s language here with that of other texts of his oral
discourse, such as his many lectures and published interviews. The
transcribers also made certain to note under the transcription of each class the
phrase: “A faithful version.” This faithfulness was maintained, fortunately,
not only in Borges’s discourse, but also in asides and colloquialisms the
professor used to address his students.
On the other hand, due to the transcibers’ rush and lack of scholarship,
each proper name, title, or foreign phrase was written phonetically such that
most of the names of the authors and titles of the works were written wrong;
the recitations in Anglo-Saxon and English, as well as etymological
digressions, were completely illegible in the original transcriptions.
Every single one of the names appearing in the text had to be checked.
It was not difficult to figure out that “Roseti” was Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It
took considerably longer, however, to puzzle out that “Wado Thoube” was,
in fact, the poet Robert Southey, or that the transcriber had written “Bartle” at
each mention of the philosopher George Berkeley. Many of these names
required laborious searches. Such was the case of the Jesuit from the
eighteenth century, Martino Dobrizhoffer—who appeared in the original as
“Edoverick Hoffer”—or of Professor Livingston Lowes, whose name was
transcribed as if it were the title of a book, “Lyrics and Lows.”
The transcribers’ lack of familiarity with the literary texts under
discussion was obvious on many occasions. Names as well known as those of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde appear in the original with strange spellings,
threatening to turn the terrible duality of the character into a multiplicity. For
example, Dr. Jekyll is “Jaquil,” “Shekli,” “Shake,” “Sheke,” and “Shakel,”
whereas Mr. Hyde is “Hi,” “Hid,” and “Hait,” variations that sometimes
appear on the same page and even in the same paragraph. It was often
difficult to determine if all the variations referred to the same person. Hence,
the hero Hengest appears in one line with the correct spelling, but in the next
he’s turned into “Heinrich”; the philosopher Spengler is hiding behind the
names “Stendler,” “Spendler,” or even further removed, “Schomber.”
Borges’s poetic citations were equally illegible. Some, once revealed,
turned out to be comic. Perhaps the most significant of these was the line
from Leaves of Grass: “Walt Whitman, un cosmos, hijo de Manhattan”
[“Walt Whitman, a cosmos, of Manhattan the son”] appears in the original
transcription as “Walt Whitman, un cojo, hijo de Manhattan” [“Walt
Whitman, a gimp, of Manhattan the son”], a variation that surely would have
disturbed the poet.
During his classes, Borges often asked his students to lend him their
eyes and their voices to read poems out loud. As the student read, Borges
would comment on each stanza. In the original transcription, however, the
poems recited by the students were removed. In their absence, Borges’s
comments on the stanzas appeared one on top of the other and were wholly
indecipherable. In order to restore coherence to these classes, the recited
stanzas were found, and Borges’s commentaries were interspersed through a
truly laborious editing and reassembling task.
Such work required the restitution of quotes in Old English that had
been transcribed phonetically from the original. Though seriously distorted,
these were recognizable and were replaced with the original texts.
Punctuation in Borges’s text, inconsistent in the quick, original
transcription, had to be completely changed, always with the goal of
following the rhythm of the spoken presentation.
This edition required the correction of all possible facts, fixing errors
of transcription and making the necessary corrections. The original sources of
most of the texts were found, and endnotes were added, offering the poems in
their original languages (if they were brief) or in fragments.
In some cases, for the sake of the reader, certain minor changes were
necessary:

1. Missing words were added (conjunctions, prepositions, etcetera) that

Borges surely spoke, despite their absence in the original transcription.
2. Other conjunctions used in spoken language, but that made
comprehension of the written text more difficult, were eliminated.
3. In a few places, it was necessary to bring a subject and verb closer
together where Borges’s enthusiasm led him into a long digression—a
practice that is acceptable in spoken language, but in a written text, the
thread of discourse is completely lost. The order of phrases in a
sentence was changed around, but without omitting a single spoken
word.

As none of these changes altered the words or the essence of Borges’s

discourse, we preferred not to indicate when this was done, so as to avoid
disturbing the reader. On other occasions, words not spoken by Borges were
added to the text in brackets to facilitate comprehension.
The endnotes mostly supply information about works, people, or
events in order to enrich the reading of these classes. We mostly resisted the
temptation to link subjects in these classes with the rest of Borges’s oeuvre.
The relationship between Borges the writer and Borges the teacher is so close
that it would require an almost infinite quantity of notes; moreover, our goal
has not been to carry out a critique or an analysis of the text.
Many of the notes are brief biographies; the relative length of each
does not reflect our judgment as to the value of the person or thing, but
rather, in most cases, was determined by two factors: 1) how unknown a
particular reference might be, and 2) its relevance within the context of the
class. Hence, Ulfilas, the Gothic minister, and Snorri Sturluson, the Icelandic
historian, receive a few lines; while those figures who are more recent or well
known—or only mentioned in passing—have notes containing only their
dates, nationality, and a few facts that allow for easy identification.
The reader will find that many of these short biographical notes
correspond to famous figures, but that does not mean that we assume the
reader is not familiar them. The presence of these notes allows the reader to
situate these figures historically, this in consideration of the liberty with
which Borges leaps from century to century, continent to continent,
contrasting and comparing.
We don’t know if Borges knew about the existence of these
transcriptions; we are, nevertheless, certain that he would be pleased to know
that these pages carry on his work as a teacher. A limitless number of readers
can now join all those students to whom Borges taught English literature for
many years with dedication and affection.
We hope the reader enjoys reading this book as much as we enjoyed
editing it.

MARTÍN ARIAS
MARTÍN HADIS
Buenos Aires, February, 2000
 CLASS 1

THE ANGLO-SAXONS. GENEALOGY OF THE GERMANIC

KINGS. POETRY AND KENNINGS.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1966

English literature starts to develop at the end of the seventh or the

beginning of the eighth century. The first works we have come from that era,
predating any from any other European literature. In these first two units, we
will discuss this literature: Anglo-Saxon poetry and prose. In order to learn
the material in these classes, it would be helpful for you to consult a book I
wrote with Ms. Vázquez called Literaturas germánicas medievales [Medieval
Germanic Literatures].1 It was published by Editorial Falbo. Before
continuing, I would like to make clear that this course will be undertaken
from the standpoint of literature, with references made to the economic,
political, and social context only when necessary for the understanding of the
texts.
Let us begin this first class, then, in which we will discuss epic poetry
and the Anglo-Saxons, who arrived in the British Isles after the departure of
the Roman legions. We are talking about the fifth century, the year 449,
approximately. The British Isles were Rome’s remotest colony, the one
farthest to the north, and it had been conquered all the way to Caledonia, part
of present-day Scotland, which was inhabited by the Picts, a people of Celtic
origin separated from the rest of Britain by Hadrian’s Wall. To the south
lived the Celts, who had converted to Christianity, and the Romans. In the
cities, educated people spoke Latin; the lower classes spoke various Gaelic
dialects. The Celts were a people who lived in the regions of Iberia,
Switzerland, Tirol, Belgium, France—and Britain. Their mythology was
wiped out by the Romans and the barbarian invasions, except in Wales and
Ireland, where some remnants of it were preserved.
 In the year 449, Rome collapses and its legions withdraw from Britain.
This was an extremely important event because the country was left without
the defenses it had counted on and was vulnerable to attacks by the Picts
from the north and the Saxons from the east. The Saxons were thought of as a
confederation of marauding tribes, for Tacitus does not refer to them as a
“people” in his Germania. They were “of North-Sea Germanic stock,” and
were related to the Vikings, who came later. They inhabited the Lower Rhine
region and the Low Countries. The Anglos inhabited southern Denmark, and
the Jutes, as their name indicates, lived in Jutland. And so it happened that a
Celtic chieftain, a Britain, upon seeing that the south and the west were being
threatened by marauders, realized he could pit them against each other. To
this end, he summoned the Jutes to help him in his struggle against the Picts.
And that’s when two Germanic chieftains arrive: Hengest, whose name
means “stallion,” and Horsa, whose name means “mare.”2
“Germanic,” then, is the generic designation of a group of tribes, each
with a different ruler, who spoke similar dialects, out of which came modern
Danish, German, English, etcetera. They shared some of the same
mythologies, though only the Norse one has survived, and then only in the
remotest part of Europe: Iceland. We know of certain connections between
them from the mythology preserved in the Eddas: for example, that the Norse
god Odin was the German Wotan and the English Woden.3 The names of the
gods have persisted in the names of the days of the week, which were
translated from Latin to Old English: Monday is the day of the moon. The
day of Mars, Tuesday, is the day of the Germanic god of war and glory. The
day of Mercury became the day of Woden in Wednesday. The day of Jove
became Thursday, day of Thor, with his Norse name. Friday is the day of
Venus, the goddess of beauty; in German it’s Frija, and Frig in England.
Saturday is the day of Saturn. The Lord’s day—domingo [in Spanish], and in
Italian domenica—remained the day of the sun, Sunday.
Very little of Anglo-Saxon mythology has been preserved. We know
that the Norsemen worshipped the valkyries—warrior goddesses who could
fly and who carried the souls of dead warriors to paradise; we also know that
these were worshipped in England, thanks to a trial held in the ninth century
of an old woman accused of being a valkyrie. In other words, Christianity
changed these warrior women who carried the dead to paradise on their
flying horses into witches. The old gods were commonly interpreted as
devils.
Although the Germanic peoples were not politically unified, they did
acknowledge unity of a different kind: national unity. Thus foreigners were
called wealh, which becomes “Welsh” in English, and means “the people
from Wales,” galeses [in Spanish]. This word also remains in the word
“Galicia,” or galo [in Spanish]. That is, the name was used for anyone who
was not German. . . . So, the Celtic chieftain Vortigern summoned the Picts to
help him, but when they launched their oar-driven boats—they didn’t have
sails—and they landed in Kent County, the Celts immediately waged war and
defeated them quite easily. So easily, in fact, that they decided to invade their
entire country. This cannot really be called an armed invasion, because the
conquest was carried out almost peacefully. Immediately thereafter the first
Germanic kingdom of England is formed, with Hengest as its ruler.
Thereafter, many other small kingdoms were formed. At the same time, the
Germans were abandoning, en masse, the southern regions of Denmark and
Jutland, and founding Northumbria, Wessex, Bernicia. This entire assortment
of small kingdoms converted to Christianity one century later as a result of
the efforts of monks who hailed from Rome and Ireland. These efforts, at first
complementary, soon grew into rivalries between the monks from those two
places. There are several interesting aspects of this spiritual conquest, the first
being the way the pagans accepted Christ. The Venerable Bede tells of a king
who had two altars: one devoted to Christ and the other to the devils.4 These
devils were, without a doubt, the Germanic gods.
Here we come to another problem. The Germanic kings were direct
descendents of their gods. And a chieftain could not be prohibited from
paying homage to his ancestors. Thus, the Christian priests, whose
responsibility it was to record the genealogies of the kings—some of which
have been passed on to us—found themselves in the dilemma of not wanting
to contradict the kings and, at the same time, not refute the Bible. The
solution they came up with was really very curious. We must realize that for
the ancients the past did not extend beyond fifteen or twenty generations:
they could not conceive of a past as long as we do. So, after several
generations, we come to a kinship with the gods, who in turn are related to
the Hebrew patriarchs. Hence, for example, we have Odin’s great-
grandfather, the nephew of one of the patriarchs. And from there, it is a direct
line to Adam. At the most, their concept of the past extended to fifteen
generations, or a bit more.
The literature of these peoples spans many centuries, and most of it has
been lost. Because of the Venerable Bede, we date its beginnings to around
the middle of the fifth century. And from the year 449 until 1066, the Battle
of Hastings, out of this entire period, there remain only four main codices and
a few other bits.5 The first codex, the Vercelli Book, was discovered in the
monastery of the same name in the north of Italy in the last century. It is a
notebook written in Anglo-Saxon, assumed to have been brought there by
English pilgrims on their way back from Rome, and who, fortunately for us,
forgot the manuscript in the convent. There are other codices: The Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle, a translation of Boethius, one of Orosius, laws, and
Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn.6 And that is all. Then come the epic
poems. The famous Beowulf, a composition of a little fewer than 3,200 lines,
suggests, perhaps, that there were other epic poems that vanished. But they
are all completely hypothetical. Moreover, considering that the epic poem
appears after the proliferation of short cantos and arises from them, it is also
reasonable to believe that that one is unique.
In every instance, poetry comes before prose. It seems that man sings
before he speaks. But there are other very important reasons for this. A verse,
once composed, serves as a model. It is repeated over and over again, and
then we have a poem. Prose, on the other hand, is much more complex, and
requires a greater effort. Moreover, we must not forget the mnemonic value
of verse. Thus, in India, the codices are written in verse.7 I assume they must
have some poetic value; this is not why they were written in verse, but rather
because in that form it was easier to remember them.
We must look closely at what we mean by “verse.” This word has a
very elastic meaning. It is not the same concept for all peoples in all eras. For
example, we think of rhymed and isosyllabic verse; the Greeks thought of
sung verse, noted for its parallel structures, for its phrases that balanced one
another. Germanic verse is nothing like this. It was difficult to discover the
rules that determine how these verses were constructed, because in the
codices the lines aren’t written—as are ours—one under the other, but rather
continuously. Moreover, they have no punctuation. But finally, it was
discovered that each line has three words whose first syllables are stressed
and that they are alliterated. Rhymes have also been found, but these are
accidental: those who listened to this poetry probably didn’t hear them. And I
say those who listened because these poems were meant to be read or sung,
accompanied by a harp. There is a Germanist who says that alliterated verse
has the advantage of forming a unit. But we must mention here its
disadvantage, which is that it does not allow for stanzas. Indeed, if we hear a
rhyme in Spanish, we are led to expect a conclusion; that is, if a four-line
stanza’s first line ends in -ía, followed by two verses ending in -aba, we
expect the fourth line to also end in -ía. But this does not happen with
alliteration. After several verses, the sound of the first one, for example, has
vanished from our minds, and hence the sensation of the stanza disappears.
Rhyming allows for lines to be grouped together.
Later, the Germanic poets discovered the refrain and used it
infrequently. But poetry had developed another hierarchical poetic
instrument: that is, kennings—descriptive, crystallized metaphors.8 Because
poets were always talking about the same things, always dealing with the
same themes—that is: spears, kings, swords, the earth, the sun—and as these
were words that did not begin with the same letter, they had to find a
solution. The only poetry that existed, as I have said, was epic poetry. (There
was no erotic poetry. Love poetry would appear much later, in the ninth
century, with the Anglo-Saxon elegiac poems.) For this poetry, which was
only epic, they formed compound words to denote things whose names did
not begin with the requisite letter. These kinds of formations are quite
possible, and normal, in the Germanic languages. They realized that these
compound words could very well be used as metaphors. In this way, they
began to call the sea “whale-road,” “sail-road,” or “fish-bath”; they called the
ship “sea-stallion” or “sea-stag” or “sea-boar,” always using the names of
animals; as a general rule, they thought of the ship as a living being. The king
was called “the people’s shepherd” and also—this surely for the minstrels’
sake, for their own benefit—“ring-giver.” These metaphors, some of which
are beautiful, were employed like clichés. Everybody used them, and
everybody understood them.
In England, however, poets finally realized that these metaphors—
some of which, I repeat, were very beautiful, like the one that called the bird
the “summer guardian”—ended up hobbling poetry, so they were slowly
abandoned. In Scandinavia, on the other hand, they carried them to their final
stage: they created metaphors out of metaphors by using successive
combinations. Thus, if a ship was “sea-horse” and the sea was “gull’s field,”
then a ship would be “horse of the gull’s field.” And this could be called a
metaphor of the first degree. As a shield was the “pirate’s moon”—shields
were round and made of wood—and a spear was the “shield’s serpent,” for
the spear could destroy the shield, that spear would be the “serpent of the
pirate’s moon.”
This is how an extremely complicated and obscure poetry evolved. It
is, of course, what happened in learned poetry, within the highest spheres of
society. And, as these poems were recited or sung, it must be assumed that
the primary metaphors, those that served as the foundation, were already
familiar to the audience. Familiar, even very familiar, almost synonymous
with the word itself. Be that as it may, the poetry became very obscure, so
much so that finding the real meaning is like solving a puzzle. So much so
that scribes from subsequent centuries show, in the transcriptions of these
same poems we have now, that they did not understand them. Here’s a fairly
simple kenning: “the swan of the beer of the dead,” which, when we first see
it, we don’t now how to interpret. So, if we break it down, we see that “beer
of the dead” means blood, and “swan of the blood” means the bird of death,
the raven, so we see that “swan of the beer of the dead” simply means
“raven.” And in Scandinavia, whole poems were written like this and with
increasing complexity. But this did not happen in England. The metaphors
remained in the first degree, without going any further.
As for the use of alliteration, it is interesting to note that a verse is
considered alliterative even if it contains stressed words beginning with
different vowels. If a verse contains a word with the vowel a, another with ,
and another with i, they are alliterated. In fact, we cannot know exactly how
the vowels were pronounced in Anglo-Saxon. Undoubtedly, Old English had
a much more open sound and was more voiced than English is now. Now, in
English, consonants serve as the high points of the syllables. On the contrary,
Anglo-Saxon or Old English—these words are synonymous—was highly
vocalic.9
Besides this, the Anglo-Saxon lexicon was completely Germanic.
Before the Norman Conquest, the only other significant influence was the
introduction of about five hundred words from Latin. These words were, for
the most part, religious, or, if not religious, they named concepts that had not
previously existed among those peoples.
As far as the religious conversion of the Germanic peoples, it is worth
noting that being polytheistic, they had no problem accepting yet another
god: one more is nothing. For us, for example, it would be rather difficult to
accept polytheistic paganism. But for the Germanic peoples, it was not; at
first Christ was merely a new god. The issue of conversion, moreover,
presented few problems. Conversion was not, as it is now, an individual act;
rather, if the king converted, the entire people converted.
The words that found a place in Anglo-Saxon, because they
represented new concepts were, for example, ones like “emperor,” a notion
they did not have. Even now, the German word kaiser, which means the same
thing, comes from the Latin caesar. The Germanic peoples, in fact, knew
Rome well. They acknowledged it as a superior culture and admired it. That
is why conversion to Christianity meant conversion to a superior civilization;
it had, without a doubt, incontrovertible appeal.
In the next class, we will look at Beowulf, a poem from the seventh
century, the oldest epic poem, prior to “Song of the Cid” from the ninth or
tenth century, and Chanson de Roland, written a century before Cid and the
Nibelungenlied.10 It is the oldest epic poem in all of European literature. We
will then continue with the Finnsburh Fragment.
 CLASS 2

BEOWULF. DESCRIPTION OF THE GERMANS. ANCIENT

FUNERAL RITES

UNDATED, PROBABLY OCTOBER 15, 19661

In our last class, I said that today we would discuss the epic poem,
Beowulf. As we shall see, the protagonist is a knight who embodies all the
virtues held in high regard during the Middle Ages: loyalty, bravery—this is
all in the book by the Venerable Bede. But let’s dig into Beowulf. The name
in itself is a metaphor that means “bee-wolf,” in other words “bear.” It is truly
a long poem: it contains a little fewer than 3,200 lines, all of which follow the
law of Germanic versification: alliteration. Its language is intricate; it makes
constant use of what is called “hyper-baton,” that is, the alteration of the
logical sequence of words in a sentence. We know this was not the usual
form of the Germanic language, and much less so of its poetry, because
another fragment that has been preserved, the Finnsburh Fragment, employs
very direct language.
It was previously believed that the style of Beowulf belonged to a
primitive, barbaric stage of poetic creation. Subsequently, however, a
Germanist discovered that lines from the Aeneid were woven into the poem,
and that elsewhere, passages from that epic poem were brought in, then
interspersed in the text. Hence, we have realized that we are not dealing with
a barbaric poem, but rather with the erudite, baroque experiment of a priest,
that is, someone who had access to Latin texts, and who studied them.
The author took an ancient Germanic legend and turned it into an epic
poem that follows the syntactic rules of Latin. Thanks to those few
interpolated lines, we can see that the author set out to compose a German
Aeneid. One clear indicator of this is the aforementioned contrast with the
direct language used in the heroic Finnsburh Fragment and the other texts we
have from that era (such as incantations, etcetera). But the author faced a
problem in attempting to carry out his intention: according to the decorum of
the time, he could not praise the pagan gods. In the eighth century, the pagan
era was quite recent, and still very much alive among the populace. It was not
until the seventeenth century, almost ten centuries later, that we see Góngora
speak calmly, without qualms, about the pagan gods.2 However, [the author
of Beowulf] could not speak about Christ and the Virgin, either. The fact is,
he never names them anywhere. But two concepts make their appearance,
and we do not know if the author understood that they contradicted each
other. The word “god” appears, as does wyrd or “fate.” Fate, in Germanic
mythology, was a power greater than even the gods themselves. We know
this from Norse mythology. Wyrd has survived in modern English:
Shakespeare uses it in Macbeth to speak of the witches, though it probably
did not have the same meaning. In any case, the word [in Beowulf] is not
“witch,” but “emissary of fate,” “weird sister,” “sister of fate.”3 Throughout
Beowulf, the concepts of God—the new God, and the old one, the one of
wyrd—are woven into the text and used indiscriminately.
The Germanist Ker has criticized Beowulf, for he considers the plot to
be childish.4a>The idea of the hero who kills an ogre, that ogre’s mother, and
then a dragon, belongs to a children’s tale. But these elements are, in fact,
inevitable; they are there because they must be. Once he chose that legend,
the author could not possibly omit the ogre, the witch, or the dragon. The
public expected them, because it knew the legend. Moreover, these monsters
were symbols of the powers of evil; they were taken very seriously by that
audience.
One of the poem’s most curious aspects is that it takes place first in
Denmark and then in southern Sweden. This indicates that after three
hundred years of living in new lands, the Anglo-Saxons still felt homesick for
their old homelands on the Baltic Sea; this further suggests that there is a
strong affinity between the Norsemen and Anglo-Saxons. The characters in
the poem are Scandinavian. The hero himself is a Swedish prince. This might
tempt some scholars to claim that the lore of the Goths contains the legend of
their origins, which says they come from Northern Europe. But there is no
proof of this. (We actually know that the first news of these people has them
hailing from south of the Danube.) However, Charles XII of Sweden believed
this. So much so that during a conflict with the pope, he wrote to him [the
pope], warning him not to feel too secure; he said his ancestors had already
entered Rome once, and their descendants were no less brave. He was hinting
at a possible invasion that would repeat the Gothic invasions of Italy. (Now,
if we look closely at the word “Geats,” we see that it can easily be associated
with “Goths.”5a> Hence, if we identify the Geats with the Goths, the
Spaniards would be relatives of the Norsemen. Hence, all descendents of the
Spaniards would be relatives of Beowulf!)
In the Odyssey and the Iliad, we see that the bloody and bellicose
events are the most paramount. The poet of Beowulf was interested in
hospitality, manners, gift-giving, and minstrels more than in military feats; in
other words, he was interested in what we would now call “social life.” All of
these things were valued at that time and must have been quite appealing to
the Saxons, who lived in a violent era and in inhospitable lands. Europe was
colder then. We know this because research has shown that the animals who
lived at that time in the south of Europe now live in the north. For example,
reindeer used to live in Germany and are now found only in Scandinavia.
England was a marshy land. The Germans considered it to be a terrible,
noxious place. They populated all those swamps with evil beings, devils.
Moreover, the psychology of these people is revealed by the fact that they
counted the years by the winters, and the days by the nights. The cold that
prevailed in that land is what constantly shows up in these texts; always
mentioned are the terrors of the snow, the hardships of winter. The arrival of
spring was welcomed as a great event.
Returning to the poem, the first episode deals extensively with the
mythic king of Denmark, Scyld Scefing, which means “shield with the
sheaf.” This name is derived from the legend of his origins. One day, a baby
arrives on the coast of Denmark in a mysterious ship. There was nobody
manning the ship, and the child is lying on the bottom, on a bed of weapons,
sheaves of wheat, and jewels. This prodigious child becomes king and was so
strong that he made his people great. This is, in the concept of the era, a
“good king”: one who terrifies his neighbors, is strong, and is a warrior, and
whose men fear and respect him. Time passes and the king grows old; he
feels that the hour of his death is upon him. So he plans his funeral and gives
orders for it to be carried out according to his instructions. These include
building a ship exactly like the one he came in and placing him next to the
mast surrounded by weapons and jewels, then pushing him out to sea.
All peoples have believed that the territory of death lies beyond the
sea. Life was associated with the course of the sun; since the sun is born in
the east and dies in the west, a parallel was drawn to human life. It was
believed that when it was over, one went to the land where the sun dies, to
the west, beyond the sea. Hence, in the Celtic legends, paradise was thought
to be in the west. In Greek mythology, the kingdom of death was beyond the
water, and one had to cross the water to reach it. So, this ship they push out to
sea has that meaning. Next comes a description of the ship and the king lying
next to the mast, and then of the subjects crying, pushing the ship out to sea.
This is one of the most powerful scenes in the poem.6 We cannot know if in
the mind of the poet—who genuinely felt this scene—if this king being
pushed out to sea (in the ship he arrived in) is a symbol of man mysteriously
returning to the place from which he mysteriously came. In any case, this
ritual of launching the ship is not an invention of this poet but rather a
Germanic custom. Ships containing the skeletons of men and animals have
been found at the bottom of the sea. We can deduce from this that they not
only pushed the dead out to sea, but on their last trip, they were accompanied
by their servants and their favorite animals. It was a Germanic custom to bury
the dead with their dogs at their feet. In the book Beau Geste, the hero says
that he “had his Viking’s funeral with a dog at his feet.”7 He was talking
about a sergeant who had been buried. There is an ancient text that also says
that after the ship was launched, it would be set on fire.
The author [of Beowulf] intentionally described different burial rites of
the Germanic people. This can be seen at the end of the poem, with
Beowulf’s funeral next to the sea, on a pyre so high it can be seen by sailors
out at sea, and that is heaped with weapons, shields, and helmets. This detail
also appears in the Odyssey, where there is also a funeral rite.
In the next class we will continue our study of Beowulf and probably
examine the Finnsburh Fragment.
 CLASS 3

BEOWULF. BRAVERY AND BOASTFULNESS:

BEOWULF AS COMPARED TO THE COMPADRITOS.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1966

In the previous class, we discussed the epic poem Beowulf. Today, we

will pick up where we left off. I recounted one of the most poetic episodes of
the poem: the one about the child who arrives mysteriously on the coast of
Denmark, who becomes king and instills fear in his enemies. The poet notes
that he is a good king because what is expected of a king is that he be strong
and warlike and that his neighbors fear his people. Then the years pass and
when death approaches, he gives instructions for his funeral. So they prepare
the funeral ship.
The poet says that this ship was “isig ond utfus.” The first word means
“frozen,” and is related to the English word “iced” and the German word
eisig. But we don’t know if the ship is covered with ice (it is strange that the
poet hadn’t spoken of ice earlier), or if he meant “resplendent,”
“shimmering,” “as clear as ice.” The third word is difficult to translate
because fusmeans “eager” and ut means “out.”1 In other words, the ship was
eager to leave, as if it were a living being. Then the ship is described; the poet
says that it flew a flag made of gold fabric, and that the king was placed in a
seated position, leaning against the mast: “The powerful one against the
mast.” Then his vassals, crying, push the ship out to sea, and then we have
these lines that I know by heart: “Nobody, neither the counselors in their
assemblies nor the heroes under the heavens, knows who received that
cargo.” And it is said that the ship was pushed far away by the power of the
sea: “Under the power of the sea, it traveled far.” Now, an ancestor is also
mentioned, who is also called Beowulf, like the eponymous hero of the poem,
but he is a different Beowulf. And this lets us imagine that there is a
connection between the royal house of Denmark and the royal house of the
Geats—that tribe that is a bit mysterious—which some have identified with
the Jutes who invaded England, and others, with the Goths, in other words,
the ancestors of the Spaniards, who were the Visigoths. But there is a lot of
disagreement about this.
One peculiar feature of Beowulf is that the story we are looking at is a
primitive one—even puerile, according to some. Yet the atmosphere in which
this barbarous and primitive fable takes place is not the fantastical
atmosphere of a fairy tale even if the events that take place are. The story
abounds in realistic details, especially regarding the genealogy of the
characters. It has, as the English Germanist Ker has said, the solid
atmosphere of a realist novel.2The events are fantastical, but we feel the
characters as real, as garrulous as if they were right there, and given to
oratory; they are characters who like good manners, conviviality, ceremony.
It is true that all of this was highly valued during that dangerous era, a violent
era when people perhaps did not much like violence; it was a barbarous era
that nonetheless was drawn to culture, that enjoyed culture.
The poet lists the names of the kings of the royal house of Denmark,
until he gets to a king named Hrothgar. These consonant clusters are common
in Anglo-Saxon, but have since been lost: hr, and the runic letter following it,
can be transcribed as th.3 We have another example in the Anglo-Saxon word
for “ring.” In German and, I think, in Scandinavian languages, it is ring,
whereas the Anglo-Saxons said hring, and there are other analogous sounds.
For example, “neigh” in English is the verb hnægan in Anglo-Saxon.4 There
are other consonant clusters we cannot pronounce, because we don’t know
how they were pronounced. For example, for “haughty” they said wlanc. I
don’t know how the wl should be pronounced. It’s possible the W was
pronounced as a U. But let’s return to the poem.
The poet names several kings until he finally gets to Hrothgar, the king
of Denmark, who builds a palace called Heorot. And this palace, the poet
tells us, is the most splendid of palaces, though we should imagine it built of
wood. I have seen beautiful houses in the United States, luxurious houses—
the house of Longfellow, the house of Emerson—houses that are three
hundred years old, and these houses are built of wood. Currently, in Buenos
Aires, to say “a wood house” is to mean a shack. This is not the case in New
England: a wood house can be very beautiful, with many floors, a salon, a
library, and they are well built so there are no drafts.
The king builds the palace, and the poet tells us that this is the palace
that shines over all the neighboring kingdoms; in other words, it is famous.
We can imagine a large central hall where the king meets with his vassals and
where he dines. I assume they ate pork and deer and drank beer from drinking
horns; wine was quite rare, as it had to be brought from the south. In the
poem, there is a minstrel who livens up the banquets singing and
accompanying himself on the harp. The harp was the national instrument of
all the Germanic peoples. The music would be, undoubtedly, very simple.
The king has his court. And there he hands out gold rings and bracelets
to his vassals. This is why one of the king’s titles is “ring-giver” or beahgifa.
We find this word, beag, in French as bague, meaning “ring.” The king is
very powerful, but the din of the court, or the music, frightens or disturbs a
monster who lives nearby in an area full of swamps, marshes, and moors.
Some believe that certain regions of England are recognizable in the
description of where the monster, named Grendel, lived. Lincolnshire, for
example. But this is pure conjecture. The monster is described as looking like
a human being, but gigantic. He is an ogre and apparently belongs to ancient
German mythology, but as the poet is Christian, he wanted to tie him to the
Christian tradition, rather than the pagan tradition, so he tells us that he is a
descendent of Cain. And this monster wanders around the moors and lives
with his mother under a lake, so deep down that the hero swims for an entire
day to reach the underground cavern where he lives with his mother, who is a
witch. The poet calls her “the she-wolf of the sea,” “the sorceress of the sea.”
There are also storms, which make this lake seem like the sea, and there is a
description of the forests surrounding the lake. It says that crows are afraid to
fly near the lake, for it is a zone of tempests, fog, solitude, and because of
what could be called sacred horror. The description of the lake and its
surroundings lasts about twenty lines. Now, this does not surprise us, but
remember that the poem was written at the end of the seventh century or,
according to the scholars, the beginning of the eighth, and it is full of
sentiment for the natural world. This sentiment does not appear in other
literatures until much later. One often says, too hastily—because in addition
to Beowulf, there is also Shakespeare—that this sentiment for nature is the
same as the romantic sentiment. In other words, the same as in the eighteenth
century, about ten centuries after Beowulf. The truth is that there are books,
notable books, in which the natural world as we feel it now makes no
appearance. And to turn to the most famous example, I believe—I don’t
know if I am certain—I suspect that in Don Quixote, it does not rain a single
time. The landscapes described in Quixote have nothing in common with the
landscapes of Castile: they are conventional landscapes, full of meadows,
streams, and copses that belong in an Italian novel. On the other hand, in
Beowulf, we sense nature as something fearsome, something that is hostile to
man; the sense of night and darkness as fearsome, as it surely was for the
Saxons, who had settled in an unknown country whose geography they
discovered only as they were conquering it. Undoubtedly, the first Germanic
invaders had no precise idea of England’s geography. It is absurd to imagine
Horsa or Hengest arriving with a map. Completely unbelievable. We don’t
even know if they would have understood Beowulf, which is written in a very
contorted language and is full of metaphors that, undoubtedly, were not used
by the Anglo-Saxons in their spoken language. In any case, these metaphors
never appear in their prose. And in the Scandinavian Norse regions, those
most closely connected to the Saxons, we find a very marked and deliberate
division between prose, which can be very eloquent and full of pathos, but is
very simple, and the language of poetry, which is filled with kennings, the
name for those metaphors that, as we have seen, reached an extraordinary
level of complexity.
So, King Hrothgar rules over Denmark. Naturally, nobody thought of
empires at that time; the idea of empire is totally foreign to the Germanic
mind. But he was a prosperous king, a victorious, opulent king, and his
court’s jubilant celebrations—one of the metaphors for the harp is “wood of
joy” or “party-wood”—upsets Grendel, who attacks the castle. The fable is
poorly wrought, for at the beginning we have a very powerful king, and then
this same king and his vassals and his troops, the only measure they take is to
pray to the gods, to ask for help from their ancient gods, Odin, Thor, and the
others. The poet tells us that all their prayers were in vain. The gods have no
power at all against the monster. And thus, improbably, twelve years pass,
and every few nights the ogre breaks down the castle’s double doors—there
were no other doors—enters, and devours one of the men. And the king does
nothing. Then news of the ogre’s attacks spreads. The ogre is gigantic and
invulnerable to all weapons. The news reaches the neighboring country of
Sweden. And in Sweden there is a youth, a prince, Beowulf, and throughout
his childhood this prince has shown himself to be clumsy, slow, but he wants
to gain fame with a great feat. He has already fought in a war against the
Franks, but this isn’t enough for him, so he departs in a boat with fourteen
companions.
Naturally, the poet makes the sea stormy, so that the trip won’t be easy,
so it will be difficult, and Beowulf lands in Denmark. The king’s sentinel
comes out to greet him, an aristocrat like Beowulf, a prince. Beowulf says
that he has come to save the country and is received courteously by the court.
There is one character, however, who questions Beowulf’s personal courage,
so Beowulf proposes a kind of contest, a swimming race, which improbably
lasts ten days, a competition against another famous swimmer named Breca.
The two swim for ten days and ten nights. They fight against sea monsters,
who drag Beowulf to the bottom of the sea, where he kills them with his
sword or chases them away. Then he surfaces, keeps swimming, and wins the
race.
Now, we find ourselves up against a modern custom, a modern
prejudice that distances us from the poem. Today we say, or better, we have
the idea, that a brave man should not be a braggart. We think that all bragging
is like that of the Miles Gloriosus, of the Latin comedy, who is a coward.5
But, generally speaking, this idea did not exist in antiquity. Heroes boasted of
their deeds, and were permitted to do so. In fact, doing this gave them
courage. I’d like to recite here some couplets of the compadritos[toughs,
braggarts] from the beginning of the century in Buenos Aires. I don’t think
anybody would think a man was a coward because he said:

Soy del barrio ’e Monserrá

donde relumbra el acero,
lo que digo con el pico,
lo sostengo con el cuero.

[I am from the Monserrat neighborhood, / where blades abound, / what I

say with my lips, / I back up with my hide.]

or:
 Yo soy del barrio del norte,
soy del barrio del Retiro,
yo soy aquel que no miro
con quién tengo que pelear,
y aquí en el milonguear
ninguno se puso a tiro.

[I’m from the northern neighborhood, / I’m from Retiro, / I never stop to
look / at who I have to fight, / and here in the fray / nobody was up to the
dare.]

or:

Hágase a un lao, se lo ruego,

que soy de la Tierre ‘el Fuego.

[Step aside, if you please, / for I am from Tierra del Fuego.]

That is, from the neighborhood around the penitentiary.

In any case, Beowulf had a lot in common with our compadritosfrom
Monserrat or Retiro. Beowulf wanted to boast about how brave he was. And
no one thought he was a coward. To find a more famous example, we can
turn to the Iliad, in which the warriors state who they are, and their
reputations do not suffer. On the contrary, they are enhanced. It is a necessary
prelude to combat, their way to warm up. They could even insult each other,
too, and could accuse each other of cowardice.
In Beowulf, after the swimming race and the battle against the sea
monsters, everyone goes to bed and falls asleep. This is another poorly
wrought episode: they are expecting the ogre’s attack, yet they sleep
peacefully. The only one who stays awake is Beowulf, and Beowulf is
unarmed, because he knows that no weapon can harm the monster. Moreover,
he has confidence in his physical strength, which is extraordinary. The poet
tells us that he has in his fist the strength of thirty men.
Then the monster arrives, circles the castle, and although the door is
locked with strong iron bars, he breaks it down, surprises the first sleeping
warrior he comes upon, and devours him whole, raw. Also, he devours the
warrior’s hands and feet, then rashly approaches Beowulf. And then Beowulf,
who has not yet risen, grabs the ogre’s hand and breaks it. And the two begin
to fight—a fight others do not participate in—which allows the hero to show
off even more. And Beowulf, with only the strength of his hands—imagine
we have before us a northern Hercules—pulls off the ogre’s arm and
shoulder. As they fight, they shout. This is realistic. For example, when
infantrymen charge, they shout. There is a poem by Kipling that describes
this. So, they are both shouting. The entire palace of Heorot trembles, it is
about to collapse, but finally the ogre receives a mortal wound and runs off to
die in his swamp. The next day, they celebrate the death of the ogre and hang
his arm in the hall as a trophy. There is another banquet, but that night the
ogre’s mother, who is a witch and also very strong, comes to recover her
dead son’s arm, and she takes it and kills a warrior. Then Beowulf decides to
look for the swamp where the ogre lives, and that’s where we get the
description of the swamp, one of the classic passages in the poem. Some men
want to accompany Beowulf, but he is the hero: it is better for him to perform
his feats alone, as Hercules did centuries before. And he sees pieces of flesh,
human flesh, possibly the ogre’s, in the swamp. And there is also foam,
which seems to be bloody. The hero dives in and swims for a whole day
before he reaches the cavern. The cavern is dry; it is illuminated by a
supernatural, magical light. And there is the ogre’s mother, horrible, as strong
as the ogre himself. Beowulf fights her and is on the verge of being defeated:
she is actually stronger than her son. But [Beowulf] manages to grab a sword
hanging on the wall. The ogre’s mother is not invulnerable to iron; he kills
her with the sword, but the sword melts because the witch’s blood contains
some kind of poison. Then, Beowulf takes the ogre’s head and also the hilt of
the sword, though not the blade, which has melted. On shore, they are waiting
for him anxiously. He rises to the surface with this trophy, and here the poet
invents an incidental detail: the giant’s head is so heavy that two men are
needed to carry it. Then Beowulf, covered in blood, wounded and triumphant,
returns to Hrothgar’s palace, where Hrothgar thanks him for what he has
done and showers him with gifts—accepting these gifts is not dishonorable—
and Beowulf returns to his own kingdom, in the south of Sweden.
Now, Beowulf was not actually Swedish. The Swedes belonged to a
different tribe. The Geats were enemies of the Swedes. . . . Well, in this way,
five years passed . . . excuse me, fifty years, “fifty winters,” the poet says.
The Saxons counted time by winters because of the harshness of the climate.
In the meantime, Beowulf performs many military feats, but the poet
mentions them only in passing because he is interested only in Beowulf’s
first and last feat. It has been said that one of the aims of the poem was to
portray an exemplary prince, according to the concept of the time. That is,
one who is strong—supernaturally strong, for he has the strength of thirty
men—as well as a slayer of monsters who are a danger to everyone—again
this coincides with Hercules—and also just. Because when he dies at the end
of the poem, he invokes God and says that he never dealt out death to a single
relative in the great banquet hall. And this is considered to be a rather
extraordinary fact, and it probably was at the time.
Fifty years pass, fifty years of victories, and, finally, a triumphant
peace, and then another character appears, a dragon who has lived for time
immemorial in a cave guarding treasures. The idea of the dragon as a
guardian of treasures is common in ancient Germanic myth. We remember
the case of Sigurd, or Siegfried, and the dragon; and there was also the griffin
in Pliny’s Natural History, who guards mountains of gold and fights against
the one-eyed Arimaspians.6The idea of the dragon as the guardian of
treasures is so common that in Norse poetry one of the most common
metaphors for gold—immediately understood by everybody—was “the
dragon’s bed.” That is, people imagined the gold, and the dragon lying on top
of it, sleeping on it in order to guard it better. The poet tells us about an
escaped slave who enters the cave when the dragon is asleep and steals a
golden pitcher. Then the slave disappears from the fable. The following day,
the dragon awakes, notices that the golden pitcher is gone, and leaves his
cave, thinking he must take revenge for the theft. Then we see a human trait:
before destroying the Geats’ land, he goes back into the cave and carefully
looks through everything, just to make sure the pitcher isn’t there somewhere.
But he doesn’t find it, so he terrorizes the kingdom of the Geats, just as the
ogre, half a century before, had done in Denmark. Then the news of what is
happening reaches old Beowulf, and again he decides to fight a monster. And
if we want to use our imaginations a little, we can see this as a story about a
man pursued by a fate: to fight a monster and die. The dragon is, in some way
—and whether or not it is understood this way by the poet, it really shouldn’t
matter to us because an author’s intentions are less important than the success
of his execution—the dragon is yet another encounter with his fate. That is,
the dragon is again the ogre of Denmark. And the king goes there with his
men, who want to help him, but he says no, he’ll manage on his own as he
did fifty years before with the ogre and the ogre’s mother. He reaches the
mouth of the cave of the dragon, who has been described with many
metaphors—he has been called “spotted horror of dusk” and “guardian of
gold”—and Beowulf challenges him. The dragon emerges, and they engage
in battle. There is a rather bloody description of the battle; Beowulf slays the
dragon, but the dragon breathes fire, and Beowulf knows that this fire will
poison him. And there is a servant named Wiglaf, the only one who has
accompanied him there; and the king says that he is going to offer his soul to
the Lord—this paragraph is Christian—and he knows he will be going to
heaven because his life has been righteous, and he gives instructions for his
funeral. The funeral is not like the one we saw earlier: there will be no funeral
ship. He tells them to erect a pyre and pile it high with helmets, shields, and
shining armor—“Helmum behongen, hildebordum, beorhtum byrnum, swa he
bena wæs.” Helmum behongen means “adorned with helmets”—the
Germanic word helm is the same. And hildebordum is “battle board”: that’s
what the shield was called, which was round, made of wood, and wrapped in
leather. And then beorhtum byrnum means “bright armor,” and swa he bena
wæs means “just as he ordered.” Then they lie him out on top of the pyre and
set it on fire, and he has instructed them to build a burial mound that can be
seen from the sea, so that people will remember it. He is then buried in the
burial mound, and twelve warriors on horseback ride circles around the
king’s tomb and sing his praises and celebrate his brave deeds.
Now, in a medieval text about the history of the Goths, by Jordanes,
Attila’s burial and the same ritual is described: the pyre, the burial mound,
and the warriors who ride circles around it singing praises of the king.7 It is
clear that the poet was an erudite poet: in his poem he wanted to describe the
various funeral rites of the Germanic peoples. (They considered Attila to be
one of their own, even though he was a Hun, because many Germanic kings
were his vassals.) The poem ends with praise of Beowulf, and this praise is
quite odd. Though I don’t agree, some have believed it to be an interpolation,
for one might expect there to be mention of the ogre, as well as of the dragon,
and of the other Swedes against whom he fought, and his victories, but none
of this is mentioned. The penultimate line says that he was manna mildust,
the mildest of men, the kindest of men, and one most eager for praise. This
also contradicts our current sensibility, because we live in an era of
propaganda: a man’s desire to be famous is not seen as an admirable
characteristic. But we have to remember that this poem was written in the
Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that all praise was just: that
men wished to be praised, deserved to be praised. The poem ends with these
words: “the mildest of men and the most eager for praise.” Nothing is said
about his courage. However, we have seen that courage exemplified
throughout the entire poem.
There’s another curious aspect of this poem, and this is the appearance
of a minstrel, and this minstrel sings—but doesn’t finish—a Germanic legend
predating Beowulf: the story of a princess from Denmark named Hildeburh.
Her name means “castle of war” or “castle of the battle.” Now, this fragment
as sung by the minstrel might not be the same as the song—the old ballad—
because the language is like the rest of Beowulf. That is, it is in rhetorical
language with an abundance of metaphors, and undoubtedly Germanic
primitive poetry was much simpler. We can see this, for example, in The Lay
of Hildebrand; although composed more or less at the same time as Beowulf,
it corresponds to a much more primitive era, for there are few alliterations,
and I believe there is only one metaphor, and even that is a dubious one:
armor is called “battle vestments,” or “war vestments,” which may or may
not be a metaphor. It is far from the complexity of “weave of men” for
“battle,” as we find among the Norsemen, or “swan-road” for “sea.”
Now, this story is told only in part, and it is the subject of the other
ancient Anglo-Saxon epic fragment, Finnsburh Fragment, which contains
about sixty lines and must be, I suspect, prior to Beowulfbecause of the
directness of the language.8
The fable chosen by the author of Beowulf does not lend itself to
pathos. In it we have two feats performed by the same hero. The two are
separated by an interval of fifty years, and there is no conflict in the poem. In
other words, Beowulf always fulfills his duty as a brave man, and that’s all.
He dies bravely. The poem is full of pious pronouncements. Some are
obviously pagan, for example, when it says that it is “better to avenge than
mourn a dead friend.” This is clearly pagan. It belongs to an era when
revenge was not only a right but a duty—a man was obliged to avenge the
death of his friend. So there is no conflict. The story of Hildeburh, on the
other hand, which is interpolated into Beowulf, contains conflict. This is the
story. There is a princess in Denmark named Hildeburh, and there is discord
between the Danes and the Frisians, the people from the Low Countries. And
so it is decided that a princess, the princess of Denmark, will marry the king
of the Frisians, so that through this alliance between the two royal houses, the
conflict will be resolved. This practice was so common that one of the
metaphors for the princess used in the Saxon poem is “peace-weaver,” not
because she was particularly peaceful but because she served to weave peace
between neighboring, rival nations. Hildeburh marries the king of the Frisians
and then her brother comes to visit her, arriving at court with sixty warriors.
They are received hospitably and given lodgings in rooms that surround a
central hall with two doors. Identical, let’s say, to Hrothgar’s palace. But at
night, the Frisians attack. The Danes defend themselves and fight for several
days, during which the princess of Denmark’s brother kills his nephew.
Finally, the Frisians realize that they are no match for the Danes. Both Anglo-
Saxon poems express true sympathy for the Danes and for the Geats, that is,
for the Norsemen. After a few days, when [the Frisians] realize that they can
no longer fight, that they are unable to defeat them [the Danes], they propose
a truce, which the princess’s brother accepts. He waits for the winter to be
over to set sail—because during the winter, the sea was obstructed by ice—
then he returns to his country. There he assembles a force larger than the one
with sixty warriors that previously accompanied him. He returns, attacks the
Frisians, kills the king, and carries his sister, the princess, back with him to
his country.
Now, if this poem existed in its entirety—and we have to assume that it
once did—we would have the possibility of a tragic conflict, because we
would have the story of the princess whose son dies by the hand of his uncle.
In other words, the poet would have more opportunity for pathos than in
Beowulf, which simply recounts two brave feats, neither credible to us,
against an ogre and a dragon. In the next class we are going to examine—and
we can examine it in great detail—the Finnsburh Fragment. We’ll leave out
the beginning of the fragment, because I’ve already told it. We will start from
the moment the Danes realize that the Frisians have forcibly entered their
rooms and are going to attack them, and we will continue until the Frisians
realize they are no match for the Danes and that they have been defeated by
them. We are going to analyze it almost line by line. There are about sixty
lines. You will see how direct the language is, so different from the pompous
language of Beowulf. Maybe its author was a man of action. In the case of
Beowulf, on the other hand, we can imagine the author as a monk, from
Northumbria, in the north of England, a reader of Virgil, who set himself the
task, quite audacious at that time, to write a Germanic epic poem. And this
brings us to a small problem, which is this: why is it that in the Germanic
nations—and here I am thinking of Ulfilas, I am thinking of the Saxons, I am
thinking later of Wycliff, and of England in the sixteenth century, of Luther
—why were there translations of the Bible in the Germanic nations before the
Latin nations?9
There is a Germanist of Jewish origin, Palgrave, who had an answer,
and the answer is this: the Bible that was read in the Middle Ages was the
Latin Vulgate Bible, that is, it was a Latin text.10 Now, if anyone would have
thought of translating the Bible into Provençal or Italian or Spanish—these
languages are too similar to Latin for the translation not to run the risk of
seeming like a parody of the original. On the other hand, the Germanic
languages are so totally different from Latin that the translation could be
undertaken without running that risk. What I mean is, in the Middle Ages,
those who spoke Provençal or Spanish or Italian knew that they were
speaking a language that was a variant or a corruption of Latin. So it would
have seemed irreverent to go from Latin to Provençal. On the other hand, the
Germanic languages were totally different. [Translations of the Bible] that
were undertaken for people who knew no Latin did not run any risks. Now,
maybe we can apply this to Beowulf. Why was Beowulf the first epic poem
written in a vernacular language? Because that vernacular language was
profoundly different from Latin, so that nobody reading Beowulfcould think
that they were reading a parody of the Aeneid. On the other hand, quite a lot
of time had to pass for the Romance-language minstrels to have the courage
to try epic poetry in their own language.
In the next class, then, we will look at the Finnsburh Fragment, and at
a much later Anglo-Saxon epic poem, and with that we’ll bring the first unit
to an end.
 CLASS 4

THE FINNSBURH FRAGMENT. "THE BATTLE OF

BRUNANBURH." THE VIKINGS. ANECDOTES FROM BORGES'S TRIP
TO YORK. TENNYSON'S TRANSLATION.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1966

In the previous class, we talked about the heroic Finnsburh Fragment.

This fragment was discovered at the beginning of the eighteenth century and
was published by an antiquarian, who would now be called a scholar. Then
the manuscript was lost. This fragment corresponds to part of a ballad sung
by a minstrel in Hrothgar’s court, in the epic poem Beowulf.1 I think in the
previous class I gave you a summary of the story of Princess Hildeburh of
Denmark, whose brother [Hrothgar] marries her to the king of Frisia, a
kingdom in the Low Countries, to prevent a war between the Danes and the
Frisians. After a while—which must have been considerable, because later,
she already has a grown son—her brother goes to visit her, accompanied by
sixty warriors. They are given lodgings in a chamber off the central hall,
which has doors on both sides. Then the poem begins with the guards seeing
something shining, a glow in the night’s darkness. And then we assume,
based on what follows, that there are several speculations about the reason for
the glow. “‘The eaves are not burning,’ said the king [Hrothgar], a novice in
battle, ‘nor is day dawning, nor is a dragon flying toward us,’”—such an
explanation was possible at that time—“‘nor are the eaves of this hall
burning: an attack is underway.’” And we can see from the previous lines that
the glow they have seen is the glow of the moon “shining through the clouds”
and onto the shields and spears of the Frisians who have come to attack them,
treacherously.
The language is extremely direct, and I’d like you to hear the first
[lines], so you can hear again the hard sounds of Old English, which is so
much better suited to epic poetry than modern English; modern English no
longer has open vowels, and the consonant sounds aren’t as hard.
“Hornas byrnað naefre?” Hornas here means “eaves”; “byrnað
naefre” is “never burn” or “are not burning.” “Hleorrode ða, heaðogeong
cyning” is: “the king, a novice in battle.” “Ne ðis ne dagað eastan, ne her
draca . . .”––draca is “dragon”—“. . . ne fleogeð, ne her ðisse healle hornas
ne byrnað, ac her forð berað,” and then the king has some kind of vision of
what is going to happen next. He is not talking about the present. He says:
“The birds are singing.” These are the birds of prey that will swoop down to
the battlefield. Then he says, “the wood of battle resounds”—“guðwudu,” in
other words, “the spear.” “Shield will answer sword,” and then he speaks of
the moon that reflects off the armor of the attackers. Then he tells his
warriors to awaken, to rise, to think about courage. Many knights adorned
with gold—with gold embroidery on their cloaks—rise, strap on their swords,
draw them, and advance upon the two doors to defend the hall of Finn.
The poem is titled Finnsburh, “the castle of Finn.” The word burh or
burg is a word you know, and it means “castle” and has remained in the
names of many cities: Edinburgh, “castle of Edin”; Strasbourg, Gothenburg
—in the south of Sweden—and the Castilian city of Burgos, which is a
Visigoth name. Then we have words like “bourgeois,” someone who lives in
a city, and “bourgeoisie.” In French, it gave rise to the word burgraves, the
counts of the city (the name of a play by Hugo), as well as other words.2
The poem, then, names the warriors who come to the defense of the
stronghold. And one name in particular stands out: this is Hengest, and the
poem says “Hengest himself.” It has been suggested that this Hengest is the
same who will later establish the first Germanic kingdom in England. This is
plausible because Hengest was a Jute. We surely remember that Jutland is the
name for the northern part of Denmark. Before becoming the captain who
establishes the first Germanic kingdom in England, Hengest could have
fought among fellow Danes. Moreover, if this Hengest were not the same
Hengest who began the conquest of England, I don’t see why the author
would have mentioned him with such emphasis in these verses. The poet was
Anglo-Saxon, and the conquest of England took place in the middle of the
fifth century. The poem is, supposedly, from the end of the seventh century.
(It could be earlier, for the style is much more direct and has none of those
Latinate inversions and complicated kennings—the kinds of metaphors in
Beowulf.) So, an English audience would be interested in knowing that this
protagonist was one of the founders of the Saxon kingdoms of England.
Then the poet turns his attention to those who are treacherously
attacking the Danes. And among them is Garulf, son of Queen Hildeburh and
the nephew of one of the defenders, at whose hands he possibly dies.
Someone tells him that he is too young, that he should not risk his life in the
attack, that there will be many who wish to take his life because he is the
prince, the son of the queen. But he is a brave young man, undaunted by this
advice, and he asks for the name of one of the defenders. (Now, this belongs
to an aristocratic era. He, as a prince, would not fight just anybody: he could
only fight someone of his same rank.) Then the defender answers: “Siegfried
is my name, I am prince of the Secgen”—all traces of this tribe have been lost
—“I am a famous adventurer, I have fought many a battle, and now fate will
decide what you shall get from me, or what I must await from you,” in other
words, fate will decide who will win glory and who, death.
The name “Sigeferð” means “victorious spirit” and it is clearly the
Saxon form of the name “Siegfried,” made famous by Wagner’s operas, the
one who kills the dragon (its Norse equivalent would be “Sigurd” in the
Völsungasaga).3 Then the battle is fought and the poet tells us that the
shields, as Garulf, the son, foresaw, fall under the blows of the spears. And
many of the attacking warriors fall, and the first to fall is Garulf, the young
Frisian, who was told not to risk fighting in the front lines. The battle
continues, somewhat implausibly, for five days, and many Frisians fall, but
none of the defenders do. The poet gets very excited here and says, “I have
never heard it said that sixty victorious fighters bore themselves better in a
battle of men.” Here the phrase “battle of men” seems redundant: all battles
are battles of men. But it really gives the sentence more power. And then we
have this curious word, sigebeorna, “warriors of victory,” “men of victory,”
or “victorious warriors.” The poet also says that the hall of Finnsburh glowed
with the shimmering of the swords, “as if Finnsburh were in flames.” I think
there is an analogous metaphor in the Iliad, comparing a battle to a fire. The
comparison refers to the glow of the arms as well as its moral stature.
Perhaps I do not need to remind you that in Norse mythology,
Valhalla, Odin’s paradise, is illuminated, not with candles but with swords
that shine with their own supernatural glow. Then the “protector of the
people”—as the king of the Frisians is called—asks how the battle is going.
They tell him they have lost many men and that one of the Frisians has
withdrawn, that his shield and his helmet have been destroyed, and then one
of the youths. . . . And here ends the fragment, one of the oldest of all
Germanic literature, definitely older than Beowulf. We know the rest of the
story from other sources. We know that a truce is declared, and a year later,
the king of the Danes, the brother of the queen, is given permission to return
to Denmark. He leaves after that year, then returns with an expedition,
defeats the Frisians, destroys the castle of Finn, and finally goes home with
his sister. So here we have a tragic conflict: a princess has lost her son,
possibly by the hand of his uncle, her brother. It is a pity that more of this
poem has not been preserved, for it is so rich in pathetic possibility; but we
should be grateful for the sixty-odd lines that have been preserved.
The two Anglo-Saxon epic poems we have looked at so far have Norse
subject matter. But then there is another, much later, that takes place in
England. And it narrates feats of arms between the Saxons and the Norsemen.
Because around the eighth century, England—already a Christian country—
began to suffer from the depredations of the Vikings. They came primarily
from Denmark. Some were also Norwegians, but they were all considered
Danish. And it is not impossible, actually it’s quite probable, that some were
Swedes. I would like to pause here to talk about the Vikings.
The Vikings were perhaps the most extraordinary of all the Germanic
peoples of the Middle Ages. They were the best sailors of their time. They
had ships, which they called “longships,” that had a dragon, the head of a
dragon, on the prow. They had masts, sails; and they were fitted with rows of
oars. It was said of one of the Norwegian kings, Olaf, that he was so agile he
could jump from oar to oar as he sailed the ship.4 The maritime and bellicose
adventures of the Vikings were extraordinary. To begin with, we have the
conquest of northern and central England, where they founded a region called
Danelaw, “the law of the Danes,” because that is where Danish law ruled.
That’s where the people settled. They were farmers, and they were also
warriors, and they ended up mingling with the Saxons and disappearing
among them. But they left many words in the English language. Generally
speaking, languages take nouns and adjectives from other languages. But
English still has Norse pronouns. For example, the word “they” is a Danish
word. The Saxons said hi, but as English had “he,” the words were confused,
and they ended up adopting the Danish “they.”5 The word “dream” is also
Danish. In the dialect of the farmers of Yorkshire, the site of one of the
principal Danish settlements, many Norse words persist. When I was in York,
I had the opportunity to speak with the art critic, Sir Herbert Read, and he
told me that years before, a Danish or Norwegian ship—I cannot remember
which—was shipwrecked off the coast of Yorkshire.6 Naturally, the people
who lived in the town went to help the shipwrecked sailors. He spoke with
the captain, who spoke English, like all educated Scandinavians—in
Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, English is taught in primary school—but the
sailors and the less educated people did not speak English, though they
managed to communicate with the fishermen and farmers who came to help.
And this is remarkable, if we consider that at least ten or eleven centuries had
passed. Nevertheless, there were still enough remnants of the Norse language
in English for these common folks to understand each other. He said that a
Yorkshire farmer would not say, “I am going to York,” but rather “I’m going
till York,” and that “till” is Norse. We could offer multiple examples. But for
the sake of brevity, here’s one: the day of the week “Thursday,” which in
Saxon is thunresdæg, and contains the Norse name for Thor. But let’s return
to the Vikings.
The Vikings were individual adventurers. This is one reason there was
never a Norse empire. The Norsemen had no consciousness of race. Each
person pledged loyalty to his tribe and his chief. There was a moment in
English history when there could have been a Norse empire, when Cnut was
king of England, Denmark, and Norway.7 But he had no consciousness of
race. He chose Saxons and Danes, indiscriminately, as governors and
ministers. The truth is, the idea of empire was a Roman idea, one totally
foreign to the Germanic mind. But let’s look at what the Vikings did. They
established kingdoms in England and in France, in the county of Normandy,
which means “men from the north.” They sacked London and Paris. They
could have remained in those cities, but they preferred to demand a tribute
and withdraw. They established a Danish kingdom in Ireland. It is believed
that the city of Dublin was founded by them. They discovered America—
they settled on the east coast of America—and they discovered Greenland.8
This idea of calling it Greenland is almost like an auctioneer’s trick, because
Greenland is a land of ice floes. But they named it Greenland to attract
colonists. Then they abandoned America. They could have been the
conquerors of America, but such a poor land, a land inhabited by Eskimos
and redskins, a land without precious metals—they never reached Mexico—
held no interest for them. Then, to the south, they sacked cities in France,
Portugal, Spain, and Italy, and even reached Constantinople. The Byzantine
emperor of Constantinople had a guard of Scandinavian warriors.9 They had
come from Sweden, after traversing all of Russia. It has been said that the
first kingdom of Russia was founded by a Norseman named Rurik, from
whom the country derives its name. Viking graves have been found along the
banks of the Black Sea. They also conquered those small islands to the north
of the British Isles, the Shetlands, the Orkneys.10 The inhabitants now speak
a dialect that contains many Norse words, and there is a certain Jarl who is
spoken of, an earl of Orkney . . . “traveler to Jerusalem,” they called him.11
And there were also reports about another Viking who sacked a city in Italy,
erroneously thinking it was Rome, then he set it on fire to have the honor of
being the first Norseman to set fire to Rome.12 It turned out to be a tiny port
town of no importance, but he had his moment of glory, his military joy.
They also sacked cities in North Africa. In the Norse language, there’s a
word, Serkland, which means “land of Saracens,” and that word refers
indistinctly to Portugal, Morocco, and Algeria—for the Moors lived there.
All of that was the land of the Saracens. And farther south is what the Norse
historians called Blaland, “blue land,” “land of blue men,” or rather Negroes,
because they mixed the colors up a little. Besides one word, sölr, which
means “yellowed” and is used to describe fallow fields and the sea, they have
no colors. The snow is often spoken of, but they never say the snow is white.
Blood is spoken of, but they never say it is red. They talk about the fields, but
they never say they are green. We don’t know if this is the result of some
kind of colorblindness or if it was simply a poetic convention. The Homeric
Greeks said “the color of wine.” But we don’t know what color wine was for
the Greeks; they don’t talk about colors, either. On the other hand, Celtic
poetry that is contemporaneous or prior to Germanic poetry, contains an
abundance of colors—it’s full of colors. There, every time a woman is
mentioned, they speak about her white body, her hair the color of gold or fire,
her red lips. They also talk about the green fields, and specify the colors of
fruits, etcetera. In other words, the Celts lived in a visual world; the Norse did
not.
And now, as we are discussing epic poetry, let’s take a look at some
much later epic compositions that are still considered to be from the ninth
century. First of all, we will look at the ode, the “Battle of Brunanburh,”
written at the beginning of the tenth century. It appears in the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle.13 There are several versions, and those of you who know English
can look at a really splendid translation of it among the works of Tennyson.
That is, it is readily available. Tennyson did not know Anglo-Saxon, but one
of his sons studied a primitive form of English and published a prose
translation of the work in a specialized magazine. This translation interested
the father, to whom the son surely explained the rules of Anglo-Saxon meter.
He was told that it was based on alliteration, not rhyme, and that the number
of syllables in each line was irregular, so Tennyson, a poet who was quite
hooked on Virgil, tried for once in his life, and with unquestionable success,
this experiment that had never been tried in any language, which was to write
in modern English an almost literal translation of an Anglo-Saxon poem, and
using Anglo-Saxon meter.14 The truth is, Tennyson stretches the rules of this
meter slightly. For example, there are more alliterations and one better
alliteration in Tennyson’s version than in the original poem. In any case, his
version deserves to be read. In any edition of Tennyson’s poems you will find
the “Battle of Brunanburh.”15 And before we talk about this ode, we should
talk about the battle. According to the poem, it was one of the longest and
bloodiest waged in England during the Middle Ages, for it began at dawn and
lasted the entire day until dusk, which is very long for a battle in the Middle
Ages.16 Think of our famous battle of Junín, which lasted three-quarters of
an hour; not a single shot was fired, and the entire battle was waged with
sabers and spears.17 We can see that a whole day for a battle in the Middle
Ages meant it was very long, analogous to the long battles of the Civil War in
the United States, the bloodiest of the nineteenth century, and the long battles
of the First and Second World Wars.
 The circumstances of the battle are quite curious. There is an alliance,
which would at first have seemed invincible, between Constantine, the king
of Scotland—Scotland was an independent kingdom at the time—and his
son-in-law Olaf—in this poem he is called Anlaf—the Danish king of
Dublin. They fought against the Saxons of Wessex. (Wessex means “land of
the western Saxons.”) Also fighting were five British—in other words, Celtic
—kings. So we have this coalition of Scots, Norsemen from Ireland, and
British kings against the Saxon king Athelstan, which means “noble stone,”
and one of his brothers. There is one detail that has never been explained.
According to all the chronicles, the Danish king of Dublin leaves Dublin to
invade England. What one would naturally expect is for him to cross the
North Channel and land in England. For unknown reasons, though—perhaps
he was hoping for a surprise attack—he took his ships—five hundred, each
carrying one hundred warriors—all the way around the north of Scotland and
landed in a place, which has not been well identified, on the east coast of
England, not on the west coast as we would expect. There he joined forces
with the Scots of Constantine and with the last British kings, who came from
Wales. And thus they made up a formidable army. Then King Athelstan and
his brother Edmund advance from the south to meet them. The two armies
meet, confront each other, and decide to wait till the following day to begin
the battle—battles in those days were a little like tournaments. King Anlaf
devised a plan to discover the location and layout of the Saxon camp. He
dressed up as a minstrel, took a harp—clearly he knew how to play the harp
and sing—and presented himself in the court of the Saxon king. The two
languages, as I have said, were similar. Moreover, as I have also said, at that
time, wars were not seen as being waged between one people and another,
but rather between one king and another, hence the appearance of a Danish
minstrel would not have alarmed or surprised anybody. They lead the
minstrel to King Athelstan, he sings in Danish, the king enjoys listening, then
he gives him, possibly tosses at him, some coins. The minstrel, who has
observed the layout of the Saxon camp, leaves. And here something happens
that is not mentioned in the Chronicle, but which is not difficult to imagine.
King Anlaf has received some coins. They have been given to him by the
Saxon king, whom he plans to kill, or in any case, defeat, the following day.
He might be thinking several things. He might be thinking—and this is the
most probable—that these coins will bring him bad luck in the battle he will
wage the following day. But he is probably also thinking that it is not right to
accept money from a man he means to fight. Now, if he throws the coins
away, they can be found, and his trick might be discovered. So he decides to
bury them. But among the Saxon king’s men was one who had fought under
Anlaf, and he has suspicions about the identity of the phony minstrel. He
follows him, sees him burying the coins, and his suspicions are thereby
confirmed. So he goes back and tells the king, the Saxon: “That minstrel who
was singing here is really Anlaf, king of Dublin.”18 And the king says, “Why
didn’t you tell me before?” And the soldier, obviously a noble personage,
says, “King, I have sworn loyalty to you. What would you think of my
loyalty if I betrayed a man I had sworn loyalty to in the past? But my advice
is that you rearrange your camp.” So the king heeds the soldier, rearranges
his camp, and in the spot he occupied previously—this is somewhat
perfidious on the part of the Saxon king—he leaves a bishop who has arrived
with his people. Before dawn, the Scots, Danes, and Britons attempt a
surprise attack, duly killing the bishop, and then the battle is waged and lasts
all day and is recounted in “Battle of Brunanburh.” Now, this battle was
recounted by the great Icelandic poet as well, the Viking poet Egil
Skallagrímsson, who fought with the Saxons against his Norse brothers. And
in that battle, one of Egil’s brothers died while fighting alongside him; Egil
celebrated the Saxon victory afterward in a poem that is famous in the history
of Old Norse literature.19 And that poem, that panegyric to the king, includes
an elegy to his brother. It is a strange poem: a panegyric, a poem of victory,
that includes a sad elegy about the death of his brother who fell next to him in
battle.
But let us return to the poem. We don’t know who wrote it. Probably a
monk. This man, although writing at the beginning of the tenth century, had
his head full of all the previous Saxon epic poetry. We find a sentence from
Beowulf buried in the poem. He talks, for example, of five young kings put to
sleep with a sword. It is one of the few moments of tenderness in the poem,
how he speaks about those young kings. . . . One would expect, in a poem
composed in the Middle Ages, expressions of gratitude to God, that it would
thank God for having bestowed victory on the Saxons rather than the enemy.
But the poet says nothing of the sort; the poet extols the glory of the king and
his brother, “the long glory,” “long Mars,” the poem says literally,
“ealdorlangne tyr.” (The word tyr would be equivalent to the classical god
Mars, which also means “glory.”) “They won by the edge of their sword near
Brunanburh”—“sweorda ecgum,” “by the edge of the sword.” Then the poem
says that they fought the whole day long, “From the moment the
sun”—“mære tungol,” “that famous star,” he calls it—“slid over the fields till
the glorious creature sank into the West.” Then he describes the battle, and
the poet clearly feels happy at the defeat of his enemies. He speaks about the
astute Scottish traitor, Constantine, who had to return to his land in the north
and had no reason to boast about the meeting of the spears, the rustling of the
standards. . . . He uses a lot of metaphors to describe the battle. But first he
talks about Anlaf. He says that Anlaf had to flee in his boats and seek refuge
in Dublin, accompanied by a few men who had barely escaped with their
lives. And he says that the Saxons spent all day chasing the enemies they
hated. There is one mention of God in the poem, only one, and this is when
he calls the sun the “bright candle of God,” “godes condel beorht.” It is the
only mention of the divinity. The poem, though clearly written by a Christian
—we are at the beginning of the tenth century—is infused with the ancient
Germanic heroic spirit. After describing the battle, the poet pauses with
obvious delight at the crow, with his beak “as hard as a horn,” that eats,
devours, the corpses of men. And he also talks about “that grey beast in the
forest,” about wolves that eat the corpses. All of this with a kind of joy. And
when he speaks about the Danes returning to Dublin, he says that they return
in shame, because defeat was considered a disgrace, especially when
accompanied by flight. Anlaf and Constantine, according to the Germanic
ethic, should have made sure they died in the battle they lost. It was
disgraceful that they were saved, that they came out of it alive. After that, the
poet tells us about the king and the prince. He says that they returned on
horseback to Wessex, “each in his glory.”20 And after this verse of
exaltation, something happens that is also peculiar in the Middle Ages,
because we need to remember that the people at that time, like the Indians in
the Pampas here, wouldn’t have had much historical consciousness. This
poet, however, who was obviously an educated man—he had all the ancient
metaphors at his fingertips, as well as all the rules of Germanic verse—he
says that never had such a great battle been waged on this island, England,
not since the Saxons and the Anglos, “proud war-smiths” (he says this as if
war were a tool, an iron tool), came to these islands motivated by—and here
Tennyson translated “by the hunger of glory.” And he tells us that “over the
broad billow broke into Britain with haughty war-workers.”
In other words, this poet from the tenth century, from the beginning of
the tenth century, is recalling the Germanic conquest of England which
occurred in the fifth century; he connects his memory of this present victory,
which must have been very moving for the Saxons—for it was more common
for the Norse to defeat them, and rare for them to be the victors—he linked it
to the often secular victories enjoyed by the first Germanic peoples who
arrived in England.
In the next class we will look at another Anglo-Saxon epic poem, one
that commemorates a Norwegian victory over the Anglo-Saxons, not a
defeat. We will then talk about Christian poetry proper, that is, poetry based
on the Bible and on Christian sentiment.
 CLASS 5

"THE BATTLE OF MALDON." CHRISTIAN POETRY.

"CAEDMON'S HYMN." THE RUNIC ALPHABET. CHARACTERISTICS
OF ANGLO-SAXON ELEGIES

MONDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1966

During the last decade of the tenth century, an event took place in
England that had only relative military importance, but it had great relevance
for the history of English literature, for out of it came the ballad of “The
Battle of Maldon,” which tells of a defeat rather than a victory. One could say
that defeats are better than victories for poetry. Let us consider, as one
example, the famous Chanson de Roland, one of the great poems of French
literature, whose subject, as you well know, was a defeat of the rearguard of
Charlemagne’s army by a group of Basque mountain dwellers, who figure as
Saracens in the poem.
In The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written by the monks of several
monasteries, one can read that in the last decade of the tenth century—in
approximately the year 990, I do not remember the exact date—Olaf
Tryggvason landed on the east coast of England and went to find Byrhtnoth,
the earl of the town.1 The Vikings demanded that he pay them a tribute. So,
what did he do? He refused to pay the tribute. This all happened along the
banks of a river that is today called Blackwater. Combat ensued between the
Vikings, who were the leading warriors and sailors of the era, and a small
group of militiamen. The Saxon militiamen were defeated by the Vikings,
and soon thereafter, the king of England, who was named Æthelred, and later
nicknamed “the Unready,” agreed to pay the Danes an annual tribute, and the
government continued to collect it for a long time after the threat of Viking
invasions had already passed.2
 It appears that the poet witnessed the battle firsthand, probably as one
of the combatants. This can be deduced by the abundance of specific details.
In the Middle Ages, circumstantial details were never invented. Now, they
are used by all and any novelist, and any journalist. At that time, people
thought differently; they thought platonically, allegorically. The abundance of
circumstantial details in “The Battle of Maldon” is proof of its authenticity—
or rather, nobody would have thought to invent them. The ballad has
preserved several features of ancient Saxon epic poetry. For example, the
characters talk too much—they make little speeches that are somewhat
implausible in the middle of a battle.
Also preserved are certain formulas from ancient epic poetry, formulas
we already saw in “Finnsburh” and in Beowulf. In general, the language is
oral and colloquial and, even more important, we feel that everything
recounted in the ballad is true. Things could not have happened in any other
way, unless we imagine there was at the time a brilliant and anonymous
novelist. But in general it is assumed, and can be felt throughout the story of
the ballad, that things had to have happened that way, or at least that is how
they were recounted afterward among the people. There is a French
anthology published by Aubier that contains a map of the battle. And with
this map we can follow the various alternatives of the battle, or rather the
combat. The word “battle” is too big for Maldon.
Unfortunately, the poem is only a fragment. We don’t know how the
poet started or how he ended, but most probably he began by saying, “I will
tell of what happened in Maldon” or maybe “I was there,” or something of
the sort. The fragment begins with the words “brocen wurde,” “was broken.”
And we’ll never know what was broken. We don’t know if it refers to a siege
or the men who remained there. Then the narration begins, but we don’t
know who the subject is. We imagine it to be the earl, because he orders his
men to fall out, to spur their horses on, to whip their horses so they will
advance. He is obviously speaking to a group of warriors, who were probably
peasants, fishermen, woodsmen, and among them are the earl’s guards. Then
the earl tells them to form a line. Far off, they will see the tall boats of the
Vikings, those boats with the dragon on the prow and the striped sails, and
the Norwegian Vikings, who have already landed. Then there appears in the
scene—because this poem is very beautiful—a young man, whom, we are
told, is offan mæg, “of the family of Offa.” Now, as Offa was the king of one
of those small English kingdoms, we suspect this might not mean Offa
himself, but rather that the man was from that kingdom. The Kingdom of
Mercia, I think it was. And this young man is, as we can see, a young
aristocrat passing through; he is not thinking about war because he has a
falcon on his fist; that is, he is doing what is called falconry. But when the
earl issues these orders, the young man understands that the lord will not
abide cowardice, and he joins the battle. And something happens, something
that is realistic and has symbolic value, something a movie director would
use now. The young man realizes that the situation is serious, so he lets his
beloved falcon (the epitaph “beloved” is very rare in this iron poetry of the
Saxons) fly off into the forest, and he joins the battle. The text says: “He let
his beloved falcon fly from his fist to the forest, and he entered the battle”:

he let him þa of handon leofne fleogan

hafoc wið þæs holtes and to þære hilde stop

And the poet adds that whosoever saw him act in this way would have
immediately understood that he would not hesitate at that moment to take up
arms. In fact, the young man is later killed. And here we can see several
symbols, but unintentional ones, of course. We might think that the falcon is
a symbol of the young man’s life. And we might also think that releasing the
hunting falcon and entering the battle symbolizes a transition from one form
of life to another. The young man ceases to be a young courtesan and turns
into a warrior who is willing to die, not for his nation—for the concept of
nation would have been an anachronism at that time—but for his lord, the
earl, who also fought, not for England, but for his own lord, the king.
Then there appears another warrior, a member of the earl’s guard, who
says that he had told his lord many times how much he liked to fight, and this
was the moment he could make good on his boasting. Remember that
“boasting,” as I have said, was not frowned upon at that time. It was
understood that a brave man could and even should boast about his bravery.
We now have the two hosts. On one riverbank are the Norwegian
Vikings, and on the other, the Saxon militia. And the earl instructs the
Saxons, who are obviously peasants, on how they should conduct themselves.
He tells them they must think about their hands and their courage, and then
he shows them how to hold their shields and spears. They have released their
horses. They will fight on foot, but the lord gallops from one end of the line
to the other, exhorting his men, telling them they have nothing to fear. In the
meantime, they are watching the Vikings descend from their boats. We can
imagine the Vikings with their helmets adorned with horns, imagine all these
people arriving. And the earl is riding back and forth, exhorting the men.
Then another character appears, and this character is the wicinga ar,
the Vikings’ messenger. The messenger shouts from the other bank, because
the River Blackwater, which is called Pant in the poem, stands between them.
And the messenger says, “The bold seamen send me to you to say they are
ready to make a truce with you, who seems to be the most powerful one here,
if you give us as much gold rings or gold bracelets”—we should assume that
money was not used at that time—“as they want, and then disband your
troops, and they will be willing to return to their boat. We offer you peace in
exchange for this tribute, and it’s better for you to give us this gold and for us
not to destroy each other.”3
Then the earl lifts his shield and his spear. This has been interpreted in
two ways. According to some commentators, it meant that he was going to
speak and everybody had to remain quiet to hear his words, but it is also
possible that he wanted to show everyone that he was not afraid of the
Norwegian. That’s why he lifts his shield and brandishes his spear and
answers with anger, saying, “Listen, seafarer, to what these people say”—or
to these troops, because the word folc has both meanings. The people would
say: “How could we surrender just like that? Why else have they brought us
here?!” Etcetera. And he adds: “We will pay you a tribute, but not with gold,
rather with old spears and swords. Deliver this hateful message to your chief.
Tell him that here stands a vassal of Æthelred, who is willing to defend the
land of Æthelred, and he should prepare for combat.” Then, the wicinga ar,
the Viking messenger, goes to deliver the news to the Norwegian king, and
the battle commences.
But the battle begins in an unsatisfactory way, because they are
separated by the river and they have to fight with arrows. And one or another
Saxon falls, as does one or another Norwegian. Now, there’s a place with a
bridge or a ford, the text is unclear here, and three or four Saxons are sent to
defend the ford, and their names are given. One of them is called “The Long
One”—he must have been very tall. And then the Norwegian, shouting from
the other bank, suggests something else. He suggests that they let them cross
the ford without attacking, because on the Saxon side there is a meadow, and
beyond the meadow is a forest, and that meadow is a good field for combat,
because combats were considered to be like tournaments.
Here the chief agrees, and the poet uses the word ofermod, which is
related to the word Übermut in German, and means “temerity.” This word is
used twice in the poem, and the poet makes us feel that the Saxon, by
agreeing, has committed an act of temerity that will have to be punished. In
Chanson de Roland we see the exact same thing, as I alluded to previously.
Roland could have sounded his horn, his oliphant. (This word has the same
origin as “elephant,” because the horn was made from the ivory of an
elephant’s tusk.) But he fails to do so, he doesn’t want to call Charlemagne to
his aid, and this is why he is defeated in the end by the Saracens.
And now the earl—we know from other texts that the earl was a tall
man, an erudite man, meaning he knew Latin and was well versed in the
Scriptures; there remain several letters from him to a learned man of the time
—he shows weakness by allowing the Vikings to cross the river; and then
comes a moment of serenity in the poem, because the poet says, “the
Norwegians did not care about the water,” “for wætere ne murnon.” The
Norwegians cross the river, their shields held high so as to keep them dry.
And the poet says, “lidmen to lande, linde bæron,” “the seafarers to the land
came, their shields held high.” And the Saxons allow them to come onto dry
land and then the battle begins.
All of this starts out well for the Saxons. The poem names the
combatants, and there is a detail now that settles any doubt as to whether or
not the description is authentic. And this is the fact that there are cowards
among the Saxons who flee. Now the Saxon chief, the earl, has dismounted
from his horse to fight alongside his men. And one of those cowards—named
Godric, a name we already encountered in the Finnsburh Fragment—climbs
on the chief’s horse and flees.4 So, some of the Saxons who are farther away
think the chief has fled. If the chief has fled, they have no obligation to
continue fighting, because their loyalty is to their chief, not to their nation. So
they also flee. And here begins the foreseeable defeat of the Saxon militias by
the Vikings.
 Individual acts of bravery are described. A soldier is mentioned, who
with his spear “pierced the neck of the haughty Viking.” Then come details
of feats of arms by the Saxon chief. The chief is wounded, mortally wounded.
They try to steal his weapons. There is also an episode like this in Chanson
de Roland, an epic element that might even have been true. And before dying
—he is a Christian fighting against pagans, he is fighting against worshippers
of Odin and Thor—he gives thanks to God for all the happiness he has had on
Earth, including this last happiness of fighting the pagans. Then he asks God
to allow his soul to come to Him and not let devils stand in his way.
The chief dies bravely, and then there is a conversation among those
who remain. And an old solider appears, and this old soldier says words that
seem to be infused with the entire Germanic attitude toward life. He says,
“The weaker we are, the less our strength, the boldest we shall be. I want to
stay here, by the side of my lord.” In other words, he deliberately chooses
death.
There is also a hostage, from the hardy stock of the Northumbrians,
because this combat is waged in the south of England. And this hostage,
taken during one of the smaller civil wars, the Norwegian alongside those
who were his enemies, but who are Saxons or Angles like he.
There is also a young man who says, “I will stay here to die; they no
longer expect victory.” And he speaks about the earl and says, “he
wæs ægðer min mæg and min hlaford,” “he was my kinsman and my lord.”
And others also die. Among those is the young man who voluntarily freed his
falcon and joined the battle. Before that comes a description of the combat,
and there is also talk about eagles, crows, wolves—animals that can never be
absent from any Germanic epic work. Then there is a Godric who dies
bravely and the poet is cut off after these words: “This was not the same
Godric who fled . . . ”
Now, this whole poem is written in very direct English, with only one
or another kenning, one or another epic formula. It is written in the spirit of
the ancient epic poems, and has, I think, one inestimable advantage over
Beowulf, and that is, when we read Beowulf, we feel that we have in front of
us the work of a learned man who set himself the task of writing a German
Aeneid, who is describing legendary facts that he doesn’t even imagine very
well. Here, however, we feel the truth.
A novel was published in Sweden not long ago, I don’t remember the
name of the author; it was published in English as The Long Ships.5 It is
about the adventures of a Viking, and in the first chapter it describes the
Battle of Maldon. Now, there are some critics who say that the poem was left
unfinished because word arrived that the sacrifice of these militiamen had
been in vain, that the king of England had paid in gold what the earl wanted
to pay with old spears and poisoned swords. But it is more likely that the rest
of the poem has been lost. This poem has been translated by [R. K.] Gordon
in that book I mentioned to you from Everyman’s Library, Anglo-Saxon
Poetry, and it is the last Saxon epic poem.6 Thereafter, the poem is lost and
the epic tradition is lost as well. But like the poem we looked at before, the
“Battle of Brunanburh,” this one no longer follows the tradition of the
continent. The ancient lands of the English are no longer talked about, the
Low Countries are no longer talked about, nor is the mouth of the Rhine, or
Denmark—instead the characters are Saxons from England: Anglo-Saxons.
Because this, it seems, is the true meaning of the word: not “Anglos and
Saxons” but rather the “Saxons of England,” to differentiate them from what
Bede, the historian, called antiqui saxones, that is, the Saxons who did not
participate in the conquest of the British Isles.
Until now we have been following epic poetry from the end of the
seventh century to the end of the tenth century. But there are two currents that
sometimes cross: epic poetry, which belongs to the pagan tradition, and
Christian poetry, which is what we will now study. In other words, we will
now begin the second unit.
This Christian poetry did not start out completely Christian. At the
beginning, the kings converted to the Christian faith, and they forced their
vassals and subjects to do the same, but this did not mean there was a moral
conversion. In other words, they remained faithful to the ancient Germanic
ideals, such as courage and loyalty—definitely not humility and love of one’s
enemy. That was inconceivable in that era. And it probably continued to be
so for a long time.
In Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, [Church History] of
English People, Bede talks about the first Christian poet of England, of
whom only a few lines have been preserved.7 His name was Caedmon and
his story is quite strange; we will return to it later when we talk about
Coleridge and Stevenson. Here’s the story: Caedmon was well along in years,
a shepherd in a monastery, and a shy old man. The custom then was for the
harp to be passed around from hand to hand after meals and for each of the
diners to play it and sing. Caedmon knew he was equally unskilled at music
and lyrics. One night among many, Caedmon, who was dining with his
companions in the hall of the monastery, watched the feared harp come
toward him. And then, so as not to say what he had said so many times
before, what everybody knew he would say, he rose without any pretext
whatsoever and left. It must have been winter, because he went to the stable
and lay down to sleep with the stable animals, who probably were few in
number. It was the seventh century, and England was a poor country, marshy,
with winters even harsher than they are now. Poor Caedmon fell asleep, and
in his dreams he saw someone, probably an angel, and this someone—
psychologists can easily explain this, and those of us who are not
psychologists can as well—this someone gave him a harp and told him,
“Sing.” In his dream, poor Caedmon spoke as he had so often with his
fellows, saying “I don’t know how to sing.” And the other said, “Sing of the
origin of creation.” So Caedmon, in wonderment, composed a poem. Then he
awoke and remembered the poem he had composed. The poem has been
preserved, and it is not very good. It is basically the first verses of Genesis,
which he must have heard, more or less amplified and with some words
changed. They were all so astonished by this that they had him go speak with
the monastic authorities. The abbess heard the verses, she thought they were
very good, but she wanted to carry out a test. She ordered one of the priests to
read Caedmon the following verses of Genesis and told him to versify them.
The next day, Caedmon, who was illiterate, came with a verse version of the
passage, which they transcribed, and Caedmon continued versifying the
Pentateuch until the day he died. Bede says that in England, many have sung
well, but that nobody sang as well as he did, because the others had men as
teachers, and he had God or his angel as his teacher. And Caedmon predicted
the hour of his death, and he was so certain of it and his posthumous fate that
just before this hour, he was asleep rather than in prayer. And so he passed
from one dream to another—from sleep to death—and it has been said that
we should rest assured that he met his angel in the other world. So Caedmon
dies, leaving behind some mediocre verses—I’ve read them—and a beautiful
legend.8And as we shall see later, when we read the work of Coleridge and
Stevenson, this is part of a literary tradition that seems to be deeply rooted in
England: the tradition of versifying in one’s sleep.
After Caedmon, there came other religious poets, the most famous of
whom is Cynewulf, whose name means “bold wolf.” The oddest thing about
Cynewulf, whose poems are paraphrases of the Bible, is the habit he had of
“signing” his poems. There are poets who have done this, of course, in a
much more efficient way than Cynewulf. Perhaps the most famous is the
American poet, Walt Whitman, who speaks about himself in his poems,
saying: “Walt Whitman, un cosmos, hijo de Manhattan, turbulento, sensual,
paternal, comiendo, bebiendo, sebrando.”9 And he has a poem that says:
“Qué ves, Walt Whitman?” [“What do you see, Walt Whitman?”] And he
responds, “Veo una redonda maravilla que gira por el espacio.” [“I see a
great round wonder rolling through space.”] And then: “Qué oyes, Walt
Whitman?” [“What do you hear Walt Whitman?”] At the end, he sends best
wishes to all the countries of the world, “from me and America sent.”10
Ronsard did the same in a sonnet.11 And Lugones has also done it, kind of in
jest.12 Somebody asks in Lunario sentimental, “El poeta ha tomado sus
lecciones / Quién es? / Leopoldo Lugones / Doctor en Lunología” [“The poet
has had his lessons / Who is he? / Leopoldo Lugones, Doctor of Lunology.”]
But Cynewulf chose another way. This practice is common among Persians,
and it seems the Persians did it so that others wouldn’t claim their poems as
their own. For example, the great Persian poet Hafiz mentions himself many
times, always in praise, in his poems. He says, for example, “Hafiz,” and
someone answers, “The angels in the sky have learned your latest poems by
heart.” Now, Cynewulf—remember that the detective novel is a genre typical
of the English language, although it was invented in the United States by
Edgar Allan Poe—Cynewulf anticipates cryptography, using the letters of his
own name to make a poem about the Final Judgment.13He says, “C and Y
kneel in prayer; N sends up its supplications; E trusts in God; W and U know
they will go to Heaven; L and F tremble.” And this is written in Runic letters.
Runic letters were the ancient alphabet of all the Germanic peoples.14
These letters were not made for cursive writing. They were made to be
engraved or etched into stone or metal. (A knife with the letters of the runic
alphabet was found in the Thames.) These letters had magic properties; they
were closely linked to ancient religion. So Cynewulf writes his poems using
the Latin alphabet, learned from the Romans, but when he gets to letters that
are meaningful, he uses the runic letters, which the Saxons, as well as the
Norsemen, used, for the writing of epigraphs. These letters—I don’t know if
you have seen them—have sharp corners; they are angular, because they
were designed to be carved into stone or metal with a knife, as opposed to
cursive writing that tends to have rounder shapes, and better suits the hand. In
England, there are monuments carved with runic letters. One is etched with
the first verses of “The Dream of the Rood,” a poem we will look at later.
There was a Swedish scholar who said that the Greeks had copied the runic
letters from the Germanic peoples for their alphabet. This is totally
improbable. Most likely Phoenician and Roman coins made their way north
and the people in the north learned the runic alphabet from them.
As for the origin of the name, it is strange. The word runin Saxon
means “whisper,” or what is spoken in a low voice. And that means
“mystery,” because what is spoken in a low voice is what one doesn’t want
others to hear. So runes means “mysteries”; letters are mysteries. But this can
also refer to the wonder primitive peoples felt at the fact that words could be
communicated through those primitive written symbols. Clearly for them the
fact that a piece of wood contained signs and that those signs could be
transformed into sounds, words, was very strange. Another explanation is that
only erudite people knew how to read, and so the letters were called
“mysteries” because the common people didn’t know them. These are several
different explanations for the word rune. And since I’ve now used the word
runic, I would like to remind you that in the British Cemetery, you can see
crosses that are mistakenly called “runic.”15 These are crosses with a circular
shape, usually of reddish or gray stone. The cross inside the circle is carved.
They are of Celtic origin: in general, the Celts and the Germanic peoples did
not like open spaces. In a painting, for example, they didn’t want there to be
any empty space—maybe they thought this showed that the painter was lazy.
I don’t know what I heard about a painting that was recently on exhibit that
was just a white canvas, nothing else. Which is similar to a concert that was
performed in Paris a while back; it lasted three-quarters of an hour and
consisted of the instruments remaining absolutely silent. It is a way to avoid
all mistakes, and also to do without any knowledge of music. There was a
French composer from the last century who said: “pour rendre le silence en
musique,” “to express silence in music, I would need three military bands.”
Which seems more intelligent, surely, than expressing silence through
silence. In any case, these runic crosses are round. Inside is the cross, but the
cross has shafts that meet. There always remains a small space between the
four arms of the cross, but this is decorated with intersecting lines, something
like a chess board. And we might think that this style is akin to the poetic
style in which everything is intertwined, everything is expressed through
metaphors. In other words, they liked what was intricate and baroque, even
though they were very simple people.
The Christian poems are, to my mind, the least worthwhile of Anglo-
Saxon poetry. Except the elegies. Now, these poems are not strictly Christian;
though written in the ninth century, they already have romantic elements.
Above all, they have one extraordinary feature: they are personal poems. In
the Middle Ages, there was nothing like this in any region of Europe.
Because a poet sang of the king or the battle, he sang what his listeners could
feel. But the so-called Anglo-Saxon elegies—soon we shall see that the word
“elegy” is not altogether appropriate—are personalpoems, some of which
start being personal as of the very first line. They have been called “elegies”
but “elegy” really means a poem written to lament someone’s death.
However, those poems are called “elegies” not because they lament a death
but rather because of their melancholic tone. I don’t know who gave them
that name, but that’s how they are known, and they constitute the
contribution, the first personal contribution, by the Anglo-Saxons to
Germanic poetry. Other than “The Battle of Maldon,” which we have seen
abounds in specific descriptions that anticipate the Norse sagas, which come
much later, everything else we have seen that was written in England
theoretically could have been written elsewhere. We can easily imagine, for
example, a poet from Germany or the Low Countries, or from Scandinavia,
taking the Norse legend of Beowulf and turning it into a poem, or a Danish
poet telling the story of the Danish warriors at Finn castle, or a poet from any
other tribe singing of his people’s victory, as did the author of the fragment
about Brunanburh. On the other hand, these elegies are individual, and one of
them, which has been called “The Seafarer,” begins with lines that anticipate
“Song of Myself,” by Walt Whitman.16 It begins like this: “I can sing a true
song about myself, I can sing of my travels,” “Mæg ic be me sylfum soðgied
wrecan, siþas secgan.” This was totally revolutionary in the Middle Ages.
This poem has been translated by the famous contemporary poet, Ezra Pound.
When I read Ezra Pound’s version many years ago, it seemed absurd.
Because I could not have guessed, by reading it, that the poet had his own
personal theory about translation. The poet believed—as did Verlaine, let’s
say, as did many others, and perhaps they were right—that the most
important thing in a poem is not the meaning of the words but the sound.
Which is, of course, true. I don’t know if I’ve already mentioned the example
of “La princesa está pálida / en su silla de oro” [“The princess is pale on her
golden chair”].17 This line is beautiful, but if we, say, use the same words,
but place them in a different order, we see that the poetry disappears. If we
say, for example, “En su silla de oro está pálida la princesa,” nothing at all is
left of the poem. And this is the case with so many poems, perhaps with all
poems, except, of course, narrative poetry.
Now, here’s how Ezra Pound translated those lines: “May I for my
own self song’s truth reckon, / Journey’s jargon.”18 This is barely
comprehensible, but as sound it resembles the Saxon. “May I for my own
self” (this is about myself)—“song’s truth reckon” sounds like “Mæg ic be
me sylfum soðgied wrecan, siþas secgan,” and then “journey’s jargon”
repeats the alliteration of “siþas secgan.” Secgan is of course the same word
as “say.” But we will delve into an analysis of this poem and another one
called “The Ruin”—a poem inspired by the ruins in the city of Bath—in the
next class. I will also speak about the strangest of all Saxon poems, the
oddest one from that period, whose title is “The Dream of the Rood.” And
after talking about these poems, and after we have analyzed the distinctive
elements contained in the last one I mentioned—in other words, after we
have looked at the Christian and pagan elements in that poem’s composition
(because in the last poem, “The Dream of the Rood,” although the poet is a
devout Christian and perhaps even a mystic, there remain elements of the
ancient Germanic epic)—after that, I will say a few words about the end of
the Saxons in England, and I will discuss the Battle of Hastings, which, true
or not, is one of the most dramatic events in the history of England and the
history of the world.
 CLASS 6

THE ORIGINS OF POETRY IN ENGLAND. THE ANGLO-SAXON

ELEGIES. CHRISTIAN POETRY: "THE DREAM OF THE ROOD."

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26, 1966

The story of the origins of English poetry is quite mysterious. As we

know, all that remains of what was written in England from the fifth century
—let’s say, from the year 449—until a little after the Norman Conquest in the
year 1066, besides the laws and the prose, is what has been preserved by
chance in four codices, or books of manuscripts. These codices suggest the
existence of a prior literature that was quite rich. The oldest texts are charms,
remedies for curing rheumatic pain or making barren lands fertile. There is
one to protect against a swarm of bees. Here, they reflect ancient Saxon
mythology, which has since been lost; we can only guess at it, based on its
affinity with Norse mythology, which has been preserved. For example, in a
charm against rheumatic pain, the valkyries, without being named,
unexpectedly appear.1 The verses say, “They were loud” or . . . sonorous,
yes, “sonorous, as they rode through the hills. They were determined, as they
rode through the land. Mighty women . . . ” And then the text is lost, and at
the end of the charm there is a Christian incantation, because the sorcerer, the
witch doctor, the wizard, says, “I will help you,” and says, “If God is
willing.” This is a Christian verse, apparently written later. Then in another
line, in another stanza, it says that this pain will be cured “if it be the work of
witchcraft, if the work of gods”—“esa geweorc,” ese being the Norse gods
—“if the work of elves.”2
Until now we have looked at the epic tradition, from Beowulf and the
Finnsburh Fragment, until its last appearance in the ballad of “The Battle of
Maldon,” which prefigures, with its abundance of circumstantial details, the
later Icelandic prose sagas and narratives. But a revolution takes place in the
ninth century. We don’t know if those who made it were even aware of it. We
don’t know if the pieces that have been preserved were even the first. But
something very important takes place, perhaps the most important thing that
can take place in poetry: the discovery of a new inflection. Often, when
journalists talk about a new poet, they say “a new voice.” Here the phrase
would have that meaning exactly: there is a new voice, a new inflection, a
new use of language. And this must have been rather difficult, for the Anglo-
Saxon language—Old English—was by its very harshness destined for epic
poetry, in other words, to celebrate courage and loyalty. This is why, in the
pieces of epic poetry we have looked at, what these poets do best is describe
battles. As if we can hear the sound of swords clashing, the blow of spears
against shields, the tumult and shouts of the battlefield. In the ninth century,
there appear what have come to be called the “Anglo-Saxon elegies.” This
poetry is not the poetry of the battlefield. These are personal poems.
Moreover, solitary poems, poems by men expressing their solitude and their
melancholy. And this is something totally new in the ninth century, when
poetry was generic, when the poet sang of the triumphs and defeats of his
clan, of his king. Here, on the contrary, the poet speaks personally,
anticipating the romantic movement, which we will study when we look at
English poetry of the eighteenth century. I have speculated—this is my
personal speculation, not to be found in any book I know—that this
melancholic and personal poetry might have come from the Celtic tradition,
that it could be of Celtic origin. It seems improbable, if we think carefully
about it, to assume, as is common, that the Saxons, the Anglos, and the Jutes,
when they invaded England, slaughtered the entire population. It is more
natural to assume that they kept the men as slaves and the women as their
concubines. There would be no point in killing the entire population.
Moreover, this can be verified in England today: the purely Germanic type,
that is, the lineage of people who are tall, blond, or red-haired, belongs to the
Northern counties and Scotland. In the south and to the west, where the
primitive inhabitants took refuge, there are many people of average height
and with brown hair. In Wales, there are a lot of people with black hair. In the
north, in the Scottish Highlands, also. In addition, surely, there are many
blond people in England who are not of Saxon but rather of Norse origin.
This can be seen in Northumberland, Yorkshire, and the Scottish Lowlands.
And this mixture of Saxons and Norsemen with Celts could have produced—
here we are obviously in the realm of speculation—the so-called Anglo-
Saxon elegies. In the last class, I said they are called elegies because of their
melancholic tone, for they are not elegies in the sense that they mourn the
death of an individual. In the last class, we looked at the beginning of one of
the most famous of these elegies, “The Seafarer,” which starts out with a
personal declaration. The poet says that he will sing a true song about himself
and will tell of his travels. Then comes an enumeration of all the rigors of the
life of a seafaring man. He talks about the storms, the night-watch on the
boat. He talks about the cold and the boat crashing against the cliffs. Here is
the theme of the sea, which is one of the eternal, constant themes in English
poetry. And there are strange images. But not strange in the way that the
kennings, which have something fabricated about them, are strange. Calling,
for example, the tongue the “oar of the mouth” is not a natural metaphor, in
the sense that there is no deep affinity between the two things: here we see
the Saxon—the Norseman—man of letters looking for new metaphors. In
“The Seafarer,” we have lines such as “norþan sniwde,” “it snowed from the
north”; and then “hægl feol on eorþan,” “hail fell on the earth”; and “corna
caldast,” “coldest of grains,” or “of seeds.” And it seems strange to compare
the ice, the snow, the hail—in short: the cold, death—to seeds, which
symbolize life. When we read this we feel that the poet has not, like a scholar,
sought a contrast, but rather that he saw the hail, and when he saw it falling,
he thought of seeds falling.
In the first part of the poem, the poet, who is a seafaring man, talks
about the hardships of the sea. He talks about the cold, the winter, the storms,
the perils of a sailor’s life. And at that time those perils would have been
tremendous in the tremendous North Sea in those small and fragile boats.
Then he says that little can be known of these hardships by those who enjoy
the pleasures of life in the cities, in the modest cities of the time. He talks
about the summer—the summer was the preferred time for sailing, for at
other times the ice floes blocked the sea. And then he says, “The guardian of
summer sings . . . ”—I think this is the cuckoo—“boding bitter sorrows,”
“singeð sumeres weard, sorge beodeð / bitter in breosthord,” breosthord is
“the treasure of the chest,” in other words, the heart. This kenning here, “the
treasure of the chest,” was clearly a well-known phrase when the poet used it.
Saying “treasure of the chest” was like saying “heart.”
 The poet talks about the storms, and just when we think that this poem
is simply about these hardships, there is a surprise, because the poet is talking
not only about the hardships but also—we will encounter this theme in
Swinburne, in Kipling, and in others—about his fascination with the sea. And
this is a particularly English theme. And this is only natural, for if we look on
a globe at England—so important in the history of the world—we see that it
is a small island torn off the western- and northern-most reaches of Europe.
What I mean is that if you showed a globe to a person who was ignorant of
history, this person would never think that such a slip of an island torn by the
sea—that slip of an island, penetrated by the sea on all sides—would become
the center of an empire. But that’s just what happened. There is a common
saying in English, “to run away to the sea,” referring to those who run away
from their families to take their chances in the dangerous North Sea.
So there are a few lines that come as a total surprise to the reader that
speak about those who feel their vocation is the sea. They speak about a man
who is a seafarer by nature. And the verses say, “He has no spirit for the harp,
nor for the passing out of rings”—remember that the kings passed out rings in
their halls—“nor for the pleasure of women, nor for the pomp of this world.
He only seeks the high and salty currents.” These contrary sentiments
combine in the elegy of the seafarer: there are the dangers, the storms, and
also this affinity for the sea.
Now, there are those who have interpreted the entire poem as
allegorical. They say that the sea symbolizes life with its storms and perils,
and that an affinity with the sea means an affinity with life. We should not
forget that people in the Middle Ages possessed the ability to read a poem on
two different levels. In other words, those who read this poem thought about
the sea, about the seafarer, and they also thought that the sea could be an
allegory or a symbol for life. There is a much later text, written many
centuries later (though it is a medieval text as well), Dante’s epistle to
Cangrande della Scala, in which Dante tells him that he wrote his poem, the
greatest poem of all of literature, The Divine Comedy, to be read in four
different ways.3 It could be read as the portrayal of the life of a sinner, a
penitent, an adventurer, a just man. Even more, it can be read as a description
of hell, purgatory, and heaven. Later, we will read a poem by Langland that
has caused contemporary readers more than a little perplexity; they read the
parts as if they were consecutive, but apparently the poem is instead a series
of visions.4 These visions become facets of the same thing. In our day, we
have poets like George or Pound, who do not want their poems to be read
consecutively—difficult as this is to honor in our era—but rather for the
reader to have patience and to read them as different facets of one poetic
object.5 Apparently the ability to do this, which we have now lost or almost
lost, was very common during the Middle Ages. Readers or listeners felt they
could interpret a text in different ways. And jumping ahead now to what will
come much later, we can say that Chesterton’s detective stories are written to
be read as fantasy stories, but also as parables. And this is, in fact, what is
going on in the seafarer’s elegy. At the end of the elegy, the poem is strictly,
explicitly, symbolic. And this clearly did not present any difficulty in the
ninth century. We must not assume, then, that we are necessarily more
complex than the men of the Middle Ages, who were men well versed in
theology and theological subtleties. We have surely gained a lot, but it is also
possible that we have lost something.
This, then, is one of the elegies. There is another one, “The Wanderer.”
Here the theme is one that surely had social importance in the Middle Ages,
of the man who has lost his protector—his lord—in battle, and is looking for
another. The man has been left outside society. This is very important in a
stratified society like that of the Middle Ages. A man who lost his protector
was left alone, and it is natural that he would lament his misfortune. The
poem begins by speaking about the lonely man—the man who seeks the
protection of a lord and who has “sorrow and longing as companions”—and
about exile as “cold as winter.” “Destiny has been fulfilled,” it then says.
Here, we can think about the general context of life, but also the particular
case of a man who finds no support. He says his friends have died in battle,
his lord has died, and he is alone. This is another famous elegy.
Then we have one that is titled “The Ruin,” which takes place in the
city of Bath, where there are still ruins of the great Roman baths, which I
have seen.6 And those constructions themselves must have seemed
prodigious to the poor Saxons, who at first knew only how to build houses
out of wood. I already said that the Roman cities and roads were much too
complex for those invaders who arrived from Denmark, the Low Countries,
the mouth of the Rhine, and for whom a city, a street—a street where there
were houses next to each other—was something mysterious and
incomprehensible. The poem begins by saying, “Marvelous, prodigious is the
carved stone of this wall, laid waste by fate,” “wyrde gebræcon.” Then it
talks about how the city was destroyed, then about the water that flows out of
the thermal fountains, and the poet imagines the parties that must have taken
place in these streets, and wonders: “Where is the horse? Where is the rider?
Where the givers of gold?”—the kings. And he imagines them with shining
armor, he imagines them drunk on wine, haughty, shining with gold, and he
wonders what happened to those generations. Then he sees the crumbling
walls, the wind blowing through the rooms. Little is left of the adornments.
He sees walls carved with snakes, and all of this fills him with melancholy.7
And since I’ve used the word “melancholy,” I want to mention that this word
has had a very curious fate. “Melancholy” means “black humors,” and
currently the word “melancholy” is a sad word for us. A long time ago,
melancholy meant “humor,” or physical bile, that when predominant, caused
a melancholic temperament.
Now, we will never know if these English poets, possibly of Celtic
origin, realized what an extraordinary, revolutionary thing they were doing.
It’s very possible they didn’t. I don’t think there were literary schools at that
time. I think they wrote these verses because they felt them, and that they
didn’t know they were doing something so extraordinary: how they were
forcing an iron language, an epic language, to say something for which that
language had not been forged—to express sadness and personal loneliness.
But they managed to do it.
We also have a poem, possibly somewhat prior, called “Deor’s
Lament.”8 All we know about Deor is that he was a poet in a German court,
in Prussia, who lost the king’s favor and was replaced by another bard. The
king took away the lands he had given him. Deor found himself alone and
was then imagined as a dramatic character by a poet in England whose name
has been lost. In the poem, Deor consoles himself by thinking about past
misfortunes. He thinks about Welund—called Völund in Norse poetry and
Wieland in Germany—who was a warrior. And this warrior was taken
prisoner—he was a kind of northern Daedalus—and he constructed wings out
of swan feathers and escaped by flying out of his prison cell, like Daedelus;
but not before he raped the king’s daughter. The poem begins by saying, “As
for Welund, he knew exile among snakes.” It is possible that these snakes
were not real; it’s possible the snakes were a metaphor for the swords he
forged . . . “Welund him be wurman wræces cunnade,” and then this
“determined man, he knew exile,” and it also says, “exile as cold as winter.”
Now that, which is not a strange phrase for us, must have seemed strange
when it was written. Because it would have been most natural to interpret it
as “cold exile of winter,” but not “exile as cold as winter,” which corresponds
to a much more complex mentality. And then, after enumerating some of
Welund’s misfortunes, comes this refrain: “Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg.”
“That passed, so too shall this,” and this refrain is an important invention,
because while we have already seen that alliterated poetry did not allow for
the formation of stanzas, the refrain does allow it. Then the poet remembers
another misfortune: that of the princess whose brothers were killed by
Welund. He recalls her sadness upon seeing that she was pregnant. And then
it says, again, “That passed, so too shall this.” Then the poet recalls tyrants,
real or historic, or legendary, out of the Germanic tradition, among whom
appears Eormenric, the king of the Goths. All of this is remembered in
England. He talks about Eormenric and his wolf’s heart: Eormenric “who
ruled that vast Goth nation,” “ahte wide folc,” that “vast nation.” “Gotena
rices” is “the king of the Goths.” Then he adds: “þæt wæs grim cyning,” “that
one was a cruel king,” and then he says, “All that passed, so too shall this.”
We have discussed the Anglo-Saxon elegies, and we will now turn to
the poems that are actually Christian. We will talk about one of the most
curious of the so-called Anglo-Saxon elegies. This poem recounts a vision
that was possibly real, possibly a literary invention. It is usually titled “The
Dream of the Rood,” though others translate it, using latinate words, “The
Vision of the Cross.” And the poem starts out by saying, “Yes, now I will tell
the most precious of dreams,” or visions, for in the Middle Ages they didn’t
distinguish very clearly between visions and dreams. [T. S.] Eliot says that
we no longer believe in dreams very much, assigning to them a physiological
or psychoanalytic origin. Whereas in the Middle Ages, people believed in the
divine origin of dreams, and this made them dream better dreams.
The poet begins by saying, “Hwæt! Ic swefna cyst secgan wylle.” “Yes,
I wish to tell the most precious of dreams, one that came to me at midnight,
when men capable of speech, capable of the word, take their rest.” In other
words, when the world is silent. And the poet says that he thinks he sees a
tree, the most resplendent of trees. He says that the tree emerged from the
earth and grew toward the heavens. Then he describes that tree almost
cinematically. He says he saw it changing, sometimes dripping with blood,
sometimes covered with jewels and rich garments. And he says that this tall
tree rising from the earth to the heavens is worshipped by men on Earth, by
the fortunate, and by the angels in heaven. And he says, “leohte
bewunden, beama beorhtost,” “It grew into the air, this most resplendent of
trees.” And that he, upon seeing this tree worshipped by men and angels, felt
ashamed, felt how tainted he was by his sins. And then, unexpectedly, the
tree begins to speak, as it will speak centuries later in the famous inscription
in hell, on the gate into hell. Those dark-colored words Dante sees over the
gate: “Per me si va ne la città dolente, / per me si va ne l’etterno dolore, / per
me si va tra la perduta gente,” and then “queste parole di colore oscuro,” and
that’s when we find out that the words are written on the gates of hell.9 This
was one of Dante’s marvelous qualities. He didn’t start by saying, “I saw a
gate, and over the gate were these words.” He begins with the words written
over the gates of hell, which would have been carved with capital letters.
But now, something even stranger occurs. The tree, which we now
realize is the cross, speaks. And it speaks like a living being, like a man who
wants to remember something that took place a long time before, something
he is about to forget, so he is summoning up his memories. And the tree says,
“This took place many years ago, I still remember, that I was hewn on the
edge of the forest. My powerful enemies felled me.” Then he recounts how
those enemies carried him and planted him on a hill, and how they made him
the gallows for the guilty, the fugitives.
Then Christ appears. And the tree asks for forgiveness, to be forgiven
for not having fallen on the enemies of Christ. And this poem, full of deep
and true mystic sentiment, hearkens back to ancient Germanic sentiment.
Then, when Christ speaks, he is called “that young hero who was All-
Powerful God,” “þa geong hæleð, þæt wæs god ælmihtig.” Then they nail
Christ to the cross with dark nails, “mid deorcan næglum.” And the cross
trembles when it feels Christ’s embrace. It is as if the cross were Christ’s
woman, his wife; the cross shares the pain of the crucified God. Then they
raise it up with Christ, who is dying. And then for the first time in the poem
—for until now it uses the word beam, like the modern English word, which
meant tree; in other words, the tree was a tree until the moment the young
man embraced it, and the two trembled as in a nuptial embrace—then the tree
says: “Rod wæs ic aræred.”10 “[As a] cross was I raised.” The tree was not a
cross until that moment. Then the cross describes how the Earth goes dark,
how the sea trembles, how the veil of the temple is torn. The cross is
identified with Christ. Then it describes the sadness of the universe when
Christ dies; and then the apostles arrive to bury Christ. And the cross calls
them “the sad apostles of evening.” We don’t know if the poet was at all
conscious of how well the words “sadness” and “evening” go together. It’s
possible this sentiment was new at that time. The fact is, they buried Christ,
and from then on the poem becomes diluted—as happens with almost all the
Anglo-Saxon elegies, and as happened later with many passages in the
Spanish picaresque novels—it becomes diluted with moral considerations.
The cross says that on the day of the Final Judgment, those who believe in it,
those who know how to repent, will be saved. In other words, the poet forgets
his splendid personal invention of creating a story told by the cross of the
Passion of Christ, and the fact that the cross considers Christ’s pain as well.
There are several Anglo-Saxon elegies. I think the most important are
“The Seafarer”—in which the horror of and fascination for the sea coexist—
and this extraordinary “Vision of the Cross,” in which the cross speaks as if it
were a living being. There are other Christian poems that are derived from
episodes of the Bible. For example, “Judith,” who kills Holofernes. We have
a poem derived from Exodus, and this poem has a feature that is not
essentially poetic, but is interesting because it shows us how far away the
Saxons were from the Bible. The poet has to describe the Israelites being
pursued by the Egyptians as they cross the Red Sea. He has to describe the
sea that parts to allow them to pass, then drowns the Egyptians. The poet
doesn’t really know how to describe the Israelites. So, since they are crossing
the sea, and he has to use words to describe them as seafarers, he uses a word
that is most unexpected for us today. When speaking about the Israelites
crossing the Red Sea, he calls them “Vikings.” Naturally, for him the ideas of
“seafarer” and “Viking” were closely linked.
We are now very close to the end of the Saxons. England has already
been invaded by the Norsemen, and would soon be invaded by the Normans.
(In the next class, we will look at the tragic end of the Saxon reign in
England.) The Saxons will remain in England, and they will remain there as
vassals, just as the Britons were vassals of the Saxons. The Norsemen were
for the Saxons what the Saxons were for the Britons, that is, pirates and then
overlords. The history of this conquest has been preserved for us in the
History of the Kings of Norway, by Snorri Sturluson, and in the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle.11 And before talking about what happened to the English
language, I want to spend some time in the next class talking about what took
place in the year 1066, the year of the Battle of Hastings. Then we will see
how the language changes, what happens to the English language and to its
literature.
 CLASS 7

THE TWO BOOKS WRITTEN BY GOD. THE ANGLO-SAXON

BESTIARY. RIDDLES. "THE GRAVE." THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28, 1966

Throughout the Middle Ages, the idea held sway that God had written
two books. One of these books, needless to say, was sacred scripture—the
Bible—dictated to various people at various times by the Holy Spirit. The
other book was the Universe, and all its creatures. It was said repeatedly that
the duty of every Christian was to study both books, the holy book and the
other enigmatic book, the Universe. In the seventeenth century, Bacon—
Francis Bacon—returns to this idea, but in a scientific manner. The idea is
that we have sacred scripture on the one hand, and on the other, the Universe,
which we must decipher. In the Middle Ages, however, we find this idea that
the two books—the book par excellence, the Bible, and the other book, the
Universe (naturally, we form part of the second book)—should be studied
from an ethical perspective. That is, it was not a question of studying nature
as Bacon did, as does modern science (conducting experiments, investigating
physical things), but rather of seeking moral examples in it. And this persists
today, in fables about the bee or the ant that teach us to work hard, in the idea
that the grasshopper is lazy, etcetera. In all the literatures of Europe can be
found books called “physiologies.”1 In this case, the word means “doctors,”
or “bestiaries” because the subjects were animals, real or imaginary. So, for
example, the Phoenix. People believed in the Phoenix, which became a
symbol of resurrection because it burns up, dies, then is reborn. In Old
English, in Anglo-Saxon, there was also a bestiary. It seems that the original
bestiary, or what has been considered the original, was written in Egypt in the
Greek language, and this is why it includes so many Egyptian animals, both
real and imaginary, such as the Phoenix, which goes to the holy city of
Heliopolis, the city of the sun, to die.
Only two chapters from the Anglo-Saxon bestiary have been
preserved. These chapters are curious because they are about the panther and
the whale. Amazingly enough, the panther is a symbol of Christ.2 This might
surprise us, but we must also remember that for the Saxons of England, for
the Anglo-Saxons, panther was merely a word in the Bible. Naturally, they
had never seen a panther—an animal that lives in other parts of the globe.
And there was a text, I don’t remember which verse of scripture, about the
panther, where it is identified with Christ. And so it says there, in the Anglo-
Saxon text about the panther—it was thought to have many colors, that is, to
have spots, to be a brilliant, dazzling animal, this panther who is identified
with Christ—the text says that the panther is an animal with a musical voice
and sweet breath, which does not appear to be borne out by zoos, or zoology.
It says that it sleeps for many months, then awakens, which might correspond
to the days Christ is dead before he is resurrected, and that it is a gentle
animal, that men come from the cities and the countryside to hear its musical
voice, and that it has only one enemy: the dragon. Thus, the dragon becomes
the symbol of the devil.
There is an expression I have never been able to figure out, and
perhaps you can help me solve it. It is a verse from Eliot, I think it is in his
Four Quartets. It says: “Came Christ, the tiger.”3 Now, I don’t know if
Eliot’s identification of Christ with the tiger is based on some memory he has
of an ancient Saxon text that identifies Christ with the panther (which is a
tiger), or if Eliot is simply seeking to evoke surprise—though I don’t think
so, for that would be too easy. Christ is always compared to the lamb, a
docile creature, and he may have been looking for the opposite. But if this
were the case, I don’t think he would have thought of the tiger, but rather the
wolf (though perhaps the wolf seemed to him too easy a contrast to the lamb).
Eliot’s verse says, “In the juvenescence of the year”—he does not use the
word “youth,” but rather an old word, from Middle English,
“juvenescence”—“Came Christ, the tiger.” And this is, undoubtedly,
astonishing. But I think that when we read Eliot, we must assume that when
he wrote his poem, he was trying to do something more than surprise his
reader. Surprise, as a literary effect, is a momentary effect, quite quickly
spent.
 So we have this pious poem about the panther, the panther that is then
understood to be a symbol for Christ, an instance of Christ given to mankind.
And then we have the other poem, “The Whale,” given the name
Fastitocalon, which I believe, though I am not certain, is similar to the Greek
word for sea turtle.4 So, this poem is about the whale. The Saxons were
familiar with whales; as we have already seen, one of the classic metaphors
for the sea is “whale road,” which is good because the immensity of the
whale seems to suggest or emphasize the immensity of the whale’s
environment, the sea. And the poem says that the whale is sleeping or
pretending to sleep, and the sailors mistake it for an island and disembark
upon it. The whale dives down and devours them. Here the whale becomes a
symbol of hell. Now, maybe we can find this idea of sailors mistaking a
whale for an island in Irish legend.5 I recall an engraving that depicts a
whale, clearly not an island, which is also smiling, and then there is a small
boat. And Saint Brendan is in the small boat, bearing a cross and about to
disembark very carefully onto the whale, who is laughing at him.6 We can
also find this in Paradise Lost by Milton, where he describes a whale sailors
often encounter near the coast of Norway, and they disembark on it, and light
a fire, and the fire rouses the whale, and the whale plunges down and devours
the sailors. And here we see Milton’s poetic touch. He could have said that
the whale was “haply slumbering on the Norway sea.” But he doesn’t say
this. He says “on the Norway foam,” which is much more beautiful.7
So, we have these fragments, and then there is a long Anglo-Saxon
poem about the Phoenix, which begins with a description of Earthly Paradise.
Earthly Paradise is imagined as a high mountain plain in the Orient. Also in
Dante’s purgatory, Earthly Paradise is on the very peak of a kind of artificial
mountain or system of terraces—purgatory. And in the Saxon poem, Earthly
Paradise is described in words that echo others in the Odyssey. It says, for
example, that there is no extreme cold or heat, or summer or winter; there is
no hail or rain, and the heat of the sun is not oppressive. And then the
Phoenix, one of the animals dealt with in Pliny’s Natural History, is
described. And here we can observe that although Pliny talks about griffins,
or dragons, or the Phoenix, it doesn’t mean that he believes in them.8 I think
there is a different explanation. The explanation is that Pliny wanted to
collect everything about animals in one volume, so he included the real and
the imaginary, in order to make the text more complete. But he himself at
times says, “which is doubtful,” or “it is said that,” whereby we see that we
should not think of him as naïve but rather as someone with a different
concept of what a natural history should be. Such a history had to include
what was definitely known, not only about all animals but also about
superstitions. I think, for example, that he believed that rubies make men
invisible, emeralds make them eloquent, etcetera. I mean no, he did not
believe these things. He knew that these superstitions existed. And he
included them in his book, as well.
I have mentioned these two pieces from the Anglo-Saxon bestiary
because they are curious, not because they have any absolute poetic value.
There is also a series of Anglo-Saxon riddles, riddles that are not meant to be
ingenious the way Greek enigmas are.9 You might remember, for example,
the famous riddle of the Sphinx: “What animal goes on four legs in the
morning, on two at noon, and on three in the evening?” And it turns out that
this is an extended metaphor for the life of man, who crawls when he is a
child, who is a biped, who stands on two feet at noon, and then, in old age—
which is compared to twilight—he leans on a cane.10 Rather than ingenious,
the Anglo-Saxon enigmas are poetic descriptions of things; there are some
whose solution is unknown, and others whose solution is obvious. For
example, there is one about the book moth, and it says it is a thief who enters
the library at night and feeds on the words of wise men but learns nothing.
So, we understand it is about the book moth. And then there is one about the
nightingale, how men hear it. There is another about the swan, the sound its
wings make, and another about the fish: it says that it is errant and that its
home—the river, obviously—is also errant, but that if you remove it from its
home, it dies. Obviously, a fish dies out of water. In other words, the Anglo-
Saxon enigmas are more like leisurely poems, not ingenious, but with a very
vivid sense of nature. (We have already seen that one of the characteristics of
English literature from the time of its beginnings is a feeling for nature.) Then
we have biblical poems, which are mere extensions of biblical texts,
oratorical extensions, greatly inferior to the sacred texts that inspired their
authors. And then we have others that take up themes of common German
mythology or legend, and we have looked at the most important of these, I
believe, the epic texts: Beowulf, the Finnsburh Fragment, and “The Battle of
Brunanburh,” splendidly translated by Tennyson—you will find that
exemplary translation of “The Battle of Brunanburh” in any edition of
Tennyson’s works—and the “Battle of Maldon,” of which I have yet to find
an exemplary translation, but you will find it translated literally in [Robert
K.] Gordon’s Anglo-Saxon Poetry.11
And then there is a very sad poem, a poem written after the Norman
Conquest and admirably translated by the American poet Longfellow, who
also translated Manrique’s Coplas from Spanish, The Divine Comedy from
Italian, and then translated many cantos of the Norsemen and the Provençal
troubadours.12 He translated the German romantic poets, as well as German
ballads. He was a man of vast learning, and during the years of the American
Civil War, in order to distract himself from the war—the bloodiest war of the
nineteenth century—he translated in its entirety The Divine Comedy, as I
said, into hendecasyllables, blank verse, without rhymes. Now, the poem
“The Grave” is a very strange poem.13 It is thought to have been written
during the eleventh or at the beginning of the twelfth century, that is, in the
middle of the Middle Ages, in a Christian era. However, in this poem, “The
Grave,” there is no mention of the hope for heaven or the fear of hell. It is as
if the poet believed only in physical death, in the decay of the body, and
imagined, moreover—like in the story by our Eduardo Wilde, “La primera
noche de cementerio” [“The First Night in the Graveyard”]—that the dead
are conscious of this decay.14 And the poem begins: “For you a house was
built before you were born”—that is, for each of us there is already a place in
the earth for us to be buried—“To you dust was given before you came out of
your mother.” “–e wes molde imynt, er ðu of moder come.” You can see that
at the end there, it is very similar to English, the English shines through. Then
it says, “Dark is that house” … Forgive me, “Doorless is that house, and dark
it is within,” and in that late Old English, which is already foreshadowing,
prefiguring English, it says “Dureleas is þet hus and dearc hit is wiðinnen.”
Already with this Anglo-Saxon, we are approaching English, even though
there are no words of Latin origin. Then the house is described. It says that
house does not have a very high roof, that the roof is built touching the chest,
that it is very low, “that there you will be very alone,” it says, “you will leave
behind your friends, no friend will come down and ask you if you like that
house.” Then it says, “the house is locked and death has the key.” Then there
are more verses—four additional verses written by a different hand than the
one that wrote the others, for the tone is different. Because it says: “No hand
will stroke your hair,” and that expresses a tenderness that seems to be an
afterthought, because the whole poem is very sad, very harsh. The whole
poem becomes a single metaphor: the metaphor of the grave as man’s last
abode. But this poem was written with so much intensity that it is one of the
great poems of English poetry. And Longfellow’s translation, which is
usually included after it, is not only literal, but sometimes the poet follows
the precise order, the same order as the Anglo-Saxon lines. Of all Anglo-
Saxon literature, its language is the easiest, because it is closest to
contemporary English.
There are many anthologies of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and there is one
published in Switzerland—I don’t remember the name of the author—that
adheres to a very intelligent criterion, as follows: rather than begin with
Beowulf or the Finnsburh Fragment, which are from the seventh or eighth
century, it starts with the most recent, that is, what is closest to contemporary
English. And then the anthology is retrospective, it goes backward to the
Anglo-Saxon of the eighth century, after beginning with the Anglo-Saxon of
the twelfth century; that is, as we proceed through the texts, they become
more and more difficult, but the first ones, the ones at the beginning, help us.
We are now going to finish up this second unit, but we should also say
a few words about history. To begin, I will talk about the history of the
language so you can understand how Anglo-Saxon turned into contemporary
English. Now, two key events occurred, and these two events, when they
occurred, must have seemed catastrophic, terrible. They did, however,
prepare English to become what Alfonso Reyes called “the imperial
language” of our century.15 That is to say, Anglo-Saxon was a far more
complicated language, grammatically, than contemporary English. It had, as
does German and the modern Norse languages, three genders. In Spanish we
have two, and already this is complicated enough for foreigners. There is no
reason that a table, mesa, is feminine in Spanish, or a clock, reloj, is
masculine, for example; each one has to be learned. But in Old English, like
in German and the Scandinavian languages, there are three grammatical
genders. It’s as if we had a masculine “moon” (“el luna”), masculine “salt”
(“el sal”), masculine “star” (“el estrella”). Now, it is assumed that the
masculine “moon” belongs to a very ancient era, an era of matriarchy, an era
when women were more important than men. Women ruled over the family,
and so the brighter light—the sun—was considered feminine, and in Norse
mythology we have, analogously, a goddess of the sun and a god of the
moon. Now, I read in El imperio jesuítico [The Jesuit Empire] by Lugones—I
assume Lugones is not mistaken—that the same thing happens in Guaraní,
that in Guaraní, the sun is feminine and the moon is masculine.16 It is
curious how this has influenced German poetry, for in German the moon is
masculine, der Mond, just as mona, moon, was masculine in Old English, and
sunne, sun, was feminine. (In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche compares
the sun to a tomcat walking on a carpet of stars. But he does not say “eine
Katze,” which could also be a she-cat, but rather “ein Kater,” a tomcat, a
male. And he thought of the moon as a monk, not a nun, who gazes enviously
at Earth.) So, grammatical gender, which is more or less random, influences
poetry as well. And in [Old] English, the word for “woman” is neuter, wif,
but there was a word, wifmann, and mann was masculine, so “woman” could
be both masculine and feminine. In modern English, this is all much simpler.
In Spanish, for example, we say alto, alta, altos, and altas; in other words,
the adjectives change according to the grammatical gender. In English we
have only “high,” which can mean alto, alta, altos, or altas, depending on
what follows. Now, what was it that brought about this simplification, that
made contemporary English a much simpler language, grammatically, though
much richer in vocabulary than Old English? It is the fact that the Vikings,
Danes, and Norwegians settled in the north and the center of England. Now,
Old Norse was similar to English. The Saxons had to communicate with the
Norsemen, who had become their neighbors, and very soon, the Saxons
began to mingle with the Norsemen, who were fewer in number. The Norse
race blended with the Saxon race. They had to understand each other, so in
order to do so, and as the vocabulary was already so similar, a kind of lingua
franca emerged, and English became simpler.
And this must have been quite sad for educated Saxons. Just imagine if
suddenly we noticed that people said “el” cuchara, “lo” mesa, “la” tenedor,
etcetera. We would think: “Darn, the language is degenerating, we have
reached the epitome of pidgin.” But the Saxons, who would have thought the
same, could not foresee that this would make English an easier language.
Notice how today English has almost no grammar. It is the simplest
dictionary there is, grammatically. The pronunciation is what is difficult. As
for English spelling, you all know about proper names, that when somebody
suddenly becomes famous, people don’t know how to pronounce the person’s
name. For example, when Somerset Maugham began to write, people would
say “Mogem,” because there was no way of knowing how it was pronounced.
And then we have the letters left over from the old pronunciation. For
example, we have “knife.” Why is there a k? Because in Old English this was
pronounced, and it has remained like some sort of lost fossil.17 And then we
also have the word “knight” in contemporary English. This seems absurd, but
it is because in Anglo-Saxon the word cniht meant “servant” or “attendant.”
That is, [the initial c] was pronounced. And then English became full of
French words as a result of the Norman conquest.
And now we will discuss that year 1066, the year of the Battle of
Hastings. Now, there are English historians who say that the English
character was not yet fully developed at the time of the Norman invasion.
Others say it was. I think the first are correct. I think that the Norman
invasion was very important for the history of England, and naturally that
means for the history of the world. I think that if the Normans had not
invaded England, England today would be, let us say, another Denmark. That
is, it would be a very educated country, and politically admirable, but a
provincial country, a country that has exerted no great influence upon world
history. The Normans, on the other hand, made possible the British Empire,
as well as the spread of the English race all over the world. I think that had
there been no Norman invasion, we would not have subsequently had a
British Empire. That is, there would have been no Englishmen in Canada, in
India, in South Africa, in Australia. Perhaps the United States would also not
exist. In other words, world history would have been totally different.
Because the Normans had managerial ability, an organizational sense, which
the Saxons lacked. And we can see this even in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
written by a Saxon monk—the Saxons were enemies of the Normans. It deals
with William the Conqueror, the bastard, who was Norman, and when he
died, they said there had never been in England a more powerful king than
he.18 Previously, the country had been divided into small kingdoms. It is
true, there was Alfred the Great, but he never grasped the idea that England
could be purely Anglo-Saxon or English.19 Alfred the Great died with the
idea that most of England would be a Norse country, and the other part would
be Saxon. The Normans arrived, however, and conquered England, that is,
they went all the way to the border with Scotland. In addition, they were a
very energetic people, people with great organizational ability, with great
religious sentiment as well, and they filled England with monasteries—
although the Saxons, of course, already had religious sentiment. But let’s take
a look at the dramatic events of that year, 1066, in England. There was in
England a king named Harold, son of Godwin. And Harold had a brother
named Tostig.
In the county of Yorkshire, I saw a Saxon church built by the two
brothers. I don’t remember the inscription exactly, but I remember that I had
it read to me, and I made a good impression because I translated it, which the
English gentlemen accompanying me were unable to do, as they had not
studied Anglo-Saxon. I have, more or less, but I may have cheated a bit on
that church inscription. In England, there must still be about fifty or sixty
Saxon churches. This was a small church. They are buildings of gray stone,
square, rather meager. The Saxons were not great architects, though they
became so later under Norman influence. After that, they had a different
understanding of the Gothic style, because Gothic generally tends toward
height. York Minster, the cathedral of York, is the longest cathedral in
Europe. It has windows called “the York sisters.” Cromwell’s soldiers did not
destroy these windows, as they are stained glass windows, with many colors,
but predominantly yellow. And the designs are what today we would call
abstract, that is, there are no figures. And they were not destroyed by
Cromwell’s soldiers, who destroyed all images because they considered them
idols. But not the “York sisters,” those precursors of abstract art; they were
saved, and this is fortunate because they are really beautiful.
So, we have King Harold and his brother, Earl Toste or Tostig,
depending on the text. Now, the earl believed that he had a right to part of the
kingdom, that the king should divide England between them. King Harold did
not agree, so Tostig left England and allied himself with the king of Norway,
who was named Harald Hardrada, Harald the Resolute, the Hard. . . . Pity he
has almost the same name as Harold, but history cannot be changed. This
personage is very interesting, because as is typical of many educated
Norsemen, he was not only a warrior but also a poet. And it seems that during
his last battle, the Battle of Stamford Bridge, he composed two poems. He
composed one, recited it, then said, “It’s not good.”20 So he composed
another, which contained more kennings—metaphors—and that’s why it
seemed better to him. Moreover, this king had traveled to Constantinople and
been in love with a Greek princess. He wrote—says [James Lewis] Farley,
with a phrase that could have been from Hugo—“madrigals of iron.”21 Earl
Tostig, who also had a stake in England, went to Norway to seek an alliance
with Harald. And they landed near a city that the Icelandic historian, Snorri
Sturluson, called Jorvik, which is the present-day city of York.22 And there
gathered, naturally, many Saxons who were his, not Harold’s, supporters. He
came with his army from the south. The two armies faced each other. It was
morning.
I have already told you that battles at that time were somewhat like
tournaments. Thirty or forty men from the Saxon army advanced on
horseback. We can imagine them covered in armor, and the horses also might
have armor. If you have seen Alexander Nevsky, it might help you imagine
this scene.23 And now I would like you to think about every word they are
going to say. These words might very well have been invented by tradition,
or by the Icelandic historian who records the scene, but each of the words is
significant. So, these forty Saxon—I mean, English—horsemen approach the
Norwegian army. And there was Earl Tostig, and next to him was the king of
Norway, Harald. Now, when Harald disembarked on the coast of England,
his horse tripped and fell. And he said, “A fall on a journey brings good
luck.” Something like when Julius Caesar landed in Africa, fell, and to
prevent this from being seen as a bad omen by his soldiers, he said, “Africa, I
have tight hold of you.” So, Harald was recalling a proverb. Then the
horsemen approached and were still a certain distance away, but close
enough to be able to see the faces of the Norwegians and the Norwegians the
faces of the Saxons. And the chief of this small group calls out, “Is Earl
Tostig here?” Tostig understands and says, “I do not deny that I am here.” So
then the Saxon horseman says, “I bear a message from your brother Harold,
king of England. He offers you a third of his kingdom and his forgiveness”—
for what he has done, of course, allying himself with the Norwegian
foreigners and invading England. Then Tostig reflects for a moment. He
would like to accept the offer, but at the same time, there stands the king of
Norway and his army. And so he says, “If I accept his offer, what will my
lord receive”—the other was the king of Norway and he was an earl—“my
lord, Harald, king of Norway?” So, the horseman reflects for a moment and
says, “Your brother has also thought of that. He offers him six feet of English
ground, and,” he adds, looking at him, “because he is so tall, one extra foot.”
During the [Second] World War, at the beginning, Churchill said in one of
his speeches that so many centuries later, England had kept this offer open to
all invaders, and he also offered Hitler six feet of English ground. The offer
stood still.
So Tostig reflects for a moment and then says: “In this case, tell your
lord that we will do battle, and that God will see who is victorious.” The
other says nothing and rides away. In the meantime, the king of Norway has
understood everything, because the languages are similar, but he has not said
a word. He has his suspicions. And when the other men have joined the bulk
of the army, he asks Tostig—because in this dialogue, everybody comes off
well—“Who was that knight who spoke so well?” You see? And then Tostig
tells him: “That knight was my brother Harold, the king of England.” And
now we see why Harold asked at first, “Is Earl Tostig here?” Of course he
knew he was, because he is seeing his brother. But he asks him in this manner
to indicate to Tostig that he must not betray him. If the Norwegians had
known he was the king, they would have killed him immediately.
So the brother also acted loyally, because he pretended not to know
him, and at the same time, he remained loyal to the king of Norway, because
he asked, “What will there be for my lord?” And so the king of Norway,
remembering their exchange, says, “He is not very tall, but he sits very
steadfastly on his horse.”
Then the Battle of Stamford Bridge begins—the site is still there—and
the Saxons destroy the Norwegians, Tostig’s allies, and the king of Norway
conquers his six feet of English ground that he had been promised in the
morning. Now, this victory is a little sad for Harold, because his brother was
there. But it was a great victory, for the Norwegians were usually the ones
who defeated the Saxons—but not here.
 They are celebrating this victory when another horseman arrives, a
very tired horseman, and he comes bearing news. He comes to tell Harold
that the Normans have invaded in the south. So, the army, tired out from its
victory, must now make a forced march to Hastings. And there in Hastings,
the Normans are waiting. Now, the Normans were also Norsemen, but they
had been in France for more than a century, they had forgotten the Danish
language, they were really French. And it was their custom to shave their
heads.
So Harold sends a spy—this was easy at that time—and sends him to
the Norman camp. The spy returns and tells him he can rest assured, nothing
is going to happen because the camp is a camp of friars. But those were the
Normans. Then the next day, the battle is waged, and we have an episode
that, if not historic—that is, historically significant—is historic in another
way. Now another personage joins the action, another horseman. This is
Taillefer, a minstrel; there are many horsemen in this story. He is a Norman
minstrel, and he asks permission of William the Bastard, who will later
become William the Conqueror, to be the first to engage in battle. He asks
him for this honor—a terrible honor, because naturally the first to engage in
battle are the first to die. So he enters into combat playing with his sword,
throwing it and picking it up in front of the astonished Saxons. The Saxons
were a serious people, needless to say, I don’t think there were many such
fellows yet among them. And he enters the battle singing cantilena Rollandi,
that is, singing an ancient version of Chanson de Roland. (So we are told in
the ancient English chronicle by William of Malmesbury.)24 And it is as if
with him the entire French culture, all the light of France, entered England.
Now, the battle lasts the entire day. The Saxons and the Normans used
different weapons. The Saxons had battle-axes—terrible weapons. The
Normans cannot mange to break through the Saxon siege, so they resort to an
ancient ruse of war: pretending to run away. The Saxons pursue them, and the
Normans turn and destroy the Saxons. And there ends Saxon rule in England.
There is another episode that is also poetic—though poetic in a
different manner—and it is the subject of a poem by Heine titled
“Schlachtfeld bei Hastings,” “The Battlefield of Hastings.” Schlacht,
naturally, is related to the English word “slay,” to kill, and the word
“slaughter.” “Slaughterhouse” in England is a place where animals are killed.
[The episode] is as follows: the Saxons are defeated by the Normans. Their
defeat is natural because they had already been decimated during their victory
over the Norwegians, because they were already very tired when they arrived,
etcetera. And there is a problem, and this is to find the king’s corpse. There
are “merchants” who have followed the army, and naturally they steal the
armor off the dead, the trappings off the horses, and the battlefield at
Hastings is full of dead men and horses. So, there is a monastery nearby, and
the monks naturally want to give Harold, the last Saxon king of England, a
Christian burial. One of the monks, the abbot, remembers that the king had a
mistress, who is not described but whom we can very easily imagine, because
her name is Edith Swaneshals, Edith Swanneck. Thus, she would be a very
tall, blonde woman with a slender neck. She is one of many women the king
had. He grew tired of her, abandoned her, and she lives in a hut in the middle
of the forest. She has grown old, prematurely. (People aged very quickly
then, just as they matured very quickly.) And so the abbot thinks that if
anybody can recognize the king’s corpse—or rather, the king’s naked body,
he must have thought—it would be this woman, who knew him so well,
whom he abandoned. So they go to the hut, and out comes the woman, by
then an old woman. The monks tell her that England has been conquered by
the French, the Normans, that this has happened nearby, in Hastings, and they
ask her to come look for the king’s corpse. This is what the chronicle says.
Now, Heine, naturally, uses this, describes the battlefield, describes the poor
woman making her way through the stench of the dead and the birds of prey
devouring them, and suddenly she recognizes the body of the man she loved.
And she says nothing, but she covers him with kisses. So the monks identify
the king, bury him, and give him a Christian burial.
Now, there also exists a legend that has been preserved in an Anglo-
Saxon chronicle that says that King Harold did not die at Hastings but rather
retired to a convent after the battle and there did penance for all his sins—it
seems his life was tempestuous. And [the chronicle says] sometimes when
William the Conqueror, who would thereafter rule over England, had a
difficulty to resolve, he would pay a visit to this anonymous monk, who had
once been Harold, king of England, and would ask him what he should do.
And he always followed his advice, because naturally both of them—the
conqueror and the conquered—cared about England’s welfare. So, you may
choose between these two versions, though I suspect you will prefer the first,
the one about Edith Swanneck, who recognizes her old lover, and not the
other one, about the king.
Then we have two centuries, and during these two centuries it is as if
English literature were taking place underground, because French was spoken
in court, the clergy spoke Latin, and the people spoke Saxon (four Saxon
dialects that were also intermingled with Danish). And one must wait from
the year 1066 to the fourteenth century for English literature—which had
carried on in a crude, clumsy way, which had continued on like an
underground river—to reemerge. And then we have the great names of
Chaucer, Langland, and then we have a language, English, that has been
deeply permeated by French, to such an extent that, yes, indeed, currently
there are more Latin than Germanic words in the English dictionary. But the
Germanic words are the essential ones, they are the words that correspond to
fire, metals, man, trees. On the contrary, all the words of culture come from
Latin.
And here we conclude the second unit.
 CLASS 8

A BRIEF HISTORY UNTIL THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. THE

LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 31, 1966

Only a few days have passed since last Friday, but for our studies, it is as
if many more had gone by. We are going to leave the eleventh century, take a
leap, and land straight in the eighteenth century. But first, we should
summarize the important events that have taken place in between.
After the Battle of Hastings, which marked the end of Saxon rule in
England, the English language goes into crisis. From the fifth to the seventh
century, English history is linked to Scandinavia, whether through the Danes
—the Angles and the Jutes came from Denmark as well as from the mouth of
the Rhine—or the Norwegians, with the Viking invasions. But after the
Norman conquest in 1066, England is connected to France, separating from
Scandinavian history and its influence. Literature is broken off, and the
English language resurges two centuries later with Chaucer and Langland.
At first, the connection to France arises, we might say, in a bellicose
fashion: in the Hundred Years’ War, the English are soundly defeated. And in
the fourteenth century, the first inklings of Protestantism appear in England,
before anywhere else. At that time, what will become the British Empire
begins to take shape: the war with Spain gives England a victory and
predominance over the seas.
In the seventeenth century, there is a civil war, when Parliament rebels
against the king. The Republic arises, which is an event that seriously
scandalized the European nations at the time. The Republic did not last. Then
came the era of the Restoration, culminating in the return of the monarchy,
which continues till today.
The seventeenth century is the century of the metaphysical, baroque
poets. This is when John Milton, the republican, writes his great poem,
Paradise Lost. In the eighteenth century, on the other hand, the empire of
Rationalism arises. It is the century of Reason, and the ideal of prose has
changed. It is no longer the flamboyant prose of the seventeenth century, but
rather one that aspires to clarity, eloquence, and expressions of logical
justification. When dealing with abstract thought, words of Latin origin are
used abundantly.
Now we come to the life of Samuel Johnson, a life that is very well
known. It is a life we know better than that of any other man of letters. And
we know it because of the work of his friend, James Boswell.
Samuel Johnson was born in the town of Lichfield, in Staffordshire
County, an inland town in England, which is not, professionally speaking, his
home. That is, it is not the home of his work. Johnson devoted his entire life
to literature. He died in 1784, before the French Revolution, which he would
have been against, for he was a man of conservative ideas, and was
profoundly religious.
He spent his childhood in poverty. He was a sickly child and had
tuberculosis. When he was still small, his parents took him to London for the
Queen to touch him and thereby cure his disease. One of his first memories
was of the Queen touching him and giving him a coin. His father was a
bookseller, which for him was a great fortune. Along with his readings at
home, he attended Lichfield Grammar School. “Lichfield” means “field of
the dead.”
Samuel Johnson was a wreck, physically, even though he was very
strong. He was stout and ugly. He had nervous tics. He went to London,
where he lived in poverty. He attended Oxford University, but he never
graduated or even came close: he was laughed out of the place. So he returns
to Lichfield and founds a school. He marries an old woman, older than he, an
ugly, old, ridiculous woman. But he was loyal to her. Perhaps, at that time,
this might indicate how religious he was. Then she dies. He also had phobias.
For example, he carefully avoided stepping on the cracks between the
flagstones. He also avoided touching poles. Nevertheless, in spite of these
eccentricities, he was one of the most sensible intellects of his era; he had a
truly brilliant intellect.
After the death of his wife, he traveled to London and there published
his translation of A Voyage to Abyssinia, by Father Lobo, a Jesuit.1 He then
wrote a novel about Abyssinia to pay for the cost of his mother’s burial. He
wrote that novel in one week. He published several journals, which appeared
once or twice a week, for which he was the principal writer. Though it was
illegal to publish accounts of the sessions of Parliament, he would often
attend them, then publish his accounts, adding a little literary fantasy. In his
reports, he would invent speeches, for example, and he always managed to
show the conservatives in the best light.
During that period he wrote two poems: “London,” and “The Vanity of
Human Wishes.” At that time, Pope was considered the greatest poet in
England. Johnson’s poetry, published anonymously, enjoyed a large
circulation and was said to be better than Pope’s. Pope then congratulated
him, once his identity was known. “London” was a free translation of a satire
by Juvenal.2 This shows us how different the concept of translation was at
that time compared to our concept today. At that time, the concept of a strict
translation, where translation was considered a labor based on verbal fidelity,
did not exist, as it does today. This concept of literal translation is based on
translations of the Bible. Those were indeed undertaken with great respect.
The Bible, composed by an infinite intelligence, was a book man could not
touch, or alter. The concept of literal translation, then, does not have any
scientific origin, but is rather a sign of respect for the Bible. Groussac says
that “the English of the Bible of the seventeenth century is as sacred a
language as the Hebrew of the Old and New Testament.”3 Johnson used
Juvenal as a model for “London,” and applied what Juvenal said about the
unpleasant aspects of life for a poet in Rome to that of a poet in London. So,
obviously, his translation had no intention of being literal.
Johnson made himself known through the journals he published, so
much so that among writers, he was considered one of the most important. He
was considered one of the best writers of his time, but the public didn’t know
him, until he published his Dictionary of the English Language.4 Johnson
believed that the English language had reached its peak and was in decline
due to constant corruption by Gallicisms. Hence, it was the moment to fix it.
In reference to this, Johnson said, “The English language is on the verge of
losing its Teutonic character.”
 According to Carlyle, Johnson’s style was “buckram.” This is true; his
paragraphs are long and heavy. In spite of this, however, we can find sensible
and original ideas on every page. Boileau wrote that tragedies that didn’t treat
the site of the action as unique were absurd.5 Johnson reacted against that.
Boileau said that it was impossible for the spectator to believe in “anyplace”
and also in, say, Alexandria. He also criticized any lack of unity of time.
From the point of view of common sense, the argument seems irrefutable, but
Johnson contradicts him by saying that “the spectator who isn’t crazy knows
perfectly well that he is not in Alexandria or anywhere else but rather in the
theater, in the stalls watching a show.” This reply was aimed against the rule
of three unities, which came from Aristotle, and which Boileau sustained.
So, a commission of booksellers went to visit Johnson and proposed
that he write a dictionary that would include all the words in the language.
This was something new and unusual. In the Middle Ages—in the tenth
century, or in the ninth—when a scholar read a Latin text and found an
anomalous word that he did not understand, he wrote his translation of it into
the vernacular between the lines. Then scholars would meet and create
glossaries; but at first they only included difficult Latin words. These
glossaries were published separately. Then they started making dictionaries.
The first were Italian and French. In England, the first dictionary was written
by an Italian, and called A Worlde of Wordes.6 Next came an etymological
dictionary, which attempted to include all words but did not deal with their
meanings, instead giving the Latin or Saxon origins, or etymologies, of a
word, or, rather, the Saxon or Teutonic origins. In Italy and France,
academies wrote dictionaries that did not include all words. They did not
want to include them all. They left out words that were rustic, dialectical,
argot, or ones that were too technical, specific to each trade. They didn’t
want to be rich in words, but rather to have a few good words. They wanted
precision above all, and to limit the language. In England, there were no
academies or anything of the kind. Johnson himself, who published an
English dictionary the main purpose of which was to fixate the language, did
not believe the language could be definitively fixated. The language belongs
to fishermen, not scholars. That is to say, language is created by humble
folks, haphazardly, but its usage creates norms of correctness that should be
sought in the best writers. In his search for these writers, Johnson established
a time frame from Sir Philip Sidney to writers before the Restoration, a time
that coincided, he believed, with the deterioration of the language through the
introduction of Gallicisms, or words of French origin.
So, Johnson decided to write a dictionary. When the booksellers went
to see him, they signed a contract. It stated that the work would take three
years to complete and that he would be paid 1,500 pounds sterling, which
ended up being 1,600. He wanted the book to be an anthology, to include a
passage from an English classic for each word. But he could not do
everything he planned. He wanted to do so much, to include for each word
several passages in order to show all its different nuances. But he was not
satisfied with the two volumes he published. He went back and reread the
classic authors, the English ones. In each work, he noted the passages in
which a word was used well, and after noting it he would put the first letter
next to it. In this way he marked up all the passages that he thought illustrated
each word. He had six amanuenses, and five of them were Scottish. . . .
Johnson knew very little Old English. The etymologies, added later, are the
weakest aspect of his work, along with the definitions. Because of his
ignorance of Old English, and his inability to do the etymologies, he defined
lexicographer, jokingly, as “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.” And
he called himself a lexicographer.
One day, one of his friends told him that the French Academy, with its
forty members, had spent forty years creating a dictionary of the French
language. And Johnson, who was a staunch nationalist, answered, “Forty
Frenchmen to one Englishmen: the correct proportion.” And he made the
same calculation with time: if the forty French people spent forty years, this
meant a total of 1,600 years; that would be equivalent to the three years one
Englishman would need. But the truth is that it took him nine rather than
three years to complete his work, and the whole time the booksellers were
depending on him to fulfill his commitment. That’s why they gave him an
additional one hundred pounds.
This dictionary was considered good until the publication of
Webster’s.7 We can now see that Webster, an American, had a much deeper
knowledge than Johnson. (In our day, the Oxford Dictionary is the best; it is
the historical dictionary of the language.) Johnson owed his fame to the
dictionary. He ended up being known as “Dictionary Johnson.” When
Boswell first saw Johnson in a bookstore, they identified him by his
nickname, “Dictionary,” which also was because of how he looked.
Johnson was poor for many years—for a time, he carried on a kind of
epistolary duel with Lord Chesterfield that would later appear in his poem
“London”: the garret and the jail, and after them, the patron.8 Around that
time he publishes an edition of Shakespeare. Actually, this is one of his last
works. His prologue is devoid of reverence, and he points out all the defects
of Shakespeare’s work. Johnson also wrote a tragedy in which Mohammed
makes an appearance, and a short novel, Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, which
has been compared to Candide, by Voltaire. During his final years, Johnson
gives up literature and spends his time holding conversations in a tavern,
where he emerges as the chief, or rather, dictator, of a literary salon that
forms around him. Samuel Johnson, having abandoned his literary career,
showed himself to be one of the great English spirits.
 CLASS 9

RASSELAS, PRINCE OF ABYSSINIA, BY SAMUEL JOHNSON.

THE LEGEND OF THE BUDDHA. OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM.
LEIBNIZ AND VOLTAIRE.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1966

Today we will discuss the story of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. This is

not the most characteristic of Johnson’s works. His letter to Lord Chesterfield
is much more characteristic, as are several articles in The Rambler, or the
preface to the Dictionary, or the preface to his critical edition of
Shakespeare.1 But [Rasselas] is the most readily accessible work for you, for
there is a version by Mariano de Vedia y Mitre, and anyway it is a very easy
read: it can be read in one afternoon.2 It is said that Johnson wrote it to pay
for his mother’s burial, after he wrote the dictionary, when he was already the
most famous man of letters in England (but he was not a rich man). Let’s
begin with the title: Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. And let us remember a
significant fact: that one of the first—or the first—publications of Samuel
Johnson was a translation of A Voyage to Abyssinia by the Portuguese Jesuit,
Lobo, which Johnson did not do directly but instead worked from a French
version.3 The important thing for us now is the fact that Johnson knew
specific information about Abyssinia, for he had translated a book about that
country. However, in his short novel, or long short story, Rasselas, he at no
point uses his knowledge of Abyssinia. Now, we shouldn’t think this was an
oversight by Johnson, or that he forgot. That would be completely absurd in
the case of a man like him. We should think about his concept of literature—
so different from our contemporary concept—and we should stop there.
There is, anyway, one chapter of Rasselas in which one of the characters, the
poet Imlac, explains his concept of poetry. And, apparently, since Johnson—
who was many things—was never an inventor of character, Imlac expresses
in this chapter—titled “A Dissertation Upon Poetry”—Johnson’s concept of
poetry, of literature in general, we could say. Prince Rasselas asks the wise
poet Imlac what poetry is, what is its nature, and Imlac tells him that the role
of the poet is not to count the stripes on a tulip or linger over the many shades
of green of the foliage. The poet should not deal with the individual but rather
with the generic, for the poet is writing for posterity. He says that the poet
must not concern himself with what is local, with what belongs to one class,
one region, one nation. For since poetry has that lofty mission to be eternal,
the poet should worry not about problems—Johnson did not use the word
“problem,” for at that time that word was used specifically for mathematics—
not about the concerns of his era, but rather should seek out the eternal, the
eternal passions of man, as well as subjects such as the brevity of human life,
the vicissitudes of destiny, the hopes we have for immortality, sins, virtues,
etcetera.
In other words, Johnson had a concept of literature that was very
different from the contemporary one, from ours. Now people instinctively
feel that each poet belongs to his nation, to his class, to his time. But Johnson
aimed for something higher. Johnson thought that a poet should write for all
the men of his century. This is why with Rasselas, besides there being a
geographic reference—it mentions the father of waters, the source of the
Nile, and there’s one or another geographic reference to the weather—and
that everything takes place in Abyssinia, it could take place in any other
country. Johnson didn’t do this, I repeat, out of negligence or ignorance but
because it corresponds to his concept of literature. We must not forget,
moreover, that Rasselas was written more than two hundred years ago, and in
the interval, literary conventions have changed greatly. For example, there is
one literary convention that Johnson accepts and that now seems awkward to
us: the monologue. His characters abundantly indulge in soliloquies. Johnson
did not do this because he thought that people were given to monologue, but
because it was a convenient way of expressing what he felt and, at the same
time, expressing his own eloquence, which was great. Let us remember the
analogous example of the speeches in Tacitus’s historical works. In that case,
naturally, Tacitus did not suppose those barbarians would have addressed
their tribes with such speeches, but the speeches were a way to express what
those people may have felt. Tacitus’s contemporaries did not accept his
speeches as historical documents, but rather as rhetorical pieces that helped
them understand what Tacitus was describing.
The style of Rasselas, at the beginning, runs the risk of seeming a bit
infantile and overly adorned. But Johnson believed in the dignity of literature.
It will seem slow, the style faltering. But after eight or ten pages, that
slowness feels pleasant to us—or to me, in any case, and to many other
readers. There is a tranquility in reading it, we have to get used to it. And
then Johnson opens the work up by using a fable. Through the fable—which
is quite tenuous, of course—we feel melancholy, gravity, sincerity, integrity,
all of which are fundamental in Johnson.
Now, the fable in Rasselas is as follows: the author imagines that the
Abyssinian emperors had isolated a valley from the rest of the kingdom, a
valley called “Happy Valley,” which was near the source of the Nile—the
father of waters, as he calls it—and surrounded by high mountains. The only
access to the world from this valley was through a bronze gate, which was
constantly under guard, very strong, and quite massive. It was really
impossible to open. Then he says that everything that can make men sad has
been excluded from this valley. There are meadows and forests surrounding
the valley, and it is fertile; there is a lake, and the prince’s palace is on an
island in the middle of the lake. And there live the princes until the emperor
dies, then it is the oldest prince’s turn to become the emperor of Abyssinia. In
the meantime, the prince and his people devote their lives to pleasure—not
only, of course, physical pleasures, of which little is mentioned in the text
(Johnson was an author who respected his readers; if we remember from
Boileau, “The French reader / must be respected,” and this was applied to all
readers at the time), but also intellectual pleasures, the pleasure of the
sciences and the arts. Now, this idea of a prince condemned to a happy
imprisonment has resonance—Johnson himself was probably ignorant of it—
in the legend of Buddha, though it would have reached him through the story
of Barlaam and Josaphat, adopted as the subject of one of Lope de Vega’s
comedies: the idea of a prince who has been brought up surrounded with
artificial happiness.4 The legend of Buddha, we might remember, can be
summarized as follows: there was a king in India about five centuries before
Christ—a contemporary of Heraclitus, of Pythagoras—who has it revealed to
him, through the dream of a woman who is giving birth to his son, that his
son can become the emperor of the world, or he can become the Buddha, the
man destined to save men from the endless cycle of reincarnation. The father,
naturally, would rather he be emperor of the world than the savior of
mankind. He knows that if the son finds out about the miseries of mankind,
he will refuse to be king and will become the Buddha, the savior—the word
“Buddha” means “awake.” So he decides that the boy will live in reclusion in
a palace, never learning anything about the miseries of mankind. The prince
is a great athlete, an archer and horseman. He has a large harem, and he
reaches the age of twenty-nine. On his birthday, he goes out in a carriage and
rides to one of the gates of the palace that faces north. And there he sees
something he has never seen before: a strange person whose face is furrowed
with wrinkles, who’s bent over, leaning on a cane, walking with hesitant step,
and his hair is white. The prince asks about this strange person, who seems
barely human, and the driver of the carriage says he is an old man, and that
with the passage of time, he will be that old man, and that all men will be or
have been old. Then he returns to his palace, very disturbed by what he has
seen, and after a while he goes on another outing, along a different road, and
he comes across a recumbent man, very pale, emaciated, perhaps his
whiteness is from leprosy. He asks who he is, and they tell him that he is a
sick man, and that with time he will be this sick man, that all men will be.
Then, on his third outing he goes south, let’s say, and something even
stranger occurs. He sees several men carrying another man who seems to be
sleeping, but he isn’t breathing. He asks who he is, and they tell him he is a
dead man. It is the first time he has heard the word “dead.” Then he goes out
a fourth time and sees an old, but robust, man wearing a yellow robe, and he
asks who he is. They tell him he is a hermit, a yogi (the word “yoga” has the
same root as “yoke,” which means “discipline”), and that man is beyond all
the world’s adversity. Then Prince Siddhartha flees from the palace and
decides to seek salvation; he becomes the Buddha and teaches salvation to
mankind. And, according to one version of this legend—please forgive me
this digression, but the story is beautiful—the prince, the driver, and the four
characters he sees—the old man, the sick man, the dead man, and the hermit
—are all the same person. That is, he has taken on different forms to fulfill
the destiny of the Bodhisattva, the pre-Buddha. (There is an echo of this word
in the name Josaphat.) Now some echo of this legend must have reached
Johnson, because the prince in that legend is the same: we have a prince in
reclusive captivity in Happy Valley. And this prince reaches the age of
twenty-six—which could be an echo of twenty-nine in the Buddha legend—
and he feels the dissatisfaction of having all his desires gratified. As soon as
he wants something, he has it. This leads him into a state of despair. He
leaves the palace filled with musicians and pleasures . . . he leaves the palace
and goes out to walk alone. Then he sees the animals, the gazelles, the crows.
Farther up, along the slopes of the mountains, are the camels, the elephants.
And he thinks that those animals are happy because all they have to do is
wish for something and once their needs are met, they doze off. But in man
there is some kind of infinite longing: once everything he can desire is
satisfied, he will desire other things, and he doesn’t even know what they are.
Then he meets an inventor. This inventor has invented a flying machine. He
suggests to the prince that he might want to board it and escape from Happy
Valley and learn firsthand about the suffering of humanity. Then there’s a
somewhat funny passage that Alfonso Reyes quotes in his book Rilindero.5 It
is as if it were a foreshadowing of the science fiction of our day, the work of
Wells or Bradbury: the inventor takes off from a tower in his rudimentary
machine, crashes, breaks a leg, and then the prince realizes that he has to find
some other way of escaping from the valley. Then he talks to Imlac, the poet
whose concept of poetry we have already discussed; he talks to his sister,
who is as weary of happiness as he is—of the immediate gratification of
every desire—and they decide to escape from the valley. And here the novel
suddenly turns into a psychological story. Because Johnson tells us that for a
year the prince was so happy at having made the decision to escape, that this
decision itself was enough for him, and he did nothing to carry through with
it. Every morning he thinks, “I’m going to escape from the valley,” then
spend his time enjoying the banquets, the music, the pleasure of the senses
and the intellect, and this is how he spent two years. One morning, he
understood that he had been living on hope. So he went out to explore the
mountains, to see if he could find anything, and finally he found a cave
through which the water from the rivers emptied into a lake. And,
accompanied by Imlac, he explored it, and he saw that there was a spot, a
kind of grotto, through which he could escape. Three years after making his
decision, he, his sister, Imlac, and a woman from his court named Pekuah
decide to leave Happy Valley. They knew that all they had to do was climb
over the mountains to be free; nobody else knew about the path through the
rocks. So they choose one night to escape, and after a few setbacks—not
many, because Johnson was not writing an adventure novel, but rather
rewriting his poem about the vanity of human hope—they find themselves to
the north, on the other side of the mountains. Then they see a group of
shepherds, and at first—this is a very human, very realistic fiction—the
prince and princess are amazed that the shepherds do not fall to their knees in
front of them. Even though they want to mingle with common people, even
though they want to be like other men, they are naturally accustomed to the
ceremony of the court. So they turn north, where everything surprises them,
even people’s indifference toward them. They are secretly carrying jewels—
because the treasures of the kings of Abyssinia are in the palace. There are
also hollow columns in the palace full of jewels. There are also spies who
watch the prince and princess, but they managed to escape. Then they reach a
port on the Red Sea. They are amazed by the port and the ships. Months pass
before they embark. The princess is terrified at first. But her brother and
Imlac tell her she must carry through with her decision, and they set sail.
Here one hopes the author will throw in a storm, just to entertain the reader.
But Johnson is not thinking about such things. The fact that Johnson wrote
this book in such a slow, musical style is quite remarkable, this book in
which all the sentences are perfectly balanced. There is not a single sentence
that ends abruptly, and we find a monotonous, but very agile, music, and this
is what Johnson wrote while he was thinking about the death of his mother,
whom he loved so much.
Finally they reach Cairo. The reader understands that Cairo is a kind of
metaphor, a reflection of London. The commercial activities in the city are
described; the prince and princess feel lost in these crowds of people, who
jostle them and push them aside. And Imlac sells some of the jewels they
have brought; he buys a palace, and establishes himself there as a merchant,
and meets the most important people in Egypt, that is, in England, because
Johnson took all those trappings of the Orient from The Arabian Nights
(which was translated at the beginning of the eighteenth century by the
French Orientalist Galland).6 There is very little Oriental color; that didn’t
interest Johnson. Then he talks about the nations of Europe. Imlac says that
compared to the nations of Europe, these people are barbarians. That the
nations of Europe have ways of communicating among themselves. He talks
about the letters that arrive quickly, the bridges, he talks again about the
many ships. (They already sailed in one from Abyssinia to Cairo.) And the
prince asks him if the Europeans are happier. Imlac answers that wisdom and
science are preferable to ignorance, that barbarism and ignorance cannot be
sources of happiness, that the Europeans are surely wiser than the
Abyssinians; but he cannot assert, based on his interactions with the
Europeans, that they are happier. Then we listen to several conversations
between philosophers. One of them says that man can be happy if he lives
according to the laws of nature, but he cannot explain what those laws are,
and the prince understands that the more he converses with him, the less he
will understand about the laws of nature. He politely says goodbye, then
receives news of a hermit, a man who has been living in solitude in Thebaide
for fourteen years.7 He decides to visit him. After a few days—I think he
travels by camel—he reaches the hermit’s cave, which has been divided into
several rooms. The hermit offers him meat and wine. He himself is a frugal
man and eats only vegetables and milk. The prince asks him to tell him his
story, and the other says that he used to be a soldier, that he has known the
tumult of battle, the shame of defeat, the joy of victory, that he became
renowned and that he saw that because of a court intrigue, a less capable, less
brave officer was given a higher position. So he sought reclusion, and for
many years he has lived alone, dedicated to meditation. And the prince—this
story is a parable, a fable about a man who seeks happiness—asks him if he
is happy. The philosopher answers that solitude has not allowed him to let go
of the images of the city, its sins and its pleasures. That before, when he had
all those pleasures within reach, he could gratify himself and then think about
other things. But now, living in solitude, the only thing he does is think about
the city and the pleasures he has renounced. He tells them that it is fortunate
that they arrived that night, because he had made up his mind to return the
following day to Cairo. And he abandons his solitude. The prince tells him
that he thinks he is wrong. The other tells him that naturally, for him solitude
is a novelty, but now that he has been alone for fourteen or fifteen years, he is
sick of it; so they say goodbye, and the prince goes to visit a great pyramid.
Johnson says that the pyramids are the greatest works of mankind. The
pyramids and the Great Wall of China. He says that there is an explanation
for the wall: on one side we have a fearful, peaceful, very civilized people,
and on the other, hordes of barbarian horsemen who could be stopped by a
wall. It is understandable why the wall was built. As for the pyramids, we
know they are tombs, but such an enormous structure is not needed to
preserve that man.
Then the prince, the princess, Imlac, and Pekuah reach the entrance to
the pyramid. The princess is terrified—fear is her only feeling portrayed in
the novel—and she says she doesn’t want to enter, that inside there might be
the specters of the dead. Imlac tells her there is no reason whatsoever to think
that specters would like cadavers, and that he has already been there. He asks
her to enter. He, in any case, goes in first. The princess agrees to follow.
Then they reach a large chamber, and there they talk about the founder of the
pyramids. And they say: “Here we have a man with unlimited power over an
enormous empire, a man who clearly had at his fingertips the satisfaction of
all his desires. And even so, where did that get him? To boredom. To the
useless task of forcing thousands of men to pile one stone upon another until
they had built a useless pyramid.” Here we might recall Sir Thomas Browne,
a good writer from the seventeenth century, author of the phrase you know,
“the ghost of a rose.”8 (That phrase, I think, was invented by Sir Thomas
Browne.) And wise Imlac, when talking about the pyramids, asks, “Who
wouldn’t take pity on the builders of the pyramids?” Then the prince says,
“Who believes that power, luxury, and omnipotence can make a man happy?
I will tell that man to look at these pyramids and admit his folly.”9
Then they visit a monastery, and in the monastery they converse with
the monks, and the monks tell them that they are accustomed to a harsh life,
that they know that their lives will be harsh, but they have no certainty that it
will be happy. They also speak about love, about the vicissitudes of the
anxious and uncertain happiness created by love. And having known the
world and seen men and their cities, the Prince, Imlac, the Princess, and
Pekuah (the princess’s maid) decide to return to Happy Valley, where they
won’t be happy, but they will be no more miserable than outside the valley.
In other words, the whole story of Rasselas is really a rejection of
man’s happiness and has been compared to Voltaire’s Candide. Now, if we
compare Voltaire’s Candide and Johnson’s Rasselas line by line, page by
page, we will immediately see that Candide is a much more brilliant book
than Rasselas, but that Voltaire’s brilliance itself refutes his own thesis.
Leibniz, a contemporary of Voltaire, put forth the theory that we live in the
best of all possible worlds, and this was derisively called “optimism.”10 The
word “optimism” that we now use to mean “good humor” was a word
invented to be used against Leibniz. He believed that we live in the best of all
possible worlds, and he has a parable in which he imagines a pyramid. That
pyramid has an apex, but it does not have a base. Each of the floors of the
pyramid corresponds to a world, the world of each floor is better than the one
below it, and so on, infinitely—the pyramid has no base so it is strictly
infinite. And then Leibniz has his hero live an entire life in each of the
pyramid’s floors. At the end, after infinite reincarnations, he reaches the
apex. And when he reaches the last floor, he has a feeling that is akin to
happiness, he thinks he has reached heaven, and then he asks, “Where am I
now?” Then they explain that this is Earth. That is, we are in the happiest of
all possible worlds. Now, of course, this world is full of misfortune; I think
having a toothache is enough to convince us that we don’t live in paradise.
But Leibniz explains this by saying it is equivalent to the dark colors in a
painting. He invents an illustration of this that is as brilliant as it is false. He
tells us to imagine a library with one thousand volumes. Each one of these
volumes is the Aeneid—or the Iliad, if you prefer. (It was believed that the
Aeneid—or the Iliad—was the highest in all of literature.) Now, which would
you prefer, a library with one thousand volumes of the Aeneid—or the Iliad,
or any other book that you like a lot, because for this example it doesn’t
matter which? Or would you prefer a library with just one copy of the Aeneid
and works by greatly inferior writers, such as any of our contemporaries? The
reader will obviously answer that he would prefer a library with a variety of
books. And so Leibniz answers, “Okay, that other library is the world.” In the
world we have perfect beings and moments of happiness, as perfect as Virgil.
But we have others as bad as the works of Mr. So-and-so, no need to give any
names here.
But this example is false, because a reader can choose from among
books, and if it is our lot to choose that horrible work by Mr. What’s-his-
name, then who knows if we can be happy. Kierkegaard has a similar
example. He says that we can imagine a delicious dish. All the ingredients in
that dish are delicious, but for the ingredients in that dish, it’s necessary to
add a drop of a bitter aloe, for example. And then he says, “Each of us is one
of the ingredients in that dish, but if it is my lot to be the drop of bitter aloe,
am I going to be as happy as the one who is a drop of honey?” And
Kierkegaard, who had deep religious sentiments, says, “From the depth of
Hell, I will be grateful to God for being the drop of bitter aloe that is
necessary for the variety and conception of the universe.” Voltaire didn’t
think like that; he thought that there is much evil in this world, more evil than
good, and so he wrote Candide to demonstrate pessimism. One of the first
examples he chooses is the earthquake of Lisbon, and he says that God
allowed the earthquake of Lisbon to punish the inhabitants for their many
sins. Voltaire wonders if the inhabitants of Lisbon are really more sinful than
the inhabitants of London or Paris, who have not been judged deserving of an
earthquake by divine justice. Now, what could be said against Candide and in
favor of Rasselas is that a world in which Candide—which is a delicious
work, full of jokes—exists can’t be such a terrible world. Because surely,
when Voltaire wrote Candide, he didn’t feel the world was so terrible. He
was expounding a thesis and was having a lot of fun doing so. On the
contrary, in Johnson’s Rasselas, we feel Johnson’s melancholy. We feel that
for him life is essentially horrible. And the very scantiness of invention in
Rasselas makes it that much more convincing.
In the book we will discuss next time, we will see Johnson’s profound
melancholy. We know he felt life as horrible, in a way Voltaire could not
have. It is also true that Johnson must have derived a considerable amount of
pleasure from the practice of literature, from the ease with which he wrote
long, musical sentences, sentences that are never empty, that always mean
something. But we know he was a melancholic man. Johnson also lived
tormented by his fear of going crazy; he was very conscious of his phobias. . .
. I think I mentioned last time that he would commonly attend meetings and
recite Our Father out loud. Johnson was much admired in society, but he
deliberately retained his country manners. For example, he was at a grand
dinner party; and on one side sat a duchess, on the other an academic, and
when he ate—above all if the food was a little spoiled, he liked food that was
a little spoiled—the veins on his forehead would swell. The duchess said
something polite to him, and he answered by brushing her off with his hand
and making some kind of grunt. He was a man who, though accepted by
society, scorned it. And in his literary work, as in that of Swinburne, there are
many prayers. One of the forms of composition he used a lot was prayers, in
which he asked God forgiveness for how little he had tolerated, for all the
foolish and crazy things he had done in his life. . . . But all of this, this
examination of Johnson’s character, we will leave for another class, because
Johnson’s private life is revealed, not by him—he tried to hide it and never
complained about it—but by an extraordinary character, James Boswell, who
devoted himself to visiting Johnson and writing down on a daily basis all of
his conversations; and in this way he left behind the best biography in all of
literature, according to Macaulay.11 So, we will devote our next class to
Boswell’s work and to examining Boswell’s character, which has been
widely discussed, criticized by some and praised by others.
 CLASS 10

SAMUEL JOHNSON AS SEEN BY BOSWELL. THE ART OF

BIOGRAPHY. BOSWELL AND HIS CRITICS.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1966

Dr. Johnson was already fifty years old. He had published his dictionary,
for which he was paid 1,500 pounds sterling—which became 1,600 when his
publishers decided to give him one hundred more—when he finished. He was
slowing down. He then published his edition of Shakespeare, which he
finished only because his publishers had received payments from subscribers,
so it had to be done. Otherwise, Dr. Johnson spent his time engaged in
conversation.
It was around this time that Oxford University, from which he had not
been able to graduate, decided to make him a doctor, honoris causa. He
founded a club, over which he presided like a dictator, according to the
biography by James Boswell, and after the publication of his dictionary he
found he was famous, well-known, but not rich. For a while, he spent his life
in poverty but “with pride of literature.” According to Boswell’s account, he
appears to have overdone it. In fact, he had a certain tendency toward
idleness; for a time after the dictionary was published, he did almost nothing
at all, though he was probably working on the Shakespeare edition, as I
mentioned. The truth is, in spite of his numerous accomplishments, he had a
natural tendency toward idleness. He preferred to talk rather than write. So,
he worked only on that edition of Shakespeare, which was one of his last
works, for he received complaints, and satirical responses, and this made him
decide to finish the work, because the subscribers had already paid.
Johnson had a peculiar temperament. For a time he was extremely
interested in the subject of ghosts. He was so interested in them that he spent
several nights in an abandoned house to see if he could meet one. Apparently,
he didn’t. There’s a famous passage by the Scottish writer, Thomas Carlyle, I
think it is in his Sartor Resartus—which means “The Tailor Retailored,” or
“The Mended Tailor,” and we’ll soon see why—in which he talks about
Johnson, saying that Johnson wanted to see a ghost.1 And Carlyle wonders:
“What is a ghost? A ghost is a spirit that has taken corporal form and appears
for a while among men.” Then Carlyle adds, “How could Johnson not have
thought of this when faced with the spectacle of the human multitudes he
loved so much in the streets of London, for if a ghost were a spirit that has
taken a corporal form for a brief interval, why did it not occur to him that the
London multitudes were ghosts, that he himself was a ghost? What is each
man but a spirit that has taken corporal form briefly and then disappears?
What are men if not ghosts?”
It was around this time that the Tory, conservative, government—not
the Whig, liberal—decided to recognize Johnson’s importance and grant him
a pension. And the Earl of Bute was commissioned to discuss the issue with
Johnson.2 This was because the government did not want to offer it to him
directly because of his reputation and the many statements he had made
against pensions and other things of that nature. In fact, his definition of a
pension, which appears in his dictionary, is famous; it says a pension is an
allowance received by a state mercenary, generally for having betrayed his
country. And as Johnson was a very violent man, they didn’t want to grant
him a pension before having consulted with him. There was a legend, or
story, that Johnson had an argument with a bookseller and felled him with a
blow, not with a cane but with a book, a folio volume, which makes the
anecdote more literary and also testifies to Johnson’s great physical strength,
for such manuscripts are difficult to handle, especially in the middle of a
fight.
Johnson agreed, let us say, to an interview with the prime minister,
who then, with great tact, sounded him out on the subject and assured him
that he would be granted a pension, of three hundred pounds sterling a year, a
considerable sum at the time: not for what he would do—which meant that
the state would not be buying Johnson—but rather for what he had already
done. Johnson was grateful for the honor and more or less made it understood
that they could grant him the pension without danger of provoking a hostile
reaction from him. I don’t know if I mentioned or not that centuries later,
Kipling was offered the position of poet laureate, and Kipling did not want it,
even though he was a personal friend to the king. He said that if he accepted
that honor, his freedom to criticize the government when it behaved badly
would be curtailed. Moreover, Kipling surely thought that being named poet
laureate would add nothing to his literary fame. Johnson accepted the
pension, which caused many to satirize him. Nobody failed to remember his
definition of a pension, and later in a bookstore something took place that
was undoubtedly of little importance to him at the moment. Generally, the
important events in our lives seem trivial when they take place and only later
take on importance.
Johnson was in a bookstore when he met a young man named James
Boswell. This young man was born in Edinburgh in 1740 and died in the year
1795. He was the son of a judge. In Scotland, judges were given the title of
Lord and could choose the place they wanted to be lord of. Boswell’s father
had a small castle that was in ruins. Scotland is full of castles in ruins, poor
castles in the Highlands of Scotland, and as opposed to the castles of the
Rhine, which suggest an opulent life with small but more or less lavish
courts, these don’t, they give the impression of a life of battle, of difficult
battles against the English. The castle was called Auchinleck. Boswell’s
father, then, was Lord Auchinleck and so was his son. But this wasn’t, let us
say, a native title, from birth, but rather a judicial title. Now, even though
Boswell showed an interest in letters, his parents wanted him to go into law.
He studied in Edinburgh and then for more than two years at Utretcht
University in Holland. This was customary at that time: to study at several
universities, in the British Isles and on the continent. It could be said that
Boswell had a premonition of his destiny. Like Milton knew that he would be
a poet before he had written a single line, Boswell always felt he would be
the biographer of a great man of his era. So he visited Voltaire; he tried to
approach the great men of his time. He visited Voltaire in Berne, in
Switzerland, and he made friends with Jean-Jacques Rousseau—they were
friends for only fifteen or twenty days, because Rousseau was a very ill-
tempered man—and then he became friends with an Italian general, Paoli,
from Corsica.3 And when he returned to England, he wrote a book about
Corsica, and at a party given in Stratford-upon-Avon to celebrate the birth of
Shakespeare, he showed up dressed as a Corsican villager. So that people
would recognize him as the author of the book about Corsica, he carried a
sign on his hat, on which he had written “Corsica’s Boswell,” and we know
this because of his own testimony and that of his contemporaries.
Johnson felt a special antagonism toward the Scots, so young Boswell
introducing himself as a Scot did not work in his favor. I don’t remember
right now the name of the owner of the bookstore, but I know that a friend of
Johnson’s said he could not imagine anything more humiliating for the man
than the fact that the bookstore owner patted him on the shoulder.4a> Of
course, this didn’t happen at their first meeting; Johnson would not have
allowed it. And Johnson spoke badly of Scotland, and then he complained
about Boswell’s friend Garrick, the famous actor David Garrick; and he said
that Garrick had refused to give tickets to a lady friend of his. He was acting
in a Shakespeare play, I don’t know which one. And then Boswell said, “I
can’t believe Garrick would have acted in such a mean fashion.” Now,
Johnson spoke badly of Garrick, but he would not allow others to do so. It
was a privilege that he reserved for himself in light of the close friendship
between them. So he said [to Boswell]: “Sir, I have known Garrick since
childhood, and I will not allow any slight to be made against him.” And
Boswell had to ask to be forgiven. Then Johnson left, without knowing that
something very important had happened, something that would determine his
fame more than his dictionary, more than Rasselas, more than the tragedy
Irene, more than his translation of Juvenal, more than all his journals.
Boswell complained a little about how harshly Johnson had treated him, but
the bookseller reassured him that Johnson had a brusque manner, and that he
believed Boswell could attempt a second meeting with Johnson. Naturally,
there were no telephones then, and visits were announced. But Boswell let
three or four days pass before he presented himself at Johnson’s house, and
Johnson gave him a warm welcome.
There is something very strange about Boswell, something that has
been interpreted in two different ways. I’m going to look at the two extreme
views: the one of the English essayist and historian Macaulay, who wrote
around the middle of the nineteenth century, and that of Bernard Shaw,
written, I believe, around 1915, or something like that.5 Then there is a whole
range of judgments between those two. Macaulay says that the preeminence
of Homer as an epic poet, of Shakespeare as a dramatic poet, of Demosthenes
as an orator, and of Cervantes as a novelist is no less indisputable than the
preeminence of Boswell as a biographer. And then he says that all those
eminent names owed their preeminence to their talent and brilliance, and that
the odd thing about Boswell is that he owes his preeminence as a biographer
to his foolishness, his inconsistency, his vanity, and his imbecility. He then
recounts a series of instances in which Boswell appears as a ridiculous
character. He says that if these things that happened to Boswell had happened
to anybody else, that person would have wanted the earth to swallow him up.
Boswell, however, dedicated himself to publicizing them.6 For example,
there’s the scorn shown to him by an English duchess, and the fact that
members of the club he managed to join thought there could not be a person
less intelligent than Boswell. But Macaulay forgets that we owe the narration
of almost all those facts to Boswell himself. Moreover, I believe a priori that
a person with the lights out upstairs can write a good poem. I have known
poets “whose name I do not wish to recall,” who were extremely vulgar, and
even trivial, apart from their poetry, but they were well enough informed to
know that a poet should exhibit delicate sentiments, should express noble
melancholy, should limit himself to certain vocabulary.7 And so these people
were, outside their work . . . some were broken men, but to tell the truth,
when they wrote, they did so with decorum because they had learned the
trade. Now, I think this is possible in the case of a short composition—a fool
can utter a brilliant sentence—but it seems quite rare for a fool to be able to
write an admirable biography of seven or eight hundred pages in spite of
being a fool or, according to Macaulay, because he was a fool.
Now, let us take a look at the opposite opinion, that of Bernard Shaw.
Bernard Shaw, in one of his long and incisive prologues, says that he is the
heir to an apostolic succession of dramatists, that this succession comes from
the Greek tragedians—from Aeschylus, Sophocles, through Euripides—and
then passes through Shakespeare, through Marlowe. He says that he is not, in
fact, better than Shakespeare, that if he had lived in Shakespeare’s century he
would not have written works better than Hamlet or Macbeth; but now he
can, for he cannot stand Shakespeare, because he has read authors who are
better than him. Before, he mentioned other dramatists, names that are
somewhat surprising for such a list. He says we have the four Evangelists,
those four great dramatists who created the character Christ. Before, we had
Plato, who created the character Socrates. Then we have Boswell, who
created the character Johnson. “And now, we have me, who has created so
many characters it is not worth listing them, the list would be almost infinite
as well as being well known.” “Finally,” he says, “I am heir to the apostolic
succession that begins with Aeschylus and ends in me and that undoubtedly
will continue.” So here we have these two extreme opinions: one, that
Boswell was an idiot who had the good fortune to meet Johnson and write his
biography—that’s Macaulay’s—and the other, the opposite, of Bernard
Shaw, who says that Johnson was, among his other literary merits, a dramatic
character created by Boswell.
It would be unusual for the truth to be exactly in the middle between
these two extremes. Lugones, in his prologue to El imperio jesuítico [The
Jesuit Empire], says that people often claim that the truth can be found
between two extreme statements, but that it would be very strange in any
particular case for there to be, for instance, 50 percent in favor and 50 percent
against.8 The most natural would be for there to be 52 percent against and 48
percent in favor, or something like that. And this can be applied to any war
and any argument. In other words, one side will always be a little more right
and one a little more wrong.
So, now we will return to the relationship between Boswell and
Johnson. Johnson was a famous man, a dictator in the world of English letters
(at the same time he was a man who suffered from loneliness, as do many
famous men). Boswell was a young man, in his twenties. Johnson was from a
humble background; his father was a bookseller in a small town in
Staffordshire. And the other was a young aristocrat. In other words, it is well
known that men of a certain age are rejuvenated by the company of the
young. Johnson was, moreover, an extremely unkempt person: he paid no
attention to what he wore; he had a gluttonous appetite. When he ate, the
veins on his forehead swelled, he emitted all kinds of grunts, and he didn’t
respond if somebody asked him a question; he pushed away—like so, with
his hands—a woman who asked him something, and grunted at the same
time, or he’d start praying right in the middle of a meeting.9 But he knew that
everything would be tolerated because he was an important figure. In spite of
all this, Boswell became friends with him. Boswell did not contradict him; he
listened to his opinions with reverence. It is true that at times Boswell
annoyed him with questions that were difficult to answer. He asked him, for
example—just to know what Dr. Johnson would answer—“What would you
do if you were locked in a tower with a newborn baby?” Of course, Johnson
answered, “I have no intention of answering such an inept question.” And
Boswell jotted down this answer, went to his house, and wrote it up. But after
two or three months of friendship, Boswell decided to go to Holland to
continue his legal studies, and Johnson, who was very attached to London . . .
Johnson said, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” Johnson
accompanied Boswell to the boat. I think it is many miles south of London.
That is, he diligently tolerated the long and—at the time—difficult trip, and
Boswell says he stood at the port watching the boat sail away, waving
goodbye. They wouldn’t see each other for two or three years. Then, after his
failure with Voltaire, his failure with Rousseau, his success with Paoli—
which might not have been difficult because Paoli was not a very important
person—Boswell decided to dedicate himself to being Johnson’s biographer.
Johnson dedicated his final years—I think we have already talked
about this—to conversation. But first he wrote and published some Lives, of
the English poets. Among these is one that is easy to find and I recommend it
to you: the “Life of Milton.” It is written without any reverence for Milton.
Milton was a republican; he had already participated in campaigns against the
royalty. Johnson, on the other hand, was a fervent defender of the monarchy
and a loyal subject of the English king. Now, in these Lives, there are some
very interesting elements. Moreover, we can find details that were quite
unusual for that time. For example, Johnson wrote the life of the famous poet
Alexander Pope, who had real manuscripts, not like Valéry.10 What I’ve
been told about Valéry is that during his final years he was not a wealthy
man, and he devoted his time to creating false manuscripts. That is, he wrote
a poem, used any old adjective, then crossed it out and put in the real one.
The adjective that he first wrote, he had invented in order to correct it. Or, he
would sell manuscripts in which he changed a few words and then didn’t
correct them so they would look like drafts. On the other hand, Johnson had,
as I said, real manuscripts of Pope’s, with his corrections. And it is curious to
see how Pope sometimes begins to use a poetic epithet. He writes, for
example, “the silvery light of the moon,” and then he says, “the shepherds
blessed the silvery light of the moon.” And then, instead of “silvery,” he uses
a deliberately prosaic epithet: “the useful light.”11 Johnson relates all this in
his biographies, and some of them are so good they should be used as
examples. But Boswell thought differently. These biographies of Johnson’s
were pretty short. Boswell conceived of the idea of an extensive biography,
one that included his conversations with Johnson, whom he saw several times
a week, sometimes more. The Life of Samuel Johnson, by Boswell, has often
been compared to Conversations of Goethe, by Eckermann, a book that in my
opinion is in no way comparable, even though it was praised by Nietzsche as
the best book ever written in German.12 Because Eckermann was a man of
limited intelligence who greatly revered Goethe, who spoke with him ex
cathedra. Eckermann very rarely dared to contradict Goethe. Then he’d go
home and write it all down. The book has something of catechism about it. In
other words: Eckermann asks, Goethe answers, the first writes down what
Goethe has said. But this book—which is very interesting, for Goethe was
interested in many things, we could say he was interested in the universe—
this book is not a drama; Eckermann almost doesn’t exist except as a kind of
machine that records Goethe’s words. We know nothing about Eckermann,
nothing about his character—he undoubtedly had one, but this cannot be
deduced from the book, cannot be inferred from it. On the other hand, what
Boswell planned, or in any case what he carried out, was completely
different: to make Johnson’s biography a drama, with several characters.
There is [Sir Joshua] Reynolds, there is [Oliver] Goldsmith, sometimes the
members of the circle, or how would we call it, the salon, of which Johnson
was the leader.13 And they appear and behave like the characters in a play.
Indeed, each has his own personality—above all, Dr. Johnson, who is
presented sometimes as ridiculous but always as lovable. This is what
happens with Cervantes’s character, Don Quixote, a character who is
sometimes ridiculous but always lovable, especially in the second part, when
the author has learned to know his character and has forgotten his initial goal
of parodying novels of chivalry. This is true, because the more writers
develop their characters, the better they get to know them. So, that’s how we
have a character who is sometimes ridiculous, but who can be serious and
have profound thoughts, and above all is one of the most beloved characters
in all of history. And we can say “of history” because Don Quixote is more
real to us than Cervantes himself, as Unamuno and others have maintained.14
And as I have said, this happens above all in the second part, when the author
has forgotten that intention of his to simply write a satire of the novels of
chivalry. Then, as occurs with every long book, the author ends up
identifying with the hero; he must in order to infuse him with life, to make
him come alive. And at the end, Don Quixote is a slightly ridiculous
character, but he is also a gentleman worthy of our respect, and sometimes
our pity, but he is always lovable. And this is the same sensation we get from
the image of Dr. Johnson, given to us by Boswell, with his grotesque
appearance, his long arms, his slovenly appearance. But he is lovable.
His hatred for Scots is also remarkable, something Boswell, the Scot,
remarks upon. I don’t know if I have told you that there is a fundamental
difference in the way Scots and Englishmen think. The Scot tends to be—
perhaps as a result of all their theological discussions—much more
intellectual, more rational. Englishmen are impulsive; they don’t need
theories for their behavior. On the contrary, Scots tend to be thinkers and
reasoners. Anyway, there are many differences.
So, let’s return to Johnson. Johnson’s works have literary value, but as
is often the case, knowing the person and appreciating him gives one much
more desire to read his work. That’s why it’s a good idea to read Boswell’s
biography before reading Johnson’s work. Moreover, the book is very easy to
read. I think Calpe has published an edition that is not complete but contains
enough fragments for you to become familiar with the work. In any case, I
recommend that you read that or another edition. Or, if you want to read it in
English, the original is very easy to read, and does not need to be read in
order, chronologically. It is a book you can open to any page with confidence
that from there you can continue to read for thirty or forty pages, and
everything is very easy to follow.
Now, in the same way that we have seen how Johnson is similar to
Don Quixote, we have to think that just as Sancho is the companion Quixote
sometimes treats badly, we see Boswell in that same relation to Dr. Johnson:
a sometimes stupid and loyal companion. There are characters whose role is
to bring out the hero’s personality. In other words, often authors need a
character who serves as a framework for and a contrast to the deeds of his
hero. This is Sancho, and that character in Boswell’s work is Boswell
himself. That is, Boswell appears as a despicable character. But it seems
impossible to me that Boswell didn’t realize this. And this shows that
Boswell positioned himself in contrast to Johnson. The fact that Boswell
himself tells anecdotes in which he appears ridiculous makes him not seem
ridiculous at all, for if he wrote them down, he did it because he saw that the
purpose of the anecdote was to make Johnson stand out.
There is a Hindu school of philosophy that says that we are not the
actors in our lives, but rather the spectators, and this is illustrated using the
metaphor of a dancer. These days, maybe it would be better to say an actor. A
spectator sees a dancer or an actor, or, if you prefer, reads a novel, and ends
up identifying with one of the characters who is there in front of him. This is
what those Hindu thinkers before the fifth century said. And the same thing
happens with us. I, for example, was born the same day as Jorge Luis Borges,
exactly the same day. I have seen him be ridiculous in some situations,
pathetic in others. And, as I have always had him in front of me, I have ended
up identifying with him. According to this theory, in other words, the I would
be double: there is a profound I, and this I is identified with—though separate
from—the other. Now, I don’t know what experiences you might have had,
but sometimes this happens to me: usually at two particular kinds of moments
—at moments when something very good has happened, and, above all, at
moments when something very bad has happened to me. And for a few
seconds, I have felt: “But, what do I care about all this? It is as if all of this is
happening to somebody else.” That is, I have felt that there is something deep
down inside me that remains separate. And this, surely, is what Shakespeare
also felt, because in one of his comedies there is a soldier, a cowardly soldier,
the Miles Gloriosus of the Latin comedy. The man is a show-off, he makes
people believe that he has acted bravely, and they promote him and he
becomes a captain. Then they discover his trick, and in front of the entire
troop they pull off his medals; they humiliate him. And then he is left alone
and says: “Captain I’ll be no more; / But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft
/ As captain shall: simply the thing I am / Shall make me live.” “No seré
capitán.” He says simply, “the thing I am shall make me live.”15 That is, he
feels that above and beyond the circumstances, beyond his cowardice, his
humiliation, he is something else, a kind of strength we all have within us,
what Spinoza called “God,” what Schopenhauer called “will,” what Bernard
Shaw called “life force,” and Bergson called “vital impulse.”16 I think this is
also what was going on with Boswell.
Perhaps Boswell simply felt it as an aesthetic necessity that to better
showcase Johnson, there should be a very different character alongside him.
Something like in the novels of Conan Doyle: the mediocre Dr. Watson
makes the brilliant Sherlock Holmes stand out even more. And Boswell gives
himself the role of the ridiculous one, and he maintains it throughout the
entire book. Yet, we feel a sincere friendship between the two in the same
way we feel it when we read Conan Doyle’s novels. It is natural, as I have
said, that this would be so; for Johnson was a famous man and alone, and of
course he liked to feel by his side the friendship of a much younger man, who
so obviously admired him.
There is another problem that comes up here, I don’t remember if I
have already mentioned it, and this is what led Johnson to devote his last
years almost exclusively to conversation. Johnson almost stopped writing,
besides the edition of Shakespeare, which he had to do because the publishers
were demanding it. Now, this can be explained in a certain way. It can be
explained because Johnson knew he liked to converse, and he knew that the
gems of his conversation would be recorded by Boswell. At the same time, if
it appears that Boswell had shown Johnson the manuscript, then the work
would have lost a lot. We have to accept the fact, true or false, that Johnson
was unaware of what it contained. But this would explain Johnson’s silence,
the fact that Johnson knew that what he said would not be lost. Now, [Joseph]
Wood Krutch, an American critic, has wondered if Boswell’s book
reproduces Johnson’s conversations exactly, and he reaches the conclusion,
in a very believable way, that Boswell does not reproduce Johnson’s
conversation as a stenographer would have done, or a recording, or anything
like that, rather that he produces the effect of Johnson’s conversation.17 In
other words, it is very possible that Johnson was not always as epigrammatic
nor as ingenious as he is presented in the work, though undoubtedly, after
meetings at his club, his interlocutors retain memories much like that. There
are sentences, in any case, that seem to be coined by Johnson.
Somebody said to Johnson that he could not imagine a more miserable
life than a sailor’s, that to see a warship, to see the sailors crowded together,
sometimes whipped, was to see the nadir, the lowest depths of the human
condition. And Johnson answered, “The profession of sailors and soldiers has
the dignity of danger. All men feel ashamed at not having been at sea or in
battle.” This is in tune with the courage we feel in Dr. Johnson. And
statements like this can be found on almost every page of the book. Again, I
recommend you read Boswell’s book. Now, it has been said that the book is
full of “hard words,” of “dictionary words.” But we mustn’t forget that words
that are difficult for the English reader are easy for us, because they are
intellectual words of Latin origin. On the other hand, as I have said more than
once, the common words in English, the words of a child or a peasant or a
fisherman, they are of Germanic, Saxon origin. So a book like Gibbon’s—for
example, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—or the
works of Johnson, or Boswell’s biography, or, in general, the English books
from the eighteenth century, or any contemporary intellectual English work
—let’s say the work of Toynbee, for example—abound in “hard words,” in
words that are difficult for the English (that demand some culture on the part
of the reader), but they are easy for us because they are Latin words, that is,
Spanish.18
In the next class we will talk about James Macpherson, about his
polemic with Johnson, and about the origins of the romantic movement,
which begins, we should never forget, in Scotland before any other country in
Europe.
 CLASS 11

THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT. THE LIFE OF JAMES

MACPHERSON. THE INVENTION OF OSSIAN. OPINIONS ABOUT
OSSIAN. POLEMIC WITH JOHNSON. REAPPRAISAL OF
MACPHERSON.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1966

I am going to end this class ten minutes early today because I have
promised to give a lecture on Victor Hugo. So, please forgive me, and it so
happens that today we will be talking about the romantic movement in which
Victor Hugo played such a large part.
The romantic movement is probably the most important movement in
the history of literature, perhaps because it was not only a literary style but
also a lifestyle. In the last century, we had Zola, the naturalist. And Emile
Zola is inconceivable without Hugo, the romantic. We still have people who
are nationalists or communists, and they are those things in a romantic way,
even if they claim to have socio-economic or whatever other motives. I said
there is a romantic lifestyle. For example, one famous case would be Lord
Byron. Byron’s poetry was excluded—unjustly in my mind—from a famous
anthology of English literature published some years ago. But Byron still
represents one romantic type. (Byron, who goes to Greece to die for the
freedom of that country against the oppression of the Turks.) We have poets
with romantic destinies: one of the greatest poets in the English language,
Keats, dies of tuberculosis. One could say that an early death is part of a
romantic destiny. So, how can we define romanticism? The definition is
difficult, precisely because we all know what it is. If I say “neo-romantic,”
you know precisely what I mean, the same as if I talked about the flavor of
coffee or wine; you know exactly what I am talking about, even if you
couldn’t define it. It would be impossible to do so without employing a
metaphor.
I would say, however, that romantic sentiment is a keen and pathetic
sense of time, a few hours of amorous delight, the idea that everything passes
away; a deeper sentiment for autumn, for twilight, for the passing nature of
our own lives. There is a very important work of historical philosophy, The
Decline of the West, by the Prussian philosopher Spengler, and in this book,
which he wrote during the tragic years of the First World War, Spengler
names the great romantic poets of Europe.1 And on that list, which includes
Hölderlin, Goethe, Hugo, Byron, Wordsworth, is James Macpherson, an
almost forgotten poet, and he heads the list. Probably some of you are hearing
his name for the first time. But the entire romantic movement is
inconceivable, unthinkable, without James Macpherson. Macpherson’s
destiny is very curious, the destiny of a man who has been deliberately
deleted for the greater glory of his homeland, Scotland.
Macpherson was born in the Highlands of Scotland in 1736 and died in
1796. Now, the official date of the start of the romantic movement in England
is 1798, that is, two years after Macpherson’s death. And in France, the
official date would be 1830, the year of the bataille de Harnani, the year of
the loud polemic between the partisans of the play Hernani, by Hugo, and its
detractors. So, romanticism begins in Scotland and reaches England later—
where it had been foreshadowed, but only foreshadowed, by the poet
[Thomas] Gray, author of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,”
admirably translated into Spanish by the Argentine Miralla.2 Then it reaches
Germany through the work of Herder, and spreads throughout all of Europe,
reaching Spain fairly late.3 We could almost say that Spain, a country that
figures so strongly in the imagination of the romantic poets of other
countries, produced only one poet who was essentially romantic, the others
being merely orators in writing. The one I am referring to is, of course,
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, disciple of the great German-Jewish poet, Heine.4
And not a disciple of all of Heine’s work, but rather of the beginning, of
Lyrisches Intermezzo.
But let us return to Macpherson. Macpherson’s father was a farmer; he
was of humble origins, and his family, it seems, was not of Celtic but rather
of English descent. (The English, even now, in Scotland, are scornfully called
“the Saxons.” This word is common in the spoken language of Scotland and
also of Ireland.) Macpherson was born and raised in a wild place in the north
of Scotland where a Gaelic language was still spoken, that is, a Celtic
language, similar of course to Welsh, Irish, and the Breton language carried
to Brittany, or Bretagne—formerly called Armorica—by the British who
took refuge there during the Saxon invasions in the fifth century. That is why
people say Great Britain, to distinguish it from small Britain, or Brittany, in
France. And in France they call that region of the country where the Breton
language is spoken Bretagne; the language was thought to be like a patois for
a long time, only because the French did not understand either language, so
they assumed they were similar, which is part of a deep ideology.
Now, Macpherson had only an oral knowledge of Gaelic. He could not
read Gaelic manuscripts, which used a different alphabet. We can imagine an
educated person from Corrientes, that is, a man with an oral knowledge of
Guaraní, who cannot explain to us the language’s grammatical rules.5
Macpherson studied at the primary school in his town, then at the University
of Edinburgh. Many times he had heard the bards singing. I don’t know if I
already talked about them. You know that Scotland was divided—and in a
way it still is—into clans. This has been lamentable throughout Scotland’s
history, because the Scots have fought not only against the English and the
Danes but have waged war among themselves. So, someone who has visited
Scotland, as I have, is drawn to the sight of small castles atop the long, rather
than high, hills of Scotland. These ruins stand out against the evening sky.
And I say evening because there are regions in the north of Scotland where
the sun shines—the word “shine” isn’t quite right here—from dawn to dusk
with a light that is like an evening light, and that cannot but make the visitor
somewhat sad.
Macpherson had heard the bards. The great clans of Scotland had bards
whose task it was to recount the history and great deeds of the family. They
were poets, and of course they sang in Gaelic. In all the Celtic countries,
literature was organized similarly. I don’t know if I told you that long ago in
Ireland, one had to study for ten years to have a literary career. One had to
pass ten examinations. At first one could use only simple meters—let’s say,
the hendecasyllable—and could write only about ten different subjects. Then,
once these exams were finished—which were given orally in a dark room—
they gave the subject and the meter the poet was supposed to use, and they
brought him food. Two or three days later, they would question the poet, then
allow him to use other subjects and other meters. After ten years, the poet
reached the highest grade, but to get there, he had to have a complete
knowledge of history, mythology, law, medicine—which was understood as
magic in those days—and he received a pension from the government. He
ended up using a language that was so laden with metaphor, only his
colleagues could understand it. He had the right to more provisions, more
horses, and more cows than the kings of the small kingdoms of Ireland or
Wales. Now, this same prosperity of the order of the poets also sealed its fate.
Because according to the legend, there came a time when one king would
hear his praises, sung by two of the principal poets of Ireland, and the king
was not well versed in the poets’ gongoristic style; he didn’t understand a
single word that was sung. And he decided to dissolve the order, and the
poets were left out in the streets. But among the great families of Scotland, a
position a little inferior to the previous one was restored: that of a bard. And
James Macpherson learned this when he was a boy. He was about twenty
when he published a book titled Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the
Highlands of Scotland, translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language.6
The songs in this volume were of an epic nature. Something had taken
place that we cannot now fully understand and that I will have to explain, but
it is something easily comprehensible. In the eighteenth century, and for
many centuries, it was thought that Homer was indisputably the greatest of all
poets. In spite of what Aristotle said, the literary genre of the Iliad and the
Odyssey became the superior genre. That is, an epic poet was inevitably
considered superior to a lyric or elegiac poet. So, when the men of letters of
Edinburgh—Edinburgh was a city that was no less, and perhaps even more,
intellectual than London—when they knew that Macpherson had collected
epic fragments from the Highlands of Scotland, they were very impressed, for
it allowed them to entertain the possibility that an ancient epic poem existed,
which would give Scotland literary supremacy over England, and above all
over the other modern regions of Europe. And here there appears a curious
character, Dr. Blair, author of a book on rhetoric that has been translated into
Spanish, and that you can still find.7
Blair read the fragments translated by Macpherson. He did not know
Gaelic, so he and a group of Scottish gentlemen provided Macpherson with a
kind of stipend that would allow him to travel through the mountains of
Scotland and collect ancient manuscripts—Macpherson had said he had seen
them—and also write down songs by the bards of the great houses. James
Macpherson accepted the mission. He was accompanied by a friend better
versed in Gaelic, who was able to read the manuscripts. And a little more
than a year later, Macpherson returned to Edinburgh and published a poem
called Fingal, which he attributed to Ossian; Ossian is the Scottish form of
the Irish name Oisin, and Fingal is the Scottish form of the Irish name Finn.8
Naturally, the Scots wanted to nationalize those legends that were of
Irish origin. I don’t know if I have told you that in the Middle Ages, the word
“Scotus” meant Irishman, not Scot. (So, we have the great pantheistic
philosopher, Scoto Eriugena, whose name meant “Scotus,” or “Irish,” and
“Eriugena,” meant “born in Erin, Ireland.”9 It is as if his name were “Irish
Irish.”) Now, what Macpherson did was collect some fragments that
belonged to various cycles. But what he needed, what he wanted for his
beloved Scottish homeland, was a poem, so he put those fragments together.
Naturally, gaps had to be filled in, and he filled them with verses of his own
invention—later we’ll see why I call them verses. Also, we must be warned
that the concept of translation that dominates now is not the same as that
which dominated in the eighteenth century. For example, the Iliad of Pope,
which is considered consummate, is what we would call today a very free
version.
So, Macpherson publishes his book in Edinburgh, and he could have
done a rhymed version, but fortunately he chose a rhythmic form based on
the verses of the Bible, especially the Psalms. (There is a Spanish translation
of Fingal published in Barcelona.) Macpherson attributes Fingal to Ossian,
son of Fingal. Macpherson presents Ossian as an old blind poet who sings in
the crumbling castle of his father. And here we already have the sense of time
so typical of the romantics. Because in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and even in
the Aeneid, which is an artificial epic, one feels time but does not feel that
those things happened a very long time ago, and this is precisely what is
typical of the romantic movement. There is a poem by Wordsworth that I
would like to mention here. He hears a Scottish girl singing—we’ll come
back to these lines later—and he wonders what she is singing about and says,
“She is singing about old misfortunes, and battles that took place long ago.”
Spengler says that in the eighteenth century, they built artificial ruins, those
ruins we can still see along the edges of lakes.10 And we could say that one
of these artificial ruins is Fingal, by Macpherson, attributed to Ossian.
As Macpherson did not want the characters to be Irish, he made Fingal,
Ossian’s father, king of Morgen, which would be on the northwestern coast
of Scotland. Fingal knows that Ireland has been invaded by the Danes. So he
goes to help the Irish, defeats the Danes, and returns. If we read the poem
now, we would find many phrases that belong to the poetic dialect of the
eighteenth century. But these phrases, of course, would not have been noticed
at the time; and what was noticed were what we would today call “romantic
phrases.” For example, there is a sentiment for nature, there’s a part of the
poem that talks about the blue mists of Scotland, about the mountains, the
forests, the afternoons, the dusk. The battles are not described in great detail:
grand metaphors are used, in the romantic style. If two armies clash in battle,
the poem talks about two great rivers, two great waterfalls whose waters mix.
And then we have a scene as follows: the king enters an assembly. He has
decided to battle the Danes the following day. Before he says a word, the
others understand the decision he has made, and the text says, “They saw the
battle in his eyes, the death of thousands in his spear.” And then the king goes
from Scotland to Ireland “high in the prow of his boat.” And fire is called
“the red thread of the anvil,” perhaps with distant echoes of kennings.
Now, this poem captured the European imagination. It had hundreds of
admirers. But I am going to mention two quite unexpected ones. One was
Goethe. If you do not find a version of Fingal by Macpherson, you can find
in that exemplary romantic novel called The Sorrows of Young Werther the
translation of two or three pages, translated literally from English to German
by Goethe. Werther, the protagonist of this novel, says, “Ossian”—of course
he wouldn’t say Macpherson—“has displaced Homer in my heart.” (There is
a word in Tacitus, one word—I don’t remember which, at this moment—that
he uses to refer to German military songs, and at that time, the Germans were
confused with the Celts, their enemies.)11 All Europeans felt they were heirs
to this poem—all of Europe, not only Scotland. Ossian’s other unexpected
admirer was Napoleon Bonaparte. An erudite Italian, the abate Cesarotti, had
rendered into Italian Macpherson’s Ossian.12 And we know that Napoleon
carried a copy of this book with him on all his campaigns from the south of
France to Russia. In Napoleon’s harangues to his soldiers, which preceded
the victories at Jena and Austerlitz, and the final defeat at Waterloo, echoes
of Macpherson’s style have been observed. So, let these two illustrious and
different admirers suffice.13
In England, on the contrary, the reaction was a bit different, or totally
different, because of Dr. Johnson. Dr. Johnson despised and hated the Scots,
even though his biographer, James Boswell, was Scottish. Johnson was a man
of classical tastes, and the idea that around the sixth or seventh century,
Scotland had produced a long epic poem must have greatly disturbed him.
Moreover, surely Johnson felt the threat this new work—so full of the
romantic movement—entailed to the classical literature he worshipped.
Boswell wrote down a conversation between Johnson and Dr. Blair. Blair
told him that there was no doubt about the antiquity of the text, and he asked
him if he thought any man of a modern age could have written such poems.
Johnson replied, “Yes, Sir, any man, many women, and many children.”
Johnson also put forth an argument that was no less grave. He argued that as
Macpherson had said the poem was a literal translation of ancient
manuscripts, he should show those manuscripts.
According to some of Macpherson’s biographers, he did try to acquire
and publish them in some way. The polemic between Johnson and
Macpherson became more and more heated. Macpherson finally published a
book to prove the similarities between his poem and the texts. Be that as it
may, Macpherson was accused of being a forger. Undoubtedly, if this had not
happened, we would not see him today as a great poet. Macpherson spent the
rest of his life promising to publish the manuscripts. He reached a point that
he proposed publishing the originals, but in Greek, and this was, of course, a
way of trying to gain time.
Today, we are not interested in whether the poem is apocryphal or not,
but in the fact that it foreshadows the romantic movement. There is a polemic
between Johnson and Macpherson that is still relevant, a rather lengthy
exchange of correspondence between them. But in spite of Johnson,
Macpherson’s style—the style of Macpherson’s Ossian—spread throughout
Europe, and with it, the romantic movement was inaugurated; with it, the
romantic movement is born. In England, we have a poet, Gray, who writes an
elegy dedicated to the anonymous dead in a cemetery. We find in Gray’s
Reliques of Ancient Poetry the melancholic tone of romanticism.14 It
includes translations of Scottish romances and ballads, and an extensive
preface that asserts the fact that poetry is the work of the people. This work
by Bishop Percy is important for its intrinsic value and because it inspired
Herder’s book, Voices of the People, which contains not only songs of
Scotland but also German Lieder, traditional ballads, etcetera.15 With this
book, the search for “the peoples’” creations spread to Germany.
We can see that without Macpherson and these elegies of Bishop
Percy, the romantic movement would have arisen—it was almost historical,
we could say—but with quite different characteristics. We should remark that
nobody considered that the romantic movement had anything to do with
Macpherson, or that he, as the author of Fingal, showed remarkable
originality. The versification he uses is a rhythmic prose never before used in
any original work. So, for this fact alone we can consider him a precursor of
Whitman and so many writers who have worked in free verse. Never could
Leaves of Grass have been written, in the style Whitman employed, without
the highly original work of Macpherson.
If there is one noble feature that we should keep in mind when we
judge Macpherson, it is that he never wished to be considered a poet; what he
wanted was to sacrifice himself for the greater glory of Scotland, for which
he gave up fame and rejected the title of poet. We also know that he wrote a
great amount of poetry and destroyed it when he realized that they were
similar to the Scottish bards, without being theirs. So, he also renounced his
own creations.
In the next class we will see how romanticism developed, now, in
another country, England.
 CLASS 12

LIFE OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. THE PRELUDE AND OTHER

POEMS.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 1966

Wordsworth was born in [Cockermouth], Cumberland, in 1770, and died

as England’s poet laureate in 1850. He comes from the family Lonsdale,
which means “people of the border,” a family that had been toughened
through wars with the Scots and the Danes.
He studied at the local grammar school, then at Cambridge. In 1790, he
went to France. Not long ago, something was discovered that caused a
scandal. It was discovered that he had a love affair with Annette Vallon, who
bore his child.
Wordsworth was a supporter of the French Revolution. About this,
Chesterton said—many Englishmen supported the Revolution—that one of
the most important events in English history was this revolution that was
about to take place. [Wordsworth] was a revolutionary as a young man, then
ceased to be. He ceased to be, and ceased to support the French Revolution,
because it culminated in the dictatorship of Napoleon.
As far as his production, it is to a large extent devoted to geography. I
remember that Alfonso Reyes said the same thing about Unamuno.1 He said
that in Unamuno, his feeling for the landscape replaced his feeling for music,
to which he was quite insensitive. Wordsworth traveled on the continent a lot.
He was in France, in the north of Italy, in Switzerland, in Germany, and he
also traveled through Scotland, Ireland, and, naturally, England. He settled in
what is called the Lake District, also in the north of England, a little to the
west, an area full of lakes and mountains similar to Switzerland, except the
heights are not as considerable. However, I have visited both countries, and
they make a similar impression. There’s a story about a Swiss guide who
went to the Lake District and did not at first realize the difference in the
altitude of the highest peaks. The climate, moreover, is very cold in the Lake
District, and it snows a lot.
Now, Wordsworth’s life was devoted to poetry. He returned to
England—he would never see Annette Vallon again—married an English
girl, and had several children with her, all of whom died young. Wordsworth
himself was orphaned at a young age, and he had the means to be able to
devote himself exclusively to literature: to poetry and sometimes prose. He
was an extremely vain man, a hard man. I think it is Emerson who recounts
that he paid him a visit and made an observation, and Wordsworth refuted
him immediately—as was his habit, because no matter what anyone said, he
would assert the opposite—and ten minutes or a quarter of an hour later,
Wordsworth expressed that same opinion that he had found absurd. Then
Emerson politely said to him, “Well, that is what I told you a while ago.”
And then Wordsworth, indignant, said, “Mine, mine, and not yours!!” And
the other understood that one could not converse with a man with such a
character. Moreover, like all poets who profess a theory, who are convinced
of it, he came to believe that everything that fit into that theory was
acceptable. And that is why Wordsworth’s work is, like that of Milton, one of
the most uneven in literature. He has poems that have melody, sincerity of
passion, incomparable simplicity. And then we have large expanses of desert.
Coleridge made this observation; he saw this difference. The truth is that
Wordsworth wrote with great facility—he wrote when he was inspired, when
the muse prompted him—and at other times, he wrote simply because he had
decided to produce a hundred, or however many lines of poetry that day. At
first Wordsworth’s theories and his practice seemed scandalous. Then they
were accepted, and he was seen—as happens with all old poets who have not
failed—he was considered a bit like an institution, so much so that they gave
him the title of poet laureate, which he accepted. . . . We must remember that
he was not only a good walker, he was also an excellent skater.
We will talk about Wordsworth’s friendship with Coleridge later. The
truth is they met around 1790 or thereabouts. Both were young, both were
excited about the French Revolution. Coleridge suggested establishing a
socialist colony in North America, along the banks of a great river, and they
also shared the same aesthetic opinions. At the end of the eighteenth century,
poetry—with the exception of Macpherson’s prose, which I spoke about last
time, and a few of Gray’s poems—had turned into a poetic dialect, what has
been called “pseudo-classicism.” For example, a respectable poet did not talk
about the breeze, he talked about the “soft zephyrs.” He did not talk about the
sun, he talked about “Phoebus.” He preferred not to talk about the moon, the
word was too common, so he talked about “chaste Diana.” There was a whole
poetic dialect based on classical mythology, a mythology that was already
dead for readers and listeners; it was a poetic diction. Wordsworth planned to
publish a book with Coleridge that would be called Lyrical Ballads, which
appeared in the year 1798. This date is important in the history of English
literature and in the history of European literature because it is a deliberately
romantic document. That is, it came long before the works of Hugo and
others.
When Wordsworth spoke with Coleridge, they agreed to divide the
themes of the volume into two groups. One would deal with the poetry of
common things, of common episodes, the common vicissitudes of every life.
And the other, assigned to Coleridge, would deal with poetry of the
supernatural. But Coleridge was very lazy, and he took opium, he was an
opium addict like the great poetic-prose writer De Quincey, and when it was
time to publish the book, Coleridge contributed only two compositions, and
Wordsworth had written all the rest.2 And the book appeared with
Wordsworth’s signature, and it was said that the other two compositions were
written by a friend who preferred not to be named.
A few years later a second edition appeared with a polemical preface
by Wordsworth. In this preface, Wordsworth explains his theory of poetry.
Wordsworth said that when a person acquires a book of poems, he hopes to
find certain things in the book. And if the poet does not meet these
expectations, if the poet disappoints, then the reader can think one of two
things: he can think that the poet is indolent, incompetent, or he can think that
he is a big fraud for not fulfilling his promise. Then Wordsworth talks about
poetic diction. He says that all or almost all contemporary poets are looking
for it. That he has taken as much pains to avoid it as others take to find it.
Hence, the absence of poetic diction, of phrases like “soft Zephyrs,” of
mythological metaphors, etcetera, which have been deliberately excluded.
And he says that he has sought plain language, more or less like spoken
language but without its stuttering, hesitations, repetitions. Wordsworth
thought that the most natural language was spoken in the countryside,
because he thought that most words have their origins in natural things—we
speak of the “river of time,” for example—and that language is preserved in a
purer state where people are constantly seeing the fields, mountains, rivers,
hills, dawn, dusks, and nights. But, at the same time, he did not want to
include any dialectical elements into his language. So, poems like Leaves of
Grass, by Whitman, from 1855, or Barrack-Room Ballads, by Kipling, or
Sandburg’s contemporary poetry, would have horrified him.
Nevertheless, poetry written afterward is the result of Wordsworth,
who said that poetry has its origin in the overflow of powerful feelings
produced by the agitation of the soul. Then the objection could have been
made: if this is the case, it would be enough for a woman to leave a man, for
a man’s father to die, for poetry to be produced. And the history of literature
shows that this is not the case. A person who is very emotional cannot
express himself well. Wordsworth brings to bear here his psychological
theory of the origins of poetry. He says that poetry comes from emotion
recollected in tranquility. Let’s imagine one of the subjects I mentioned: a
man who is left by a woman he loves. At that moment, the man can sink into
despair, can try to resign himself, can try to distract himself, drink alcohol,
anything. But it would be very strange for him to sit down to write a poem.
On the other hand, some time passes, a year, let’s say. The poet is now more
serene, and then he recalls all he has suffered, that is, he relives his emotions.
But this second time, not only is he the author who remembers exactly what
he suffered, what he felt, what made him despair, but he is also the spectator,
a spectator of his past I. And that moment, says Wordsworth, is the most
suited to the production of poetry, the moment of the feeling recalled and
relived in tranquility. Wordsworth also wanted for there not to be any
feelings in the poem other than those required by the subject, by the poet’s
primary impulse. That is, he totally rejected what are called the ornaments of
poetry. That is, Wordsworth thought it was fine to write a poem about the
emotion brought about by dawn in the mountains or in a city. But he thought
it was bad to interweave a landscape or a description in a poem about another
subject—the death or loss of a beloved woman, for example. Because he said
this was to seek “a foreign splendor,” a splendor foreign to the main subject.
Now, it is true that Wordsworth was a man of the eighteenth century, and it is
given to no man, no matter how revolutionary, to differ wholly from his era.
And so Wordsworth sometimes employs—and this makes some of his pages
ridiculous—the same diction he himself censured. In one poem he speaks of a
bird, then he doesn’t see it again, and he thinks someone might have killed it.
And he wants to say, and says, that the men of the valley might have killed it
with their rifles. But instead of saying it directly, he says: “the Dalesmen may
have aimed the deadly tube” instead of “rifle.”3 This was somewhat
inevitable.
Wordsworth wrote some of the most admirable sonnets of English
poetry, usually about nature. And there is one famous one that takes place on
Westminster Bridge, in London. This poem, like all of Wordsworth’s good
poems, is sincere. He had always said that beauty was in the mountains, in
the moors; nevertheless, in this poem, he says that he never had such a serene
feeling as the one he had that morning when he crossed Westminster Bridge
while the city was sleeping.4 There’s also a quite curious sonnet in which he
is in a port, and he sees a ship arrive, and we could say he falls in love with it;
he wishes it good luck, as if the ship were a woman.5
Now, Wordsworth also planned out two philosophical poems. One of
them, The Prelude, was autobiographical, that is, the meditations of a solitary
walker. And in it is a dream I am going to retell. One critic has observed that
Wordsworth must have had dreams of startling clarity, because he has a poem
titled “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,”
which lays out his argument for immortality—based on the Platonic doctrine
of the pre-existence of the soul. The poem is derived from recollections of
childhood. In it, he says that when he was young, all things had a certain
splendor, a kind of clarity that later became blurred. He says that things had
“the freshness and glory of a dream.”6 And in another poem, he says that
something is as “vivid as a dream.” We know that he had hallucinatory
experiences. He was in Paris a little before what has been called the Reign of
Terror, and from the balcony of his house, a tall house, he saw the sky
crimson, and he thought he heard a voice prophesying death. Then, back in
England, he had to pass at night through Stonehenge, the circle of stones
from before the Celtic era, where the Druids performed sacrifices. And he
thought he saw the Druids with their stone knives—flint knives—sacrificing
human beings. But now I’ll get back to that dream.
 Someone said that the dream had to have been dreamed by
Wordsworth, but I believe—you can form your own judgment, of course—
that the dream is too elaborate to really be a dream. Before telling it,
Wordsworth tells us about the previous circumstances; the basis of the dream
is in these circumstances, which are told with particular vividness.
Wordsworth says that he had always been plagued by a fear, a fear that the
two greatest works of mankind, the sciences and the arts, could disappear
through some cosmic disaster. Nowadays, we have more right to this fear,
given the progress of science. But at that time, this idea was very strange, to
think that humanity could be erased from the planet, and along with
humanity, science, music, poetry, and architecture. In other words, everything
essential in mankind’s labor throughout thousands of years and hundreds of
generations. And Wordsworth says that he spoke with somebody about this,
and that person told him that he shared the same fear, and that the day after
that conversation he went to the beach. You will see how these circumstances
lay the groundwork for Wordsworth’s dream. Wordsworth arrives at the
beach in the morning, and at the beach there is a cave. He seeks shelter from
the sun’s rays in the cave, but he can see the beach from it, the golden beach
and the sea. Wordsworth sits down to read, and the book he is reading—this
is important—is Don Quixote. Then the noon hour arrives—la hora del
bochorno [the sultry hour], as they say in Spain—and he yields to the weight
of the hour; the book falls from his hand, and then Wordsworth says, “I
passed into a dream.” In the dream he is no longer at the beach, in the cave
facing the sea. He is in a huge desert of black sand, a kind of Sahara. Now,
you can see that the desert, as well as its black sand, we are suggested by the
white sand on the beach. He is lost in the desert, and then he sees a figure
approaching, and this figure is holding a shell in his left hand. And in the
other hand he has a stone that is also a book. And this man approaches him at
a gallop on his camel. Now, naturally you can see how the previous
circumstances lay the groundwork, especially for an English mind. There is a
relationship between Spain and the Arabs, and this rider on his camel, this
rider with his spear, is a transformation of Don Quixote. The rider approaches
Wordsworth, who is lost in that black desert. Wordsworth asks him for help,
and he moves the shell close to the dreamer’s ear. Wordsworth hears a voice
“in an unknown tongue, which yet I understood,” a voice that prophesies the
destruction of the earth with a second flood. And then the Arab, with a grave
demeanor, tells him that this is how it is, and that it is his mission to save the
two capital works of humanity from this flood, this deluge. One is related
“with the stars,” “undisturbed by space and time.” And this work is science.
Science is represented by a stone, which is also a book. This kind of
ambiguity is common in dreams. I have dreamed about someone who
sometimes is someone else, or has someone else’s features, and in the dream
this did not surprise me; dreams can use that language. Then the Arab shows
the stone to Wordsworth, who sees that it is not just a stone, it is Euclid’s
Elements, and this represents science. As for the shell, the shell is all books,
all the poetry that has ever been written, is being written, will be written, by
man. And he hears the whole poem like a voice, a voice full of despair, joy,
passion. The Arab tells him that he has to bury—to save—those two
important objects, science and art, represented by the shell and Euclid’s
Elements. Then the Arab looks out and sees something, then spurs on his
camel. Then the dreamer sees something like a great light filling the earth and
understands that this great light is the flood. The Arab is riding off. The
dreamer runs after the Arab, asking him to save him, and the waters almost
reach him just as he awakens.
De Quincey says that this most sublime dream needs to be read. But
De Quincey believed that Wordsworth invented it. Needless to say, we will
never know. I think that most likely Wordsworth had a similar dream that he
then improved upon. In the dream, when the Arab rides off, Wordsworth
follows him with his eyes, and sees that the Arab is sometimes an Arab on his
camel and sometimes Don Quixote on his Rocinante. And then when he tells
the dream, he says that perhaps he did not really dream it, that perhaps there
actually is among the Bedouin tribes—the Arab is Bedouin—some madman
thinking that the world will be flooded and he wants to save the sciences and
the arts. You will find this passage—I don’t know if it has been translated—
in the second book of The Prelude, Wordsworth’s long poem.7
Now, usually whenever Wordsworth is discussed, one discusses the
poem “Intimations of Immortality,” that poem I told you about, the one that
mentions the Platonic doctrine. But I think what is special about Wordsworth
is, besides a few ballads . . .8 There’s a poem called “To a Highland Girl.”9
And this is also the subject of one of the first poems Rilke wrote, that of a girl
singing in the countryside, and of the song, and of the melody remembered
many years later. Now, in Wordsworth’s poem there is the added detail,
mysterious for him, that the girl is singing in Gaelic, in Celtic, which he
could not understand. And he wonders what the theme of the song is, and he
thinks, “unhappy, far away things, and battles long ago.” That music that
filled the valley in waves, that music, continues resounding in his ears. Then
we have the series about Lucy Gray, poems about a girl he was in love with.
The girl dies, and he thinks that now she is part of the earth and is condemned
to spin forever, like the stones and the trees. There is a poem about when the
shadow of Napoleon fell over England, in a manner of speaking, as would
fall the shadow of another dictator. This time, England was left alone to fight
against Napoleon, much like in the Second World War when it was again left
alone. So Wordsworth writes a sonnet saying, “Another year has passed,
another vast empire has fallen and we have been left alone to fight the
enemy.” And then the sonnet says that this circumstance must fill them with
joy. “The fact that we are alone, the fact that we have nobody to depend on,
that our salvation is in ourselves.” And then he wonders if the men that rule
England are up to their mission, to their high destiny. He asks “if they are
really deserving of this earth and its traditions,” and if they are not, he says,
they are “a servile band”—at that moment he insults the government. If they
are not a servile band, they are obliged to deal with “danger, which they
fear,” “and with honor, which they do not understand.” . . . Then Wordsworth
also wrote a play, and poems about different places in England.10
Now, Wordsworth always said that the language had to be simple, yet
in these poems he achieves a splendor of language that he would have
rejected in his youth, when he was still a fanatic for his own theory. He later
writes, for example, about an antechamber in a chapel in Cambridge, where
there is a bust of Newton, and he speaks of Newton, “with his prism and
silent face,” with his prism that he used to develop his theory of light. Then
he says: “The marble index of a mind for ever traveling through strange seas
of thought.”11 This has nothing to do with Wordsworth’s initial theories. At
the beginning, Wordsworth was a kind of scandal, he wrote a poem
dangerously titled “The Idiot Boy” and Byron could not resist an easy quip,
saying that it was an autobiographical poem.
People began to refute his theory. Even Coleridge told him that no
poetry should be presented with an accompanying theory because it puts the
reader on his guard. If the reader, he says, reads a polemical preface before
reading a book of poems, he might suspect that the arguments in that preface
have been formulated to persuade him to like the poems, hence he will reject
it. Moreover, Coleridge said, poetry should prevail on its own, the poet
should not give any justification for his work. This now seems very strange
because we live in an era of coteries, manifestos, publicity for the arts.
However, Coleridge lived at the end of the eighteenth century, and the
beginning of the nineteenth. Wordsworth had to explain to him, explain to his
readers, so that they would not look for something in his poetry that wasn’t
there but rather see that he had deliberately chosen simple themes, humble
characters, plain language, an absence of professional poetic metaphors,
etcetera. Wordsworth is now considered one of the great poets of England. I
talked about Unamuno.12 I know that he was one of Unamuno’s favorite
poets. But then, it is very easy to find lazy pages in his work. Ezra Pound has
done so, saying that Wordsworth was a silly old sheep. But I think a poet
should be judged by his best pages.
I don’t know if I have ever mentioned that Chesterton agreed to
compile an anthology of the worst poems in the world as long as he was
allowed to choose them from among the best poets. Because, Chesterton
says, writing bad pages is typical of the great poets. When Shakespeare
wanted to write a ridiculous page, Chesterton says, he sat down and did it
without further ado, he enjoyed it. On the other hand, a mediocre poet might
not have any very bad poems. He might not have them because he is
conscious of his mediocrity, because he is constantly keeping watch on
himself. Wordsworth, on the other hand, is conscious of his strength, and that
is why there is so much ballast, so many dead zones in his work. But apart
from this dream of Wordsworth’s (I don’t know why it has been excluded
from the anthologies), Wordsworth’s most important works—except maybe
the one in which he speaks of the tall sailboat he falls in love with—are
included in anthologies of English poetry.
The works have been translated many times, but the translation of
English poetry into Spanish is, as I have discovered, difficult, very difficult.
Because the English language, like Chinese, is essentially monosyllabic. So,
in a verse, more verses fit in an English line than in a Spanish line. How to
translate, for example, “With ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh like
stars in Heaven”: “con barcos, el mar estaba salpicado aquí y allá como las
estrellas en el cielo.” Nothing is left in the translation, and yet the line is
memorable.13
Today I have spoken about Wordsworth. In the next class I will talk
about his friend, collaborator, and, finally, polemicist, Coleridge, the other
great poet from the beginning of the romantic movement.
 CLASS 13

THE LIFE OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. A STORY BY

HENRY JAMES. COLERIDGE AND MACEDONIO FERNÁNDEZ,
COMPARED. COLERIDGE AND SHAKESPEARE. IN COLD BLOOD,
BY TRUMAN CAPOTE.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1966

One of a writer’s most important works—perhaps the most important of

all—is the image he leaves of himself in the memory of men, above and
beyond the pages he has written. Now, Wordsworth was himself a better poet
than Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom we will speak about today. But when
one thinks of Wordsworth, one thinks of an English gentleman of the
Victorian era, similar to so many others. When one thinks of Coleridge, on
the other hand, one thinks of a character from a novel. All of this is
interesting for a critical analysis and for the imagination, and so Henry
James, the great American novelist, believed. Coleridge’s life was a
collection of failures, frustrations, unfulfilled promises, vacillations. There is
a story by Henry James called “The Coxon Fund,” which was inspired by his
reading of one of the first biographies of Coleridge.1 The protagonist of the
story is a man of genius, a genius conversationalist, that is, someone who
spends his life at the homes of his friends. They expect him to write a great
work. They know that for him to carry out this work he needs time and rest.
And the heroine is a young lady whose responsibility it is to choose the
fellow for this foundation, the Coxon Foundation, established by one of her
aunts, Lady Coxon. The young lady sacrifices her chance to be married,
sacrifices her own life, so that the person who receives the award will be a
man of genius. The protagonist accepts the annuity, which is considerable,
and then the author leaves us to understand—or he states it directly, I don’t
remember—that the great man writes nothing, barely a few rough drafts. And
we can say the same thing about Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was at the
center of a brilliant circle, called the “Lake School,” because they lived in the
Lake District. He was Wordsworth’s friend and De Quincey’s teacher. He
was friends with the poet Robert Southey, who left among his many works a
poem called “A Tale of Paraguay,” based on the texts of the Jesuit
Dobrizhoffer, a missionary in Paraguay.2a> The members of this group
considered Coleridge their master, they considered themselves inferior to
him. Nevertheless, Coleridge’s work, which fills many volumes, actually
consists of only a few poems—unforgettable poems—and a few pages of
prose. Some of the pages are in the Biographia Literaria; others are of
lectures he gave about Shakespeare.3 Let’s first look at Coleridge’s life, and
then we will examine his work, not infrequently unintelligible, tedious, and
plagiarized.
Coleridge was born in 1772, two years after Wordsworth, who was, as
you know, born in the year 1770, which is easy to remember. (I’m saying this
now because you are about to have an exam.) Coleridge dies in the year
1834. His father is a Protestant vicar in the south of England. Reverend
Coleridge was a vicar in a country town, and he impressed his listeners
because he would always weave into his sermons what he called “the
immediate tongue to the Holy Ghost.” In other words, long passages in
Hebrew that his rustic parishioners did not understand, but which made them
venerate him. When Coleridge’s father died, his parishioners scorned his
successor because he did not interweave unintelligible passages in the
immediate language of the Holy Ghost.
Coleridge studied at Christ Church, where his classmate was Charles
Lamb, who wrote a description of him.4 He then attended Cambridge
University, where he met Southey, and there they planned to found a socialist
colony in a remote and dangerous region of the United States. Then, for some
reason that has never been fully explained, but is just one of the many
mysteries that constitutes Coleridge’s life, Coleridge enlists in a regiment of
dragoons. “I am,” as Coleridge said, “the least equestrian of men.” He never
learned to ride a horse. After a few months, one of the officers found him
writing poems in Greek on one of the barrack walls, poems in which he
expressed his despair at his impossible fate as a horseman, which he had
inexplicably chosen. The officer spoke with him and managed to have him
released. Coleridge returned to Cambridge and shortly thereafter planned to
establish a weekly journal. He traveled around England looking for
subscribers for this publication. He recounts that he arrived in Bristol, spoke
with a gentleman, that this gentleman asked him if he had read the
newspaper, and he answered that he did not believe that one of his duties as a
Christian was to read the newspaper, which caused no small amount of
hilarity, because everyone knew that the purpose of his trip to Bristol was to
engage subscribers for his publication. Coleridge, after having been invited to
join a conversation, took the strange precaution of filling half his pipe bowl
with salt and the other half with tobacco. In spite of this, he became ill, as he
was not in the habit of smoking. Here we have one of those inexplicable
episodes in Coleridge’s life: his carrying out of absurd acts.
The journal was finally published. It was called The Watchman,
something like “El sereno” or “El vigilante,” and actually consisted of a
series of sermons, more than news; then it was closed a year later. Coleridge
also collaborated with Southey on the writing of a play, The Fall of
Robespierre, and another about Joan of Arc, who speaks about the Leviathan,
for example, and magnetism, subjects that surely never figured in the
conversations of the saint.5 Otherwise, it can be asserted that he did nothing
but converse. He wrote a few poems we will look at later, called “The
Ancient Mariner” . . . another is called “Christabel,” and another, “Kubla
Khan,” the name of that Chinese emperor who was Marco Polo’s patron.6
Coleridge’s conversations were very unusual. De Quincey, who was a
disciple and admirer, said that each time Coleridge talked, it was as if he were
tracing a circle in the air. In other words, he went further and further away
from the subject he had started with, then returned to it, but very slowly.
Coleridge’s conversation could last for two or three hours. At the end, it was
discovered that he had traced a circle, returning to the point of departure. But
usually his interlocutors would not have lasted that long and would have left.
So they carried away the impression of a series of inexplicable digressions.
Coleridge’s friends thought that a good outlet for his genius would be
for him to give lectures. In fact, his lectures were advertised and many people
subscribed to the series. For the most part, when the date arrived, Coleridge
would not appear, and when he did appear, he would speak about anything
other than the subject that had been announced. And then there were times he
spoke about everything, even the subject of the lecture. But those occasions
were rare.
Coleridge married fairly young. The story is that he visited a house
where there were three sisters. He was in love with the second one, but he
thought that if the second got married before the first—that is, according to
what he told De Quincey—this could wound the sexual pride of the first. And
so, out of a sense of delicacy, he married the first, even though he was not in
love with her. It is no big surprise to learn that the marriage failed. Coleridge
had nothing to do with his wife and children and went to live with his friends.
Coleridge’s friends felt honored by his visits, honored. At first it was
assumed that the visits would last a week, then they lasted a month, and in
some cases years. And Coleridge accepted this hospitality, not with
ingratitude, but with a kind of absentmindedness, because he was the most
absentminded of men.
Coleridge traveled to Germany, and he realized he had never seen the
sea, in spite of having described it in his poem “The Ancient Mariner” in an
admirable, unforgettable way. But he was not so impressed by it. The sea of
his imagination was vaster than the real one. Then, another of Coleridge’s
characteristics was to announce ambitious works—a history of philosophy, a
history of English literature, a history of German literature. And he wrote to
his friends—they knew he was lying, and he knew that they knew—that this
or the other work was well under way, even when he hadn’t written a single
line. Among the works he did complete is a translation of Schiller’s
Wallenstein trilogy, which, according to some critics, among them Germans,
is better than the original.
One of the themes that has most worried critics is that of Coleridge’s
plagiaries. In his Biographia Literaria, he announces, for example, that he
will devote a coming chapter to explaining the difference between reason and
understanding, or between fantasy and imagination. And then the chapter in
which he lays out these important differences ends up being translations of
Schelling or of Kant, whom he admired. It has been said that Coleridge
promised the printers that he would turn in a chapter, then turned in
something plagiarized.7 What is most likely is that Coleridge had forgotten
he had translated it. Coleridge lived what we could call a purely intellectual
life. Thought interested him more than the writing of thought. I had a more or
less famous friend, Macedonio Fernández, and the same was true about him.8
I remember that Macedonio Fernández moved around from one
boardinghouse to another, and each time he moved he left behind a collection
of manuscripts in a drawer. I asked him why he lost what he wrote, and he
answered, “What, you think we are so rich, we have something to lose? What
I thought up once, I’ll think up again, so I lose nothing.” Perhaps Coleridge
thought the same way. There is an article by Walter Pater, one of the most
famous prose writers in English literature, who says that Coleridge, for what
he thought, what he dreamed, what he carried out, and even more, “for what
he failed to do,” represents an archetype, we could almost say, of the
romantic man. More than Werther, more than Chateaubriand, more than
anyone else. And the truth is, there is something in Coleridge that seems to
fill the imagination to overflowing. It is life itself, filled with postponements,
unfulfilled promises, brilliant conversations. All of this belongs to a
particular kind of human being.
What’s curious is that Coleridge’s conversation has been preserved, as
was Johnson’s; but when we read Boswell’s pages—those pages full of
epigrams, those short and clever sentences—we understand why Johnson was
so admired as a conversationalist. On the contrary, the volumes of Table Talk
—of Coleridge’s after-dinner conversations—are rarely admirable. They
abound in trivialities. Perhaps in a conversation, more important than what is
said is what the interlocutor feels is lurking behind the spoken words. And
undoubtedly there was in Coleridge’s conversation a kind of magic that was
not in the words but rather in what the words suggested, in what was revealed
behind them.
Moreover, there are, of course, admirable passages in Coleridge’s
prose. There is, for example, a theory of dreams. Coleridge said that in our
dreams we are thinking, though not with reason but with the imagination.
Coleridge suffered from nightmares, and he noticed the fact that, even if a
nightmare was horrific, a few minutes after waking up, the horror of the
nightmare had disappeared. And this is how he explained it: he said that in
reality—when awake, I mean, because nightmares are real for those who
dream them—when awake, a man has been known to go insane because of a
pretend ghost, a ghost invented as a joke. On the other hand, we dream
horrible dreams, and when we wake up, even if we wake up shaking, we calm
down after five or ten minutes. And Coleridge explained it like this: he said
that our dreams, even the most vivid ones, the nightmares, are part of an
intellectual process. That is, a man is sleeping, there is a weight on his chest,
and in order to explain that weight, he dreams that a lion is lying on top of
him. Then, the horror of this image wakes him up, but all of this has been part
of an intellectual process. That is how Coleridge explained nightmares, as
imperfect, atrocious reasoning, but still works of the imagination—that is,
intellectual processes—and that is why they do not mark us so deeply.
And all of this about dreams is very important when talking about
Coleridge. In the last class, I told one of Wordsworth’s dreams. In the next
class, I will talk about Coleridge’s most famous poem, “Kubla Khan,” which
is based on a dream. And this reminds us of the case of the first English poet,
Caedmon, who dreamed of an angel who forced him to compose a poem
based on the first verses of Genesis, about the origins of the world.
Next, Coleridge is one of the first who backed the Shakespeare cult in
England. George Moore, an Irish writer from the beginning of this century,
says that if the Jehovah cult came to an end, it would be replaced
immediately by the Shakespeare cult. And one of the people who founded
this cult, together with some German thinkers, was Coleridge. Speaking of
the German philosophers, their ideas were almost unknown in England.
England, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had almost completely
forgotten its Saxon origins. Coleridge studied German, as would Carlyle, and
reminded the English of their connection to Germany and the Norse nations.
This had been forgotten in England, and then came the Napoleonic Wars; the
English and the Prussians were brothers in arms at the victory of Waterloo,
and the English felt that forgotten ancient fraternity. And the Germans,
through Shakespeare, felt it as well.
Among the manuscript pages Coleridge left, there are many written in
German. He also lived in Germany. On the other hand, he never managed to
learn French, in spite of the fact that half the vocabulary in English, almost
two-thirds of it, is French words. And these are the words that pertain to the
intellect, to thought. It has been said that somebody put in Coleridge’s hand a
book in French, and in the other, its translation into English. Coleridge read
the English translation, then he went back and read the French text and failed
to understand it. That is, Coleridge had an affinity with German thought,
whereas he felt quite alienated from French thought. And so, Coleridge
dedicated part of his life to a perhaps impossible reconciliation between the
doctrine of the Anglican church, the Church of England, and the idealistic
philosophy of Kant, whom he worshipped. It is strange that Coleridge would
have been more interested in Kant than in Berkeley, for he would have found
what he was looking for more easily in Berkeley’s idealism.
And now we come to what Coleridge thought about Shakespeare.
Coleridge had studied Spinoza’s philosophy. You will remember that this
philosophy is based on pantheism, that is, the idea that there is only one real
being in the Universe, and that is God. We are attributes of God, adjectives of
God, moments of God, but we don’t really exist. Only God exists. There is a
poem by Amado Nervo.9 In it, he expresses this idea: God does Exist. We are
what does not exist. And Coleridge would have been completely in
agreement with that poem by Amado Nervo. Spinoza’s philosophy, as in the
philosophy of Johannes Scotus Eriugena, talks about creative nature and
nature that is already created: natura naturans and natura naturata.10 And it
is well known that when Spinoza spoke about God, he used a word that was
synonymous with God: “Deus sive natura,” or “God or nature,” as if both
words meant the same thing. Except that Deus is the natura naturans, the
force, the impetus of nature—the life force, as Bernard Shaw would say.
Coleridge applies this to Shakespeare. He says that Shakespeare was like
Spinoza’s God, an infinite substance capable of assuming all shapes. And so,
according to Coleridge, Shakespeare based the creation of his vast work on
observation. Shakespeare took everything out of himself.11
In recent years, we have had the case of the American novelist,
Truman Capote, who heard about a horrible murder that took place in a
landlocked state in the United States. Two thieves entered the house of a man
—the wealthiest man in town. The two thieves entered the house, killed the
father, the wife, and one of the daughters.12 The younger murderer, and thief,
wanted to rape the man’s other daughter, but the other told him they could
leave no living witness, and that anyway it was immoral to rape a woman,
and they had to stick to their original plan (which was to kill all possible
witnesses). Then they shot all four, and they were arrested. Truman Capote,
who until then had written pages of very careful prose—in the style of
Virginia Woolf, we could say—moved to this town in the middle of nowhere,
gained authorization to visit the prisoners on a regular basis, and in order to
win their trust, he told them some shameful episodes from his own life. The
trial, thanks to the lawyers’ skill, lasted a couple of years. The writer kept
visiting the murderers, brought them cigarettes, became friends with them.
He was with them when they were executed, then immediately returned to his
hotel and spent the whole night crying. Before, he had trained his memory to
take notes; he knew that when a person is questioned he tends to answer
cleverly, and he didn’t want that, he wanted the truth. And then he published
the book, In Cold Blood, which has been translated into many languages.
Now, that whole thing would have seemed absurd to Coleridge, and to
Coleridge’s Shakespeare. Coleridge imagined Shakespeare as an infinite
substance similar to Spinoza’s God. That is, Coleridge thought that
Shakespeare had not observed man, had not lowered himself to the mean
chore of espionage, or journalism. Shakespeare had thought about what a
murderer is, how a man can become a murderer, and that’s how he imagined
Macbeth. And just as he imagined Macbeth, he imagined Lady Macbeth, and
Duncan, and the three witches. He imagined Romeo, Juliet, Julius Caesar,
King Lear, Desdemona, Banquo’s ghost, Hamlet, the ghost of Hamlet’s
father, Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, all of them. That is,
Shakespeare was each of the characters in his plays, even the most
insignificant. And in addition to all of them, he was also the actor, the
businessman, the moneylender William Shakespeare. I remember that Frank
Harris was writing a biography of Bernard Shaw, and he sent Shaw a letter
asking him for facts about his personal life. Shaw answered him that he had
almost no personal life, that he, like Shakespeare, was all things and all men.
And at the same time, he added, “I have been all things and all men, and at
the same time I’m nobody, I’m nothing.”
So, we have Shakespeare compared to God by Coleridge, yet
Coleridge in a letter to one of his friends confesses there are scenes in
Shakespeare’s work that seem unwarranted to him. For example, he thinks it
is unwarranted that in the tragedy King Lear, one of the characters has his
eyes pulled out on stage. But he piously adds, perhaps with more piety than
conviction, “I have often wanted to find errors in Shakespeare, and then I
have seen that there are no errors, I have seen that he is always right.” That is,
Coleridge was a Shakespeare theologian—like theologians are of God—and
as Victor Hugo would be later. Victor Hugo quotes some coarse passages
from Shakespeare, some errors in Shakespeare, some of Shakespeare’s
distractions, then majestically justifies them by saying, “Shakespeare is
subject to absences in the infinite.” And then he adds, “When dealing with
Shakespeare, I accept everything as if I were an animal.” And Groussac says
that this extreme view proves Hugo’s lack of sincerity.13 We don’t know if
Coleridge sometimes lacked sincerity, or if he really meant it.
Today, we have looked at some of Coleridge’s prose. In the next class,
we will examine, not all of Coleridge’s poems, which would be impossible,
but the three most important ones, those that correspond, according to a
recent Coleridge critic, to hell, purgatory, and paradise.
 CLASS 14

COLERIDGE'S FINAL YEARS. COLERIDGE COMPARED TO

DANTE ALIGHIERI. COLERIDGE'S POEMS. "KUBLA KHAN."
COLERIDGE'S DREAM.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 1966

Coleridge spent his final years in a suburb of London, a wild and rugged
place. He stayed there in the home of some friends. He had long since had
nothing to do with his wife and children, having abandoned them, and he had
also cut off from the circle of friends he’d had. He pulled away from them
and moved to the suburbs. So his world also changed. He now lived in a
world solely of mental activity, in which he spent his time in conversation, as
we have already seen of others. But Coleridge was never left on his own: his
friends and acquaintances continued to visit him.
Coleridge would welcome them and spend long hours conversing with
them. He wrote in the garden of his friends’ house and conversed, and these
conversations were essentially monologues. For example, Emerson tells
about how he went to visit him and how Coleridge spoke about the
essentially unitary nature of God, and that after a while, Emerson told him
that he had always believed in the fundamental unity of God. He was a
Unitarian. Coleridge said to him: “Yes, that’s what I think,” then kept talking,
because he did not care about his interlocutor.
Another person who went to visit him was the famous Scottish
historian Carlyle. Carlyle said that he ruled over London from the heights of
Highgate, where the commotion of the city, the noise and the multitudes of
London, could be seen from above. He had the impression that Coleridge was
up there, stuck fast above human commotion and lost in his own thoughts, as
if in suspension, or in a labyrinth, we could say. By that time he was writing
very little, though he was always announcing the publication of vast works,
of an encyclopedic or psychological nature. When Coleridge died, in the year
1834, his friends had the impression, that is, they felt, that he had already
died a long time before. And there is a famous page written by the English
essayist Charles Lamb, who had been a classmate of his, where he says, “I
grieve that I could not grieve.” Coleridge had turned into a kind of aesthetic
ghost for many of them. But Lamb says that in spite of this, everything he
himself has written, everything he is writing, and everything he would write
later, he wrote for Coleridge. And he speaks—as all his interlocutors did—of
Coleridge’s splendid conversation. He says that his words were “the very
music of thought.” But people stopped thinking that as soon as they
understood what he was saying. That’s why he had no friends at that time.
Well, many still loved him, they welcomed him into their homes, they sent
him anonymous charity, as did De Quincey. (Coleridge accepted all of this as
if it were something natural. He felt no gratitude or even any curiousity about
these gifts from friends. He lived essentially for thought and in thought.) He
was not very interested in contemporary poetry. He was shown some poems
by Tennyson, by the young Tennyson, who was also famous for the
musicality of his poetry. Coleridge said, “He seems not to have understood
the essential nature of English verse,” a judgment that is completely unfair.
The fact is that Coleridge wasn’t interested in other people. Nor was he
interested in convincing an audience or convincing his interlocutor. His
conversations were monologues; and he accepted visits from strangers, but
that was because it gave him the opportunity to talk out loud. I said in the last
class that Coleridge’s poetic oeuvre, counted in pages, is considerable. The
Oxford edition [of his work] has three or four hundred pages. However, that
of the distinguished Everyman’s Library, which you will hear about—the
word “Everyman” is the name of a play from the Middle Ages—is probably
two hundred pages.1 It is called The Golden Book of Coleridge, and is an
anthology of his poetic oeuvre.2 However, we can reduce that to five or six
poems, and I will begin with the least important.
There is “France: An Ode.” There is a curious poem—not more than
just curious—titled “Time, Real and Imaginary,” whose subject is the
difference between the two existing times: abstract time, which is what can
be measured by watches, and the one that is essential for expression, for fear,
and for hope. Then there is a poem, chiefly of autobiographical interest,
called “Ode on Dejection,” in which, as in Wordsworth’s “Intimations of
Immortality,” Coleridge speaks about the difference between the way he felt
life when he was young and how he felt it later. He said he had contracted
“the habit of despair.”3
And then, we come to Coleridge’s three essential poems, those that
have led some to call him the greatest poet or one of the greatest poets of
English literature. Not long ago a book was published, whose author I don’t
remember, called The Crystal Dome.4 This book analyzes the three poems by
Coleridge we are discussing today. The author says that these three poems of
Coleridge’s are a kind of miniature Divine Comedy, for one alludes to hell,
one to purgatory, and the other to paradise. One of Dante’s sons explained
that the first part shows man as a sinner, as guilty; the second shows man as
repentant, as penitents; and the third shows man as just and blessed.5
Speaking about Coleridge, it seems so natural to make these digressions. He
would have done the same. I want to use this opportunity to say, as an aside,
that we have no reason at all to assume that Dante, when he wrote Inferno,
Purgatorio, and Paradiso, wanted to describe those ultra-earthly regions the
way he imagined them. There is no reason at all to make that supposition.
Dante himself, in a letter to Cangrande della Scala, said that his book could
be read in four ways, that there were four levels for the reader.6 That is why I
think it right what Flaubert said: that when Dante died, he must have been
amazed to see that hell, purgatory, or paradise—let us assume he made it into
the last region—did not match his imagination. I think that Dante, when he
wrote the poem, did not believe that he had done anything more than find
adequate symbols to sensitively express the conditions of sinners, penitents,
and the righteous. As for Coleridge’s three poems, we don’t even know if he
wanted to express hell in the first, purgatory in the second, and paradise in
the third, though it is not impossible that he felt that way.
The first poem, which would correspond to the Inferno, is
“Christabel.” He began it in 1797, picked it up ten or fifteen years later, then
finally abandoned it because he could not think up an ending. The plot,
anyway, was difficult, and if the poem has endured—you will find it in every
anthology of English literature—if the poem “Christabel” has endured it is
thanks to its musical qualities, its magical atmosphere, its feeling of terror,
rather than the vicissitudes of its plot. The story takes place in the Middle
Ages. There is a girl, the heroine, Christabel, whose sweetheart has left her to
join the Crusades. And she leaves her father’s castle and goes to pray for the
safe return of her lover. She meets a beautiful woman, and this woman tells
her that her name is Geraldine, and that she is the daughter of a friend of
Christabel’s father, a friend who is now feuding with him. She tells her that
she has been stolen, kidnapped by bandits, that she has managed to escape,
and that is why she is in the forest. Christabel takes her to her house, brings
her to the chapel, tries to pray, but she cannot. Finally, the two share the same
room and during the night Christabel feels or sees something that reveals that
the other woman is not really the daughter of her father’s old friend but rather
a demonic spirit that has taken on the appearance of the daughter. Here,
Coleridge does not specify how she reaches this conclusion. This reminds me
of what Henry James said regarding his famous story—you probably know it,
maybe you’ve seen a movie version of it—The Turn of the Screw.7 James
said that there was no need to specifically name evil, that if in a literary work
he specified it—if he said that a character was a murderer, or incestuous, or a
heathen, or whatever—this would weaken the presence of evil, that it was
better for it to be felt as a gloomy ambiance. And that is what happens in the
poem “Christabel.”
The next day, Christabel wants to tell her father what she felt, which
she knows to be true, but she is not able to because she is under a spell, a
diabolical spell, that prevents her. The poem ends there. The father goes in
search of his old friend. Some have conjectured that when Christabel’s
sweetheart returns from the Crusades, he becomes the deus ex machina, the
one who resolves the situation. But Coleridge never found an ending, and the
poem has endured—as I said—because of its music.
We now come to the most famous of Coleridge’s poems. The poem is
called “The Ancient Mariner.” Even the title is archaic. It would have been
more natural to call it “The Old Sailor.” And there are two versions of the
poem. It is unfortunate that the first version has not been anthologized by
editors, and can be found only in specialized works, because Coleridge, who
knew English deeply, decided to write a ballad in an archaic style, a style that
was more or less contemporaneous with Langland or Chaucer; but then as he
continued it, he wrote in a very artificial way. That language came to be a
barrier between the reader and the text, and so in the version that is usually
published, he modernized the language, I think with good reason. Coleridge
also added some notes written in exquisite prose, which are like a
commentary, but a commentary that is no less poetic than the text.8
Coleridge did finish this poem, as opposed to his other works.
It begins with a description of a wedding. There are three young people
on their way to church to attend the ceremony, when they meet up with the
ancient mariner. The poem begins, “It is an ancient Mariner, / And he
stoppeth one of three.” “Es un viejo marinero y detiene a uno de los tres.”
Then the mariner looks at him, touches him with his hand, his fleshless hand,
but most important is the mariner’s gaze, which has a hypnotic force. The
mariner speaks and begins by saying, “There was a ship, there was a ship,
said he.”9 Then he forces the guest to have a seat on a rock as he tells him his
story. He says he is condemned to wander from place to place, and
condemned to retell his tale, as if to carry out a punishment. The young man
is desperate; he sees the bride and the musicians enter the church, he hears
the music, but “the Mariner hath his will,” and he tells his story, which
obviously happens in the Middle Ages.10 It begins with a ship, a ship that
sets sail and sails south. This ship sails to the Antarctic and is surrounded by
icebergs. All of this is written in a uniquely lively manner; each stanza is like
a painting. The poem has been illustrated. In the Biblioteca Nacional, there is
a copy, one by the famous French engraver Gustave Doré. These Doré
illustrations are admirable, but lack a certain harmony. The same is true about
Doré’s illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Because every line of
Dante’s, or every line of Coleridge’s, is vivid. Whereas Doré, like a proper
romantic, a proper contemporary of Hugo, preferred the Bacchic qualities—
the undefined, gloomy, and mysterious. Now, mystery is not at all missing
from Coleridge’s work, but each of the stanzas is clear, lively, and well
drawn, as opposed to the chiaroscuro the illustrator indulged in.
The ship is surrounded by icebergs, and then an albatross appears. This
albatross makes friends with the sailors; he eats out of their hands, and then a
wind rises to the north and the boat is able to make headway. The albatross
accompanies them and they arrive, let’s say, in Ecuador, more or less. And
when the narrator reaches this point in the story, he cannot continue. The
young man says, “Que Dios te salve de los demonios que te atormentan.”
[“God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends that plague thee thus!”]
Then the ancient mariner says, “With my cross-bow I shot the Albatross.”
“Con mis arbaleses maté al albatros.”11 Now we have an offense, an offense
that has been committed out of a kind of innocence; the mariner himself does
not know why he did it, but from that moment on, the winds cease to blow,
and they enter a vast area of dead calm. The ship stops, and all the sailors
blame the narrator. He wore a cross around his neck, but they force him to
wear the albatross instead. Undoubtedly, Coleridge had but a vague idea of
what an albatross was, imagining it much smaller than it really was.
The ship is becalmed, and it does not rain: “Water, water, every where
and not a drop to drink.” “Agua, agua por todas partes y ni una gota para
beber.” And everybody is dying of thirst. Then, they see a boat approaching,
and they think it will rescue them. But when it comes close, they see that the
ship is the skeleton of a ship. And on this ship are two fantastical characters:
one is death and the other is something like . . . something like a kind of red-
haired harlot. It is “Death in Life.” And the two play dice for the lives of the
sailors. Death always wins, except in the case of the narrator, whom the red-
haired woman, Death in Life, wins. They can no longer speak because their
throats are so parched, but the sailor feels the others staring at him; he
believes they think he is guilty of their deaths, of this horror surrounding
them, and then they die. And he feels he is a murderer. The ship—that ghost
ship—sails away. And the sea becomes rotten and filled with snakes. These
snakes swim in the dark waters; they are red and yellow and blue. And he
[the narrator] says, “The very deep did rot,” “el absimo estaba pudriéndose.”
He sees those horrible creatures, the snakes, and he suddenly feels a beauty in
those infernal beings. As soon as he feels that, the albatross falls from his
neck into the sea, and it begins to rain. He drinks in the rain with his whole
body, and then he is able to pray, and he prays to the Virgin. And then he
speaks of “gentle sleep that slid into my soul.” Before that, to say that the
ship was still, he says, “As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.” Then
it starts to rain. The mariner feels that the ship itself is drinking in the rain.
Then when he awakens from that dream—that dream that means the
beginning of his salvation—he sees a host of angelic spirits entering the dead
bodies of his companions, who help him sail the ship. But they do not speak,
and so the ship sails northward and returns to England. He sees his native
village, the church, the chapel; a boat comes out to greet him, and he
disembarks. But he knows he is condemned to wander the earth forever,
telling his story, telling it to whomever he comes across.
In this ballad, “The Ancient Mariner,” two influences have been found.
One is a legend about an English captain, a captain condemned to sail forever
without ever reaching shore, near the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.
The second is the legend of the Wandering Jew. I don’t know if any of you,
when you read Chaucer, read the story of “The Pardoner’s Tale.” In that,
there also appears an old man who strikes the earth with a staff looking for a
tomb, and this old man might be a reference to the Wandering Jew,
condemned to roam the earth until the day of the Final Judgment.12 And
surely Coleridge also knew the various Dutch legends that inspired the
musical drama by Wagner, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” and the story of the
Wandering Jew.13
And now we come to a no less famous poem by Coleridge called
“Kubla Khan.” Kublai Khan was the famous emperor who received in his
court the famous Venetian traveler, Marco Polo. He was one of those who
revealed the Orient to the West. The story of the composition of this poem—
written in 1798 and which Coleridge could not complete; it was included in
Lyrical Ballads—is quite curious. There is a book by an American professor
named Livingston Lowes about the sources of “Kubla Khan.”14 The library
of Southey, a Lake poet and author of a famous biography of Nelson, has
been preserved. And in this library are the books that Coleridge was reading
at that time, and there are passages he has marked. In this way, Livingston
Lowes reached the conclusion that, although “Kubla Khan” is one of the most
original compositions in all of English poetry, there is virtually no single line
that has not been derived from a book. In other words, there are hundreds of
sources for “Kubla Khan,” even though at the same time, the poem is, I
repeat, original and incomparable.
Coleridge says that he was sick, and the doctor recommended he take a
dose of laudanum, that is, opium. In any case, taking opium was very
common at that time. (Later, if there is time, I will say a few words about a
distinguished poetic prose writer of the time, one of Coleridge’s disciples,
Thomas De Quincey, whose Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was
partially rendered into French by Baudelaire under the title Les Paradís
Artificiels, Artificial Paradises.) Coleridge says that at the time he was living
on a farm, and was reading a book by Purchas, a writer from the sixteenth or
seventeenth century, I think, and in it, he read a passage about Emperor
Kublai Khan, who is the Kubla Khan of his poem.15 The passage has been
found and is quite short. It says that the emperor ordered trees to be cut down
in a forested area through which a river ran, and there he constructed a palace
or a hunting pavilion, and he built a high wall around it. This is what
Coleridge read. Then, still under the influence of his readings, and
undoubtedly also under the influence of opium, Coleridge had a dream.
Now, this dream was sad. It was a visual dream, because Coleridge
dreamt, he saw, the construction of the Chinese emperor’s palace. At the
same time, he heard music, and he knew—the way we know things in
dreams, intuitively, inexplicably—that the music was building the palace,
that the music was the architect of the palace. There is, moreover, a Greek
tradition that says that the City of Thebes was built by music. Coleridge, who
could have said as did Mallarmé, “I have read every book,” could not have
been unaware of this. So, Coleridge, in the dream, watched the palace being
built, heard music he had never heard before—and now comes the
extraordinary part—he heard a voice that recited the poem, a poem of a few
hundred lines. Then he awoke, and remembered the poem he had heard in his
dreams, the way the verses had been given to him—as had happened to his
ancestor, Caedmon, the Anglo-Saxon shepherd—and he sat down and wrote
the poem.
He wrote about seventy lines, and then a man from the neighboring
farm of Porlock came to visit him, a man who has since been cursed by all
lovers of English literature. This man talked to him of issues of rural life. The
visit lasted a couple of hours, and by the time Coleridge managed to free
himself and pick up where he had left off writing down the poem given to
him in his dream, he found that he had forgotten it. Now, for a long time it
was believed that Coleridge began the poem, that he did not know how to end
it—as happened to him with “Christabel”—and then he invented this
fantastic story about a triple—an architectural, musical, poetic—dream. This
is what Coleridge’s contemporaries thought. Coleridge dies in the year 1834,
and ten or twenty years later a translation is published, I don’t know if
Russian or German, of a universal story, the work of a Persian historian. That
is, a book that Coleridge could not have possibly read. And in that book, we
read something as marvelous as the poem. We read that Emperor Kublai
Khan had built a palace that the centuries would destroy, and that he built it
according to plans that had been revealed to him in a dream. Here, the
philosophy of [Alfred North] Whitehead comes to mind, which says that time
is continually bringing lucre to eternal things, Platonic archetypes. So we can
think about a Platonic idea—a palace that wants to exist not only in eternity
but also in time—and that through dreams, it is revealed to a Chinese
medieval emperor and then, centuries later, to an English poet at the end of
the eighteenth century. The event, of course, is unusual, and we can even
imagine how the dream continues: we don’t know what other form the palace
will look for to fully exist. As architecture, it has disappeared, and poetically,
it exists only in an unfinished poem. Who knows how the palace will define
itself a third time, if there ever is a third time?
Now let us look at the poem. The poem mentions a sacred river, the
Alph. This might correspond to the Alpheus River of classical antiquity. And
it begins like this:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

Here we have the alliteration that Coleridge used in “The Ancient

Mariner,” when he said: “The furrow followed free; / We were the first that
ever burst / Into that silent sea.” (The f and then the s.) In other words, in
Xanadu—which could be an ancient name for Peking—Kubla Khan decreed
—ordered—the construction of a large pleasure pavilion or hunting pavilion
where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns that men could not
measure, to a sunless sea, to a deep and underground sea.
Then Coleridge imagines a vast cavern the sacred river runs through,
where he says there are blocks of ice. And then he mentions how odd the
garden is, that garden surrounded by green forests, all of it constructed over
an abyss. Now, this is why it has been said that this poem is about paradise,
for this could be a transposition of God, whose first work, as Francis Bacon
reminds us, was a garden, Eden. So we can think about the universe being
built on emptiness. And Coleridge, in the poem, says that the emperor leaned
over the black cavern of underground water, and there he heard voices that
prophesied war. And then the poem moves from this dream to another one.
Coleridge says that in the dream, he remembered another dream, and in that
dream, there was an Abyssinian maiden on a mountain who sang and played
the laud. He knows that if he could remember this maiden’s music, he could
rebuild the palace. Then he says that everyone would look at him in horror,
everyone would realize that he had been bewitched.
The poem ends with those four enigmatic lines that I will first say in
Spanish, then in English: “Tejí a su alrededor un triple círculo, / y miradlo y
contempladlo con horror sagrado, / porque él se ha alimentado de hidromiel,
/ y ha bebido la leche del Paraíso.” “Weave a circle round him thrice, / And
close your eyes” . . . No . . . “Tejed a su alrededor un triple círculo y cerrad
vuestros ojos con horror sagrado.” . . . Nobody can look at him. . . . “And
close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honey-dew hath fed . . . ”
“Porque él se ha alimentado del rocío de la miel.” “And drunk the milk of
Paradise.” A lesser poet might have spoken of “the wine of Paradise,” which
would be terrible; but no less terrible is it to speak, as in this poem, of “the
milk of Paradise.”
These poems, of course, cannot be read in translation. In translation all
that remains is the plot, but you can easily read them in English, especially
the second one, “Kubla Khan,” whose music has never since been equaled. It
is about seventy lines long. We don’t know, we cannot even imagine, a
possible ending to this poem.
Finally, I would like to emphasize how marvelous, how almost
miraculous it is that in the last decade of that reasonable, that very admirable
eighteenth century, a poem was composed that is totally magical, a poem that
exists above and beyond reason and against reason through the magic of
fable, the magic of music.
 CLASS 15

THE LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. THE POEM "THE TYGER."

BLAKE AND SWEDENBORG'S PHILOSOPHY, COMPARED. A POEM
BY RUPERT BROOKE. BLAKE'S POEMS.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1966.

We are now going to go back in time, for today we are going to talk
about William Blake, who was born in London in 1757 and died in that city
in 1827.1
The reasons I have postponed the study of Blake are easily explained,
because my goal was to explain the romantic movement based on certain
representative figures: Macpherson, the precursor; and then the two great
poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge. William Blake, on the contrary, remains
not only outside the pseudo-classic school (to use the most elevated term),
and that is the school represented by Pope, but he also remains outside the
romantic movement. He is an individual poet, and if there is anything we can
connect him to—for, as Rubén Darío said, there is no literary Adam—we
would have to connect him to much more ancient traditions: to the Cathar
heretics in the south of France, the Gnostics in Asia Minor and Alexandria in
the first century after Christ, and of course to the great and visionary Swedish
thinker, Emmanuel Swedenborg. Because Blake was an isolated individual,
his contemporaries considered him a bit mad, and perhaps he was. He was a
visionary—as Swedenborg had been, of course—and his works circulated
very little during his lifetime. Moreover, he was better known as an engraver
and a draftsman than as a writer.
Blake was personally a quite unpleasant man, an aggressive man. He
managed to make enemies out of his contemporaries, whom he attacked with
ferocious epigrams. The events of his life are less important than what he
dreamed and saw. However, we will make note of certain circumstances.
Blake studied engraving, and he illustrated some important works. He
illustrated, for example, the works of Chaucer, Dante, and also his own work.
He married, and like Milton, he believed in polygamy, although he did not
practice it so as not to offend his wife. He lived alone, isolated, and is one of
the many fathers of free verse, inspired a little—like Macpherson before him
and Walt Whitman after him—on Bible verses. But he comes long before
Whitman, for Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855, and William Blake, as I
have said, died in 1827.
Blake’s work is extraordinarily difficult to read because he created a
theological system. In order to express it, he had the idea of inventing a
mythology, and critics don’t agree on what it means. We have Urizen, for
example, which is time. We have Orc, which is a kind of redeemer. And then
we have goddesses with strange names like Oothoon. There is a divinity
named Golgonooza, as well. There is an otherworldly geography of his
invention, and there are characters named Milton—Blake came to believe
that Milton’s soul had been reincarnated in him to recant the errors Milton
committed in Paradise Lost. Moreover, these same divinities in Blake’s
private pantheon change meaning, but not name; they keep evolving along
with his philosophy. For example, there are four Zoas. There is also a
character named Albion, Albion of England. The daughters of Albion appear,
and so does Christ, but this Christ is not at all the Christ of the New
Testament.
Now, there is a quite extensive bibliography of works on Blake. I have
not read all of it, I don’t think anybody has. But I think the most lucid book
about Blake is by the French critic Denis Saurat.2 Saurat has also written
about the philosophy of Hugo and Milton, considering all of them in the same
tradition as the Jewish Kabbalah, and before that, the Gnostics of Alexandria
and Asia Minor (Saurat actually speaks little about the Gnostics and prefers
to discuss the Cathars and the Kabbalists, who are closer to Blake). He says
almost nothing about Swedenborg, who was Blake’s most direct mentor.
Quite characteristically, Blake rebelled against Swedenborg and speaks of
him with disdain.3 What we can say is that all through Blake’s oeuvre, all
through his nebulous mythologies, there is one problem that has always
worried philosophical thinkers, and that is the idea of evil—the difficulty of
reconciling the idea of a benevolent and omnipotent God with the presence of
evil in the world. Naturally, when I speak about evil, I am thinking not only
about betrayal or cruelty, but also about the physical presence of evil: illness,
old age, death, the injustices that every man must suffer, and the different
forms of bitterness we find in life.
There is a poem by Blake—it is included in all the anthologies—where
this problem is expressed, but of course is not resolved. It corresponds to
Blake’s third or fourth book, his Songs of Experience (prior to that, he
published Songs of Innocence and the Book of Thel, and in these books he
talks mostly about a love and a kindness that are behind the universe in spite
of all apparent suffering).4 In Songs of Experience, Blake deals directly with
the problem of evil, and he symbolizes it, in the manner of the bestiaries of
the Middle Ages, as a tiger. The poem, which consists of five or six stanzas,
is called “The Tyger,” and was illustrated by the author.
This poem is not about a real tiger, but rather an archetypical tiger, a
Platonic, eternal tiger. The poem begins like this—I will translate the lines
into Spanish, quickly and poorly:

Tigre, tigre ardiente

que resplandeces en las selvas de la noche
Qué mano inmortal o qué ojo
pudo forjar tu terrible simetría?

[Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?]

Then he wonders how the tiger was formed, in what forge, with what kinds of
hammers, and then he reaches the principal question of the poem:

Cuando los hombres arrojaron sus lanzas,

y mojaron la tierra con sus lágrimas,
A quel que te hizo sonrió?
A quel que hizo al cordero te hizo?
 [When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?]

That is: How could God—omnipotent and merciful—have created the

tiger and the lamp that would be devoured by it?
Then “Did he smile his work to see?” “He” is God, of course. That is,
Blake is entranced by the tiger, the symbol, the emblem of evil. And we
could say that the rest of Blake’s oeuvre is devoted to answering this
question. Needless to say, this question has preoccupied many philosophers.
We have Leibniz in the eighteenth century.5 Leibniz said we live in the best
of all possible worlds, and he invented an allegory to justify this affirmation.
Leibniz imagines the world—not the real world, but rather the possible world
—as a pyramid, one with a top but no base. That is, a pyramid that can
continue infinitely, indefinitely, downward. The pyramid has many floors.
And Leibniz imagines a man who lives his entire life on one of those floors.
Then his soul reincarnates to a higher floor, and this continues an
indeterminate number of times. And finally he arrives at the highest floor, the
top of the pyramid, and he believes he is in paradise. And then he remembers
his previous lives, and the inhabitants of this floor remind him, tell him, that
he is on Earth. That is, we are in the best of all possible worlds. And to make
fun of this doctrine, somebody, I think it was Voltaire, called it “optimism,”
and when he wrote Candide, he wanted to show that in this “best of all
possible worlds,” there exists, nonetheless, illness, death, the earthquake in
Lisbon, the difference between rich and poor. And somebody called this, also
a bit jokingly, “pessimism.” So the words “optimism” and “pessimism” that
we now use—we call a person an optimist when we want to say he is in a
good mood or he tends to see the bright side of things—were invented as a
joke to poke holes in Leibniz’s doctrine and in the ideas of Swift and Voltaire
—pessimists—who asserted that it was Christianity that stated that this world
was a vale of tears, asserting the bitterness of our lives.
Such arguments were used to justify evil, to justify cruelty, envy, or a
toothache, we could say. It was said that in a painting there could not be only
beautiful and shimmering colors but also others; or also, it was said that
music needed moments of disharmony. And this Leibniz, who liked
ingenious but misleading illustrations, imagined two libraries. One contains a
thousand copies, let us say, of the Aeneid, considered a perfect work. In the
other library, there is only one copy of the Aeneid and nine hundred and
ninety-nine inferior books. And then Leibniz wonders which of the two
libraries is better, and he reaches the obvious conclusion that the second one,
containing a thousand books of different qualities, is superior to the first,
which contains a thousand copies of the same perfect book. And Victor Hugo
would say later that the world had to be imperfect, because if it were perfect,
it would be mistaken for God—the light would be lost in the light.
These examples seem false to me. Because it is one thing that in a
painting there are dark areas, that in a library there are imperfect books, and it
is quite another that in the soul of a man there have to be such books and such
colors. And Blake sensed this problem. Blake wanted to believe in an all-
powerful and benevolent God. At the same time, he felt that in this world, in
a single day of our lives, there are events that we would have wished had
gone differently. So, perhaps under the influence of Swedenborg, or maybe
some other influences, he finds a solution. The Gnostics—philosophers in the
first centuries after Christ—came up with this solution. According to the
explanation of the system given by Irenaeus, they imagined a first God.6 That
God was perfect, immutable, and from that God emanate seven gods, and
those seven gods correspond to the seven planets—the sun and the moon
were considered planets at that time—and they allow seven other gods to
emanate from them. In this way, there rises a high tower with 365 floors.
(This corresponds to the days of the year.) Each instance, each one of those
conclaves of gods, is less divine that the previous, and so on the bottom floor,
the fraction of their divinity is close to zero. And it is the god on the floor
below floor 365 that created the earth. And that is why there is so much
imperfection on earth: it was created by a god who is a reflection of a
reflection of a reflection, and so on, of all the higher gods.
Now Blake, through his entire oeuvre, distinguishes between the
Creator God, who would be Jehovah from the Old Testament—the one who
appears in the first chapters of the Pentateuch, in Genesis—and a much
higher god. In this case, according to Blake, the earth would have been
created by an inferior god, and this is the god who gives the ten
commandments, moral law; and then a much higher god sends Jesus Christ to
redeem us. That is, Blake creates an opposition between the Old Testament
and the New Testament whereby the god who created the world is the one
who imposes moral law—that is, restrictions, the idea that you should not do
this, or not do that. Then Christ comes to save us from those laws.
Historically, this is not true, but Blake stated that this is what the
angels and demons revealed to him in special revelations. He said that he had
conversed with them many times as had the Swedish Emmanuel Swedenborg,
who also died in London and who also conversed frequently with demons
and angels. Now, Blake arrives at the theory that this world—the work of an
inferior god—is an hallucination, that we are being deceived by our senses.
Previously it had been stated that our senses are imperfect instruments. For
example, Berkeley already pointed out that if we see a distant object, we see
it as small. We can touch a tower or the moon with our hand. Nor do we see
the infinitely small, nor do we hear what is said far away. We could add that
if I touch this table, for example, I feel it as smooth; but all it would take is a
microscope to show me that this table is rough, uneven, that in reality, it
consists of a series of ridges, and as science has shown, a jumble of atoms
and electrons.
But Blake went further. Blake believed that our senses deceive us.
There is a poem by an English poet who died during the First World War,
[Rupert] Brooke, where this idea is expressed quite beautifully, and it can
help you if you remember it. He says that when we have left our bodies
behind, when we become pure spirit, then we can really touch: “ya que no
tendremos manos para tocar, y veríamos, no ya cegados por nuestros ojos”:
“And touch who have no longer hands to feel / And see no longer blinded by
our eyes.”7 And Blake said that if we could cleanse our “doors of
perception”—a phrase used by Huxley in a book about mescaline that was
recently published—we would see things as they are, as infinite.8 That is, we
are now living in some kind of dream, an hallucination that has been imposed
on us by Jehovah, the inferior god who created the earth, and Blake wondered
if what we see as birds—a bird cutting through the air in flight—is not really
a delightful universe hidden to us by our five senses. Now, Blake writes
against Plato, even though Blake is profoundly Platonic, for Blake believes
that the true universe is inside ourselves. You have probably read that Plato
said that to learn is to remember, that we already know everything. And
Bacon added that not knowing is having forgotten, which becomes the
obverse of the Platonic doctrine.
So, for Blake there are two worlds. One, the eternal one—paradise—is
the world of the creative imagination. The other is the world in which we
live, deceived by the hallucinations imposed on us by our five senses. And
Blake calls this universe “the vegetable universe.” Here, we can see the
enormous difference between Blake and the romantics, because the romantics
felt reverence for the universe. In a poem, Wordsworth speaks of a divinity
“whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns, the round ocean and the
living air,” “una divinidad cuya morada es la luz de los soles ponientes y el
Redondo océano y el aire viviente.”9 Whereas all this was abhorrent to Blake.
Blake said that if he watched the sunrise, what he was really seeing was a
kind of silver coin rising in the sky. If, however, he saw or thought of the
dawn with his spiritual eyes, then he saw hosts, numerous luminous hosts of
angels. He said that the spectacle of nature shuts down all his inspiration. A
painter and contemporary, [Sir Joshua] Reynolds, said that the artist who
draws or paints should start out working from models, and this made Blake
indignant. He said, “For Reynolds, the world is a desert, a desert that must be
sown with observation. For me, no. For me, the universe is in my mind; and
what I see is pale and very poor compared to the world of my imagination.”
Now we will return to Swedenborg and Christ, because this is
important for Blake’s philosophy. In general it was believed that man, in
order to be saved, had to be saved ethically, that is, if a man is just, if he is
forgiving and loves his enemies, if he does not do bad deeds, that man is
already saved. But Swedenborg goes one step further. He says that man
cannot be saved through his behavior, that the duty of every man is to
cultivate his intelligence. And Swedenborg gives an example of this. He
imagines a poor man, and this poor man’s only desire is to get to Heaven. So
he retreats from the world, goes to the desert, let’s say to Thebaid, and lives
there without committing a single sin. At the same time, he leads an
impoverished mental life—the typical life of cenobites, or hermits. Then,
after many years, the man dies and goes to Heaven. When he reaches
Heaven, Heaven is much more complex than Earth. The general tendency is
to imagine Heaven as disembodied. On the contrary, this Swedish mystic saw
Heaven as much more concrete, more complex, richer than Earth. He said, for
example, that here we have the colors of the rainbow and the nuances of
those colors, but in Heaven, we see an infinite number of colors, colors we
cannot even imagine. Shapes, as well. That is, a city in Heaven would be
much more complex than a city on Earth, our bodies would be more complex,
furniture would be more complex, and thought would as well.
So the poor saintly man reaches Heaven, and in Heaven there are
angels who speak about theology; there are churches—Swedenborg’s Heaven
is a theological Heaven. And the poor man wants to participate in the angels’
conversations, but naturally he is lost. He is like a country hick, a peasant
who arrives in the city and feels dizzy. At first, he tries to console himself,
thinking that he is in Heaven, but then this Heaven bewilders him, gives him
vertigo. So he talks to the angels and asks them what he should do. The
angels tell him that by devoting himself to pure virtue he has wasted his time
on Earth to learn. Finally, God finds a solution—a somewhat sad solution but
the only one possible. Sending him to Hell would be terribly unjust, for that
man could not live among the devils. Nor need he suffer the torments of
envy, hatred, the fires of Hell. And keeping him in Heaven would be
condemning him to vertigo, the incomprehension of that much more complex
world. So, they look for a place for him in space, and they find one, and
there, they allow him to again project his world of the desert, the chapel, the
palm tree, the cave. And now that man is there, as he was on Earth, but more
unhappy, because he knows that this abode is his eternal abode, the only
possible abode for him.
Blake takes this idea and says, directly: “Despojaos de la santidad y
revestíos de la inteligencia.” [“Relinquish holiness and summon
intelligence.”] And then, “El imbécil no entrará en el Cielo por santo que
sea.” [“The fool shall not enter into Heaven, let him be ever so holy.”]10
That is, Blake also offers man intellectual salvation. We have the duty to be
just as well as intelligent. Now, Swedenborg reached this point, but Blake
goes further. Swedenborg was a man of science, a visionary, a theologian,
etcetera. But he did not have much of an aesthetic sensibility. Blake,
however, had a powerful aesthetic sense, and he said that man’s salvation had
to be threefold. He had to be saved through virtue—that is, Blake condemns
cruelty, evil, envy—through intelligence—man should try to understand the
world, develop intellectually—and through beauty—that is, through the
practice of art. Blake preached that the idea of art is the patrimony of a select
few, who must in one way or another be artists. Now, since he wants to link
his doctrine to that of Jesus Christ, he says that Christ was also an artist, for
Christ’s ideas are never expressed abstractly (Milton never understood this),
but rather through parables, that is, in poems. Christ says, for example, “I did
not come to bring peace,” and an abstract understanding would be, “I did not
come to bring peace, but war.” But Christ, who is a poet, says, “I did not
come to bring peace, but a sword.” When they are about to stone an
adulterous woman to death, he doesn’t say that the law is unjust, but rather
writes some words in the sand. He writes some words: surely the law that
condemns the sinning woman. Then he erases them with his elbow,
anticipating “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” And he says, “He that is
without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” That is, he uses concrete
examples, poetic examples.
Now, according to Blake, Christ did not work, did not speak in this
way in order to express things more vividly, but because he naturally thought
in images, in metaphors and parables. For example, he did not say that given
all his temptations, it is difficult for a wealthy man to enter Heaven. He said
that it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a
rich man to enter Heaven. That is, he used hyperbole. All of this is quite
important for Blake.
Blake also believes—and this prefigures a large part of current
psychoanalysis—that we should not smother our impulses. He says, for
example, that an injured man has the desire to take revenge, that it is natural
to want revenge, and that if a man does not take revenge, that desire remains
in the depth of his soul, and corrupts him. This is why in his most
characteristic work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—I think it has been
translated into Spanish, I do not remember if by [Rafael] Alberti or Neruda—
he has the “Proverbs of Hell,” except that for Blake what common
theologians call Hell is really Heaven; for instance, there we read: “El gusano
partido en dos perdoná al arado.” [“The cut worm forgives the plow.”]11
What else can a worm do? And he also says that it is unfair to have the same
law for the lion—who is pure strength, energy—as for the ox. That is, he
anticipates Nietzsche’s doctrines, which come much later.
 At the end of his life, Blake seems to repent and preaches love and
compassion, and mentions Christ’s name more often. This work, The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is strange, for it is written partly in verse and
partly in prose. And there is a series of proverbs in which he spells out his
philosophy. Then there are other books that are referred to as his “prophetic
books,” and these are very difficult to read, but we suddenly find
extraordinarily beautiful passages.12 There is, for example, a goddess named
Oothoon. This goddess is very much in love with a man, and she hunts
women to give to the man, she hunts them with steel, and diamond traps. We
have these verses: “But nets of steel and traps of diamond will Oothoon
spread, and catch for thee girls of mild silver and furious gold.”13 That is
“Pero Oothoon tenderá para ti redes de hierro y trampas de diamante, y
cazará para ti muchchas de suave plata y de furioso oro.” Then Blake speaks
of fortune, of corporal delights, because for him, those delights were not sins
as they are for Christians generally, and for Puritans in particular.
Blake’s oeuvre was forgotten by his contemporaries. De Quincey, in
the fourteen volumes of his work, refers only once to him as “that mad
printmaker William Blake.” But later, Blake wields a powerful influence over
Bernard Shaw. There is one act—the act of John Tanner’s dream in Man and
Superman, by Bernard Shaw—that is like a dramatic expression of the
doctrines of Swedenborg and Blake. Now Blake is considered one of the
classic English poets. Moreover, the complexity of his work has lent itself to
multiple interpretations. There is a book, which I’ve ordered but have not yet
received; it is a dictionary of Blake.14 That is, a book that deals, in
alphabetical order, with all of Blake’s gods and divinities. Some symbolize
time, others space, others desire, others moral laws. And attempts have been
made to reconcile Blake’s contradictions, for he was not completely a
visionary—that is, not completely a poet, not completely a man who thinks
through images, which would have made his work easier—he was also a
philosopher. So in his work there is a kind of easy coming and going between
images—they are usually splendid, like the one I talked about with “girls of
mild silver and furious gold”—and long abstract stanzas. Moreover, the
music of his verses is sometimes rough, and this is odd because Blake began
by using traditional forms and a very simple, almost infantile language. But
then he finally comes to free verse. . . . One finds in Blake an ancient belief
of sailors: that a man and a woman can lose their humanity. He also suggests
the idea of an old maritime superstition: that the sailor who kills an albatross
is thus condemned to eternal penitence. What we see in Blake’s beliefs is this
concept: that small acts produce terrible consequences. And so he says: “He
who tortures a caterpillar sees the terrible and mysterious, descends into a
labyrinth of infinite night, and is condemned to infinite torments.”
Blake, as a writer, is unique in the English literature of his time. He
cannot be fit into romanticism or pseudo-classicism; he escapes, he does not
follow trends. Blake is unique in his era—in England and in Europe, as well.
And in this regard I would like to recall a probably well-known phrase, which
is: “Each Englishman is an island.” That can be applied very well to Blake.
 CLASS 16

LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. SARTOR RESARTUS BY

CARLYLE. CARLYLE, PRECURSOR OF NAXISM. BOLÍVAR'S
SOLDIERS, ACCORDING TO CARLYLE

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1966

Today, we will discuss Carlyle. Carlyle is one of those writers who

dazzles the reader. I remember when I discovered him, around 1916, I
thought that he was really the only author. The same thing then happened to
me with Walt Whitman; it had already happened with Victor Hugo, and it
would happen with Quevedo.1 In other words, I thought that all other writers
were wrongheaded simply because they were not Thomas Carlyle. Now,
those writers who dazzle you, who seem like the prototype of the writer, tend
to end up being overwhelming. They start out by dazzling you, but run the
risk of becoming intolerable in the end. The same thing happened to me with
the French writer Léon Bloy, with the English poet Swinburne, and with
many others throughout my long life.2 In all these cases, they were highly
personal writers, so personal that one ends up learning the formula for the
dazzle, the stupor they provoke.
Let’s take a look at some of the facts of Carlyle’s life. Carlyle was born
in a village in Scotland in the year 1795 and died in London—in Chelsea,
where his house has been preserved—in the year 1881. That is, his was a
long and industrious life devoted to literature, reading, scholarship, and
writing.
Carlyle had humble origins. His parents, grandparents, and great-
grandparents were all peasants. And Carlyle was Scottish. It is common to
confuse the Scots and the English, but they are, in spite of their political
unification, two essentially different peoples. Scotland is a poor country with
a bloody history of warring among the many clans. Moreover, the Scots in
general tend to be more intellectual than the English. Or better said, the
English are usually not intellectual, and almost all the Scots are. This may be
because of all the religious controversies, but if it is true that the people of
Scotland devoted themselves to discussing theology, it is because they were
intellectuals. This often happens with causes that tend to be effects and
effects that are confused with causes. In Scotland, religious discussions were
common, and it is worth remembering that Edinburgh, like Geneva, was one
of the capitals of Calvinism in Europe. The essential aspect of Calvinism is
the belief in predestination, based on the Biblical passage “many are called,
but few are chosen.”
Carlyle studied at the parish church in his town, then at the University
of Edinburgh, and when he was around twenty, he underwent some kind of
spiritual crisis or mystical experience that he described in the strangest of his
books, Sartor Resartus. Sartor Resartus in Latin means “The Mended Tailor”
or “The Darned Tailor.” We will soon see why he chose this strange title. The
fact is that Carlyle had reached a state of melancholy provoked undoubtedly
by the neurosis that haunted him his whole life. Carlyle had become an
atheist; he did not believe in God. But the melancholy of Calvinism
continued to haunt him even when he thought he had left it behind—the idea
of a universe without hope, a universe in which the vast majority of its
inhabitants are condemned to Hell. And then one night he had a kind of
revelation, one that did not free him from this pessimism, from his
melancholy, but did lead him to the conviction that man can be saved through
work. Carlyle did not believe that any human labor had any lasting value. He
thought that anything aesthetic or intellectual man did was despicable and
ephemeral. But at the same time he believed that the fact of working, the fact
of doing something, even if that thing was despicable, was not despicable.
There is a German anthology of his work, which was published during the
First World War and titled Work and Do Not Despair.3 This is one of the
effects of Carlyle’s thought.
Once Carlyle decided to devote his life to literature, he began to
acquire a vast and miscellaneous culture. For example, he and his wife, Jane
Welsh, studied Spanish without teachers, and every day they read one chapter
of Don Quixote in the original Spanish. There is a passage in Carlyle in
which he contrasts the fate of Cervantes and Byron. He considers Byron—a
good-looking, athletic aristocrat, a man of fortune, who nevertheless felt
inexplicably melancholic. And he considers the hard life of Cervantes—a
soldier and a prisoner—who nevertheless wrote a book, not full of complaints
but rather full of private and sometimes hidden joys, Don Quixote.
Carlyle moves to London—he had already been a schoolteacher and
had collaborated on an encyclopedia, the Edinburgh Encylcopaedia—and
there he contributes to periodicals.4 He publishes articles, but we must
remember that an article then was what we would today call a book or a
monograph. Now an article is usually about five to ten pages long; then, an
article was usually more or less one hundred pages long. So, Carlyle’s and
Macaulay’s articles were truly monographs, and some were even two
hundred pages long. Today, they would be books.
A friend of Carlyle’s recommended that he study German. Because of
political circumstances, after the victory at Waterloo, the English and the
Prussians became brothers-in-arms, and England was discovering Germany,
and discovering after centuries its affinity with other Germanic nations, with
Germany, Holland, and of course with the Scandinavian countries. Carlyle
studied German, was excited by Schiller’s work, and published—this was his
first book—a biography of Schiller written in a correct, and rather ordinary,
style.5 Then he read a German romantic writer, Johann Paul Richter, a writer
we could call soporific, who recounted slow and sometimes languid, mystical
dreams.6 Richter’s style is full of compound words and long clauses, and this
style influenced Carlyle’s style, except that Richter leaves one with a pleasant
impression. On the other hand, Carlyle was an essentially ardent man, so he
was a dreary writer. Carlyle also discovered the works of Goethe, who was
then unknown outside his own country except in a very fragmentary fashion,
and he believed he found his master in Goethe. I say “believed he found”
because it is difficult to think of two more different writers: the Olympic—as
the Germans call him—and serene Goethe, and Carlyle, tormented as befits a
Scot by his ethical preoccupations.
Carlyle was also an infinitely more impetuous and more extravagant
writer than Goethe. Goethe began as a romantic, then repented of his initial
romanticism and achieved a serenity that we could call “classical.” Carlyle
wrote about Goethe for magazines in London. This was very moving for
Goethe, for although Germany had achieved full intellectual development,
politically it was still not unified. (The unification of Germany would take
place in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian War.) That is, to the world, Germany
was a heterogeneous collection of small principalities, dukedoms, a bit
provincial, and for Goethe, that people in England admired him would be
like, for a South American, being known in Paris or London.
Then Carlyle published a series of translations of Goethe. He translated
both parts of Wilhelm Meister: Meister’s Apprenticeship and Wilhelm
Meister’s Travels.7 He translated other German romantics, including the
amazing [E.T.A.] Hoffman. Then he published Sartor Resartus.8 Then he
devoted himself to history, and wrote essays about the famous affair of the
diamond necklace—the story of a poor Frenchman who was made to believe
that Marie Antoinette had accepted a gift of his (the essay was taken from
Count Cagliostro)—and a wide range of other subjects.9 Among these
essays, we find one about Dr. Francia, tyrant of Paraguay, an essay that
includes—and this is typical of Carlyle—a vindication of Dr. Francia.10
Then Carlyle writes a book titled The Letters and Speeches of Oliver
Cromwell.11 It is natural that he would admire Cromwell. Cromwell, in the
middle of the seventeenth century, made it so that the king of England was
tried and condemned to death by Parliament. This scandalized the world, as
would, later, the French Revolution, and much later, the Russian Revolution.
Finally, Carlyle settles in London and there publishes The French
Revolution, his most famous work.12 Carlyle lent the manuscript to a friend,
the author of a famous treatise on logic, [John] Stuart Mill.13 Mill’s cook
used the manuscript to light the stove in the kitchen. Thus, his work of years
was destroyed. But Mill convinced Carlyle to accept a monthly stipend while
he rewrote his work. This book is one of Carlyle’s most vivid; however, it
does not have the vividness of reality, but rather the vividness of a visionary
book, the vividness of a nightmare. I remember that when I read that chapter
where Carlyle describes the flight and capture of Louis XVI, I remembered
reading something similar: I was thinking of the famous description of the
death of Facundo Quiroga, in one of the final chapters of Facundo by
Sarmiento.14 Carlyle describes the king’s flight in the chapter “The Night of
Spurs.” He describes how the king stops at a tavern and a boy recognizes
him. He recognizes him because an image of the king is engraved on the back
of a coin, and this gives him away. Then they arrest him, and in the end take
him to the guillotine.
Carlyle’s wife, Jane Welsh, was his social superior, a very intelligent
woman whose letters are considered among the best of English
correspondence.15 Carlyle lived for his work, his lectures, his labors, and this
was somewhat prophetic; Carlyle neglected his wife, but after her death, he
wrote little of any importance. Before, he had spent fourteen years writing
History of Friedrich II of Prussia, called Frederik the Great, a difficult book
to read.16 There was a great difference between Carlyle the man, with his
religious and pious atheism, and Frederik, who was a skeptical atheist and
had no moral scruples. After the death of his wife, Carlyle wrote the history
of the first kings of Norway, based on the Heimskringla by the Icelandic
historian Snorri Sturluson, from the thirteenth century, but this book does not
have the passion of his first works.17
Now we will look at Carlyle’s philosophy, or at a few features of this
philosophy. In the previous class, I said that for Blake the world was
essentially hallucinatory. The world was an hallucination perceived through
the five deceptive senses we were given by the inferior God who made this
Earth, Jehovah. Now, this corresponds to the philosophy of idealism, and
Carlyle was one of the first proponents of German idealism in England.
Idealism already existed in England through the work of the Irish bishop
Berkeley. But Carlyle preferred to seek it out in the work of Schelling and
Kant. For those philosophers, and for Berkeley, idealism has a metaphysical
meaning. It tells us that what we believe to be reality—let us say, what can be
seen, touched, tasted—cannot be reality: it is simply a series of symbols and
images that cannot possibly be akin to it. Hence, Kant spoke of the thing in
itself that is beyond our perceptions. Carlyle understood all of this perfectly.
Carlyle said that just as we see a green tree, we could see it as blue if our
visual organs were different, and in the same way, when we touch it we feel it
as convex, we could feel it as concave if our hands were made differently.
(This is fine, but our eyes and our hands belong to the external world, the
world of appearances.) Carlyle takes the basic idea that this world is merely
apparent, and gives it a moral meaning and a political meaning. Swift also
said that everything in this world is apparent, that we call, let us say, a miter
and a garment with a particular drape a bishop, that we call a wig and a robe a
judge, that we call a certain uniform, with a helmet, and epaulettes, a general.
Carlyle takes this idea and writes Sartor Resartus, or “The Mended Tailor.”
This book is one of the greatest mystifications in the entire history of
literature. Carlyle imagines a German philosopher who teaches at the
University of Weissnichtwo—at that time, very few people spoke German in
England, so he could use these names with impunity.18 He gave his
imaginary philosopher the name Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, that is Diogenes
Devil’s Dung—the word “dung” is a euphemism, the word here is stronger—
and attributes to him the penning of a huge tome titled Clothes: Their Origin
and Influence. The subtitle of this work suggests it is a philosophy of clothes.
Carlyle then imagines that what we call the universe is really a series of
garments, of appearances. And he praises the French Revolution because he
sees in it the beginning of an awareness that the world is mere appearances
and that one must destroy it. For him, royalty, the Pope, the republic, are all
appearances, or used clothing that should be burned, and the French
Revolution had started by burning them. So Sartor Resartus ends up being
the biography of this imaginary German philosopher, and this philosopher is
a kind of transfiguration of Carlyle himself. Situating it in Germany, he
recounts a mystical experience. He tells the story of an ill-fated love, of a
young woman who seems to love him then leaves him, leaving him alone
with the night. Then he describes conversations with this imaginary
philosopher, and gives long excerpts from a book that never existed called
Sartor, the Tailor. And, as he is the one giving excerpts from that imaginary
book, he calls the work “The Mended Tailor.”
The book is written in a rather obscure style, full of compound words
and with a lot of eloquence. If we had to compare Carlyle with a writer in the
Spanish language, we would start close to home with the most impressive
pages of Almafuerte.19 We might also think of Unamuno, who translated The
French Revolution by Carlyle into Spanish and over whom Carlyle had a
strong influence.20 In France, we could think of Léon Bloy.
Now, let us look at Carlyle’s concept of history. According to Carlyle,
there is sacred scripture, which is only partially the Bible. That scripture is
universal history; and that history, says Carlyle, is what we are forced to read
constantly, for our fates are part of it. That history is what we are forced to
read incessantly and to write, and in which—he adds—we are also inscribed.
That is, we are readers of this sacred scripture of letters, words, and verses.
Thus, he sees the universe as a book. Now, this book is written by God, but
God for Carlyle is not a character. God is in each of us, God writes himself
and realizes himself through us. That is, Carlyle turns out to be a pantheist:
the only being that exists is God, though God does not exist as an individual
being but rather through rocks, through plants, through animals, and through
man. And above all, through heroes. Carlyle gave a series of lectures in
London titled, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.21
Carlyle says that mankind has always recognized the existence of heroes, that
is, of human beings who are superior to them, but that in primitive eras the
hero is conceived of as a god; and so his first lecture is titled “The Hero As
Divinity,” and characteristically he uses the Norse god Odin as an example.
He says that Odin was a very brave, a very loyal man, a king who ruled over
other kings, and that his contemporaries and immediate successors deified
him, considered him a god. Then we have another lecture, “The Hero As
Prophet,” and Carlyle chooses Mohammed as an example, who until then had
only been an object of scorn for Christians in Western Europe. Carlyle says
that Mohammed, in the solitude of the desert, was possessed by the idea of
solitude and unity with God, and that is how the Koran was written. Then we
have other examples of heroes: the hero as poet—Shakespeare. Then as a
man of letters: Johnson and Goethe. And the hero as soldier, and, even
though he despised the French, he chooses Napoleon.
Carlyle had absolutely no faith in democracy. Some have even thought
of Carlyle—and I understand this fully—as a precursor to Nazism, for he
believed in the superiority of the German race. The years 1870 to 1871 saw
the Franco-Prussian War. Almost all of Europe—what was intellectual
Europe—was on France’s side. The famous Swedish writer Strindberg would
later write, “France was right, but Prussia had the cannons.” This is how all
of Europe felt. Carlyle was on Prussia’s side. Carlyle believed that the
founding of the German Empire would be the beginning of an era of peace in
Europe—given what happened later in the world wars we can appreciate the
error of his judgment. And Carlyle published two letters in which he said that
Count von Bismarck was misunderstood and “the triumph of Germany, that
thinks deeply, over the frivolous, vainglorious, and bellicose France,” would
be a boon for mankind. In the year eighteen sixty-something, the Civil War in
the United States began, and everybody in Europe was on the side of the
Northern states. This war, as you well know, did not begin as a war of
Northern abolitionists—those opposed to slavery—against supporters of
slavery and slaveowners in the South. Legally, the Southern states may have
been in the right. The Southern states thought they had the right to secede
from the Northern states, and they put forth legal arguments. The real issue
was that the United States Constitution had not contemplated the possibility
that some states would want to secede. The issue was ambiguous, and when
Lincoln was elected president, the Southern states decided to separate from
the Northern states. The Northern states said that the South did not have the
right to secede. Lincoln, in one of his first speeches, said that he was not an
abolitionist, but that he thought slavery should not spread beyond the original
Southern states, it should not spread, for example, to new states like Texas or
California. But then, as the war grew bloody—the Civil War was the
bloodiest war of the nineteenth century—the cause of the North was
confounded with the cause of the abolition of slavery.
The cause of the South was confounded with that of the supporters of
slavery, and Carlyle, in an article titled “Shooting Niagara,” went over to the
Southern side.22 He said that the Negro race was inferior, that the only
destiny possible for the Negro was slavery, and that he was on the side of the
Southern states. He added a sophistic argument that is typical of his sense of
humor—because in the middle of his prophetic tone, Carlyle could also be a
humorist; he said that he did not understand those who fought against slavery,
that he did not understand what possible advantage there could be in
continually changing servants. He thought it much more convenient for the
servants to be for life. Which could be more convenient for the masters, but
perhaps not for the servants.
In the end, Carlyle condemned democracy. That is why, throughout his
entire oeuvre, Carlyle admires dictators, those he called “strong men.” The
term is still used today. That is why he wrote a eulogy for William the
Conqueror, he wrote three volumes of eulogy to the dictator Cromwell; he
praised Dr. Francia, Napoleon, and Frederick the Great of Prussia. And as for
democracy, he said that it was nothing but “despair of finding strong men,”
and that only strong men could save society. He defined democracy with a
memorable phrase like “the chaos that comes with voting.” He wrote about
the state of affairs in England. He traveled all over England, paid a lot of
attention to the problems of poverty, and the workers—he was from a peasant
background. And he said that in every city in England he saw chaos, he saw
disorder, he saw the absurdity of democracy, but at the same time there were
some things that comforted him, that helped him not lose all hope. And these
spectacles were the barracks—there is order in barracks, at least—and
prisons. These were the two things capable of making Carlyle’s spirit rejoice.
We have, then, in everything I’ve said, a kind of manifesto of Nazism
and fascism, conceived before the year 1870. More particularly, Nazism, for
Carlyle believed in the superiority of the various Germanic nations—the
superiority of England, Germany, Holland, and the various Scandinavian
countries. This did not prevent Carlyle from being one of Dante’s greatest
admirers in England. His brother published an admirable, literal translation
(in English prose) of Dante’s Divine Comedy.23 And naturally Carlyle
admired the Greek and Roman conquerors, the Vandals, and Caesar.
As for Christianity, Carlyle believed it was already disappearing, that it
already had no future. And as far as history, he saw salvation in strong men.
He thought that strong men can be—as Nietzsche said later; in a way
Nietzsche would be his disciple—that strong men are beyond good and evil.
This is what Blake said before: that having the same law for the lion and the
ox was an injustice.
I don’t know which of Carlyle’s books to recommend to you. I think
that if you know English, the best book would be Sartor Resartus. Or, if you
are interested—if you are less interested in his style and more in his ideas—
read the lectures he collected under the title On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and
the Heroic in History. As for his more extensive work, on which he spent
fourteen years, his History of Friedrich II of Prussia is a book that has
brilliant descriptions of battles. Carlyle’s battles came out very well, always.
But in the long run it is evident that the author feels himself to be quite
distant from the hero. The hero was an atheist, and a friend of Voltaire’s.
Carlyle was not interested in him.
Carlyle’s life was sad. He ended up turning his friends into enemies.
He preached in favor of dictatorship, and he was dictatorial in his
conversation. He tolerated no contradictions. His best friends distanced
themselves from him. His wife died tragically: she was driving in her carriage
through Hyde Park when she dropped dead of a heart attack. Afterward,
Carlyle felt regret at being a little responsible for her death, for he paid no
attention to her. I think Carlyle came to feel, as our Almafuerte felt, that
personal happiness was denied to him, that his own neurosis destroyed any
hope of being personally happy.24 And that is why he sought happiness in
his work.
I forgot to say—a merely curious detail—that in one of the first
chapters of Sartor Resartus, when speaking about garments, Carlyle says that
the simplest garment he knows of was used by the cavalry of Bolivar in the
South American war. And here we have a description of the poncho as “a
blanket with a hole in the middle,” under which he imagines Bolivar’s
cavalry soldier, he imagines him—simplifying it a bit—“mother naked,” as
naked as when he came out of his mother’s belly, covered by the poncho,
with only his sword and his spear.”25
 CLASS 17

THE VICTORIAN ERA. THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS. THE

NOVELS OF CHARLES DICKENS. WILLIAM WILKIE COLLINS. THE
MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD, BY DICKENS.
NOVEMBER 25, 1966

When we look at the history of French literature, we see that it can be

studied by using the sources that fed it as points of reference. But this method
of study is not applicable to England; it does not fit the English character. As
I have said before, “Every Englishman is an island.” Englishmen are
especially individualistic.
The history of literature that we are doing—and that most people do—
resorts to a method of convenience, and that is the division of literary history
into eras: dividing writers up into eras. And this can be applied to England.
So, we will now see that one of the most remarkable periods in the history of
England is the Victorian era. But such a characterization has the
inconvenience of being too long: it lasts from 1837 to 1900, a long reign.
And, moreover, we would find that defining it is difficult and risky. We
would have difficulty, for example, fitting in Carlyle, an atheist who believed
in neither heaven nor hell. It appears to be a conservative era, but it saw the
rise of the Socialist movement. It is also the time of the great debates between
science and religion, between those who affirmed the truth of the Bible and
those who followed Darwin. (We should note, however, that the Bible
contains great visions of the present.) The Victorian era was characterized by
a great reserve regarding anything related to the sensual or the sexual. And
yet Sir Richard Burton translated the Arabic book The Perfumed Garden, and
he put his whole soul into that work.1 (It is also around this time, in 1855,
that Walt Whitman writes his Leaves of Grass.) It is the height of the British
Empire. Yet, in spite of all this, several writers wrote and acted without any
partisanship: Chesterton, Stevenson, etcetera. The Victorian era was a time of
debates and discussion. It did not have a markedly Protestant tendency; there
is, for example, a strong movement, born in Oxford, that leans toward
Catholicism. So the meeting of all these contrasting elements makes it
difficult to define; but still it exists. All these elements are united by a
common but changing atmosphere lasting seventy-odd years.
It is within this framework that we find Charles Dickens. He is born in
1812 and dies in 1870. He is a man who comes from the lower middle
classes. His father was a clerk and was in debtors’ prison many times.
Dickens was an engaged writer who devoted a large part of his life’s work to
fighting for reform, yet we cannot say that Dickens achieved his goal. And
this perhaps explains why the reformer aspect of Dickens has been so lost to
us. He also lived with the fear that a creditor would send him to debtors’
prison, and he advocated for the reform of schools, prisons, labor systems.
But if a reform fails, the reformer’s work seems to have less value. If it is
successful, it no longer seems relevant. For example, the idea that an
individual must live his own life, which now seems like a cliché, was at one
time a revolutionary idea. This can be seen in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.
Now, the problem with socially engaged literature is that it is never
completely accepted. In the case of Dickens, the social part of his work is
obvious. He was a revolutionary. He had a very difficult childhood, and to
find out about it, we must read David Copperfield, where he also portrays his
own father. Dickens [Senior] is a man who lives on the verge of ruin, a
lifelong debtor with extravagant optimism about the future. Dickens’s mother
was a good woman, but her behavior was rather confused and excessive.
Dickens had to work in a factory when he was a child. Then he was a
journalist and a stenographer. He recorded the debates of the House of
Commons, but much more realistically than Johnson—we’ve already seen
how he did it.
Dickens lived in London. In his book A Tale of Two Cities, based on
the French Revolution, we see that he really could not write a tale of two
cities. He was a resident of just one city: London.
He began in journalism and came to the novel from there. And he
remained faithful to the style he developed, throughout his life. His novels
were published in installments, in serial form, and his work resonated so
much that his readers followed the destinies of his characters as if they were
real. For example, one time he received hundreds of letters asking him not to
let the protagonist of a novel die.
 Now, Dickens was not very interested in plot but rather in character, in
his characters’ personalities. The plot is almost a mere mechanical means
through which the action advances. There is no real development in his
characters. It is the environment, the events, that change them, as is the case
in reality.2 The characters Dickens creates live in the perpetual rapture of
being themselves. He often distinguishes them through dialects; for some he
employs a special dialect. This can be seen in the original English.
But Dickens suffers from an excess of sentimentalism. He does not
remain outside his work when he writes. He identifies with each and every
character. His first book that achieved a large readership was The
Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, published in installments.3 At first
they suggested he use certain illustrations, and Dickens adjusted the text to fit
them. And as he kept writing the book, he kept imagining new characters,
becoming intimate with them. His characters soon began taking on a life of
their own. This is what happens with Mr. Pickwick, who takes on a singular
relevance and is a gentleman with a solid character, and the same thing
happens with the other characters. The servant sees certain ridiculous things
about his master, but he is very fond of him.
Dickens read very little, but one of the first books he did read was the
translation of A Thousand and One Nights; also, the English novelists who
were influenced by Cervantes—the road novels—in which characters
traveling around create the action; adventure jumps out to meet the
characters.4 Pickwick loses a court case, but he believes it to be unfair and
refuses to pay damages, so must spend time in jail.
His servant, Sam Weller, incurs debts he does not pay so he can
accompany him in jail. Dickens’s penchant for extravagant names is worth
noting: Pickwick, Twist, Chuzzlewit, Copperfield. One could list many more.
He ended up making a fortune from literature, and achieving fame. His only
rival was Thackeray. But it is said that even Thackeray’s daughter once asked
him, “Papa, why don’t you write books like Mr. Dickens?” Thackeray was a
cynic, though there are sentimental moments in his works. Dickens was
incapable of portraying a gentleman, but they appear in his work. He was
intimate with the lower classes and the bourgeoisie, but not the members of
the aristocracy, who rarely figure in his work. Thackeray portrays them
because he knew them well; Dickens, because he felt plebian. We should
keep these different circumstances in mind: they set the two writers apart.
Dickens traveled around England giving public readings of his work.
He would choose dramatic chapters. For example, the scene of Pickwick’s
trial. He used a different voice for each of the characters, and he did so with
extraordinary dramatic talent. The audience applauded heartily. It is said that
he would take out his watch, see that he had an hour and a quarter; delays for
applause meant the audience would miss part of the reading. He attempted to
repeat this English experience in the United States, but there he was not well
received. First, because he declared that he was an abolitionist, and second,
because he defended the rights of the author. He felt victimized, offended,
considered it outrageous that North American publishers were growing rich
printing short excerpts of his work. The North Americans thought, on the
contrary, that he was wrong to protest this system. So, when he returned to
England he published American Notes; he seemed not to realize that England
was peopled by ridiculous characters, whereas the North Americans were a
new nation. He attacked them bitterly. As I said, Dickens enjoyed enormous
popularity and grew rich from his work, and he traveled to France, to Italy,
but without trying to understand those countries. He was always looking for
humorous episodes to recount. He died in 1870. He was not at all interested
in literary theory. He was a brilliant man, interested mostly in pursuing his
work.
The structure of his novels divides his characters into the good and the
bad, the absurd and the lovable. He wished to do something like a Final
Judgment in his work, hence many of his endings are artificial, because the
bad are punished and the good are rewarded.
There are two features worth pointing out. Dickens discovered two
things that were important for subsequent literature: childhood, with its
solitude, its fears. (The truth is, we do not know for certain about his
childhood.) When Unamuno speaks about his mother, we are amazed.5 And
Groussac said that it is absurd to devote chapters to childhood—the emptiest
age—and not to spend more time on youth and adulthood.6 Dickens is the
first novelist who gave importance to his characters’ childhoods. Dickens
also discovered the city as a landscape. Landscapes were always the
countryside, mountains, jungles, rivers. But Dickens writes about London. He
is one of the first to find poetry in sordid, impoverished places.
 Second, we should point out that he was interested in the melodramatic
and tragic side of life, along with the caricatured. We know from biographies
that this had an influence on Dostoyevsky, on his unforgettable murders. In
the novel Martin Chuzzlewit, two characters take a trip in a kind of
stagecoach, and one is somehow under the other’s control.7 Chuzzlewit has
made the decision to kill his companion. The coach turns over. Chuzzlewit
does everything possible to make the horses kill him, but his companion is
saved. When they reach the inn, Chuzzlewit closes the door [to his room and
falls asleep], but he dreams that he did kill him. He walks through a forest
and when he emerges, he is alone, without regrets: but he is afraid that the
[ghost of the] murdered man will be waiting for him when he reaches home.
Dickens describes Chuzzlewit emerging alone from the forest. He has no
regrets about what we has done, but he has fear, an absurd fear, that when he
reaches home, the man he murdered will be waiting for him.
Then, in Oliver Twist, we have a poor girl, Nancy, who is strangled by
Bill Sikes, a ruffian. We have the pursuit of Bill Sikes. Bill Sikes has a dog
who loves him very much, and Bill kills it because he is afraid he will be
found because the dog is with him. Dickens was very good friends with
Wilkie Collins. I don’t know if any of you have read The Moonstone or The
Woman in White.8 Eliot says his are the longest detective novels, and the
best. (Dickens collaborated with Wilkie Collins on a play that was staged at
Dickens’s house. And Eliot says that Dickens—because he was an excellent
actor—must have given the roles much more individuality than they had in
the work.) Wilkie Collins was a master in the art of weaving complicated, but
never confusing, storylines. That is, his plots have many threads, but the
reader holds them in his hand. On the contrary, Dickens, in all his novels,
arbitrarily wove the storylines together. Andrew Lang said that if he had to
recount the plot of Oliver Twist and they were threatening him with the death
penalty, he, who so admired Oliver Twist, would certainly be hung.9
In his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens set out to write
a well-constructed detective novel, like his friend Wilkie Collins, the master
of the genre.10 The novel was left incomplete. But for the first installment—
because Dickens was always loyal to the system of serializing his work;
Dickens usually published his novels in one volume after they had appeared
in installments—he gave a series of instructions to his illustrator. And we see
in one of the illustrations one of the characters in a chapter Dickens did not
manage to write, and that character does not have a shadow. Some have
conjectured that he has no shadow because he is a ghost. In the first chapter,
one of the characters smokes opium and has visions, so maybe these visions
are being portrayed.
Chesterton says that God was generous to Dickens, for he gave him the
dramatic end. In none of Dickens’s novels, Chesterton says, does the plot
matter: what mattered were his characters, with their phobias, their clothes
that were always the same, and their special vocabulary. But finally Dickens
decides to write a novel with an important plot, and at almost the very
moment when Dickens is about to announce the murderer, God orders his
death, and so—Chesterton says—we will never know the real secret, the
hidden plot of Edwin Drood, until we meet Dickens in heaven. And then—
says Chesterton—most likely Dickens will no longer remember and will be
as perplexed as we are.11
In conclusion, I would like to tell you that Dickens is one of the great
benefactors of humanity. Not because of the reforms he advocated without
any success but rather because he created a series of characters. One can now
pick up any of Dickens’s novels, open it to any page, and be certain to keep
reading it and enjoying it.
Perhaps the best novel to read to become familiar with Dickens—the
kind of familiarity that can be worth so much in our lives—is his
autobiographical novel, David Copperfield, which contains so many scenes
from Dickens’s childhood. Then, The Pickwick Papers. And then, I would
say, Martin Chuzzlewit, with its deliberately unfair descriptions of America
and the murder of Jonas Chuzzlewit. But the truth is that once one has read
some of Dickens’s pages, once one has resigned oneself to some of his bad
habits, to his sentimentalism, to his melodramatic characters, one has found a
friend for life.
 CLASS 18

THE LIFE OF ROBERT BROWNING. THE OBSCURITY OF HIS

WORK. HIS POEMS.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 1966

Today we will talk about England’s most obscure poet, Robert

Browning. This surname belongs to a group of surnames that, although they
seem to be English, are of Saxon origin. Robert Browning was the son of an
Englishman, but his grandmother was Scottish, and his grandfather—one of
them—was German of Jewish origin. He was what we would today call a
typical Englishman because of his mixed blood. As for his family and its
social standing, they had a good position; they belonged to the upper class.
That is, Browning was born in an aristocratic neighborhood—but one in
which there were also boardinghouses.
Browning is born in 1812, the same year as Dickens, but the parallels
end there. Their lives, and they themselves, are very different. Robert
Browning was educated, more than anywhere else, in his father’s library. As
a result, he had vast cultural knowledge, for everything interested him and he
read everything, especially about Jewish culture. He also knew languages—
Greek, for example. Practicing them and translating was his spiritual refuge
for many years, especially during the final years of his life.
His life as a wealthy man who knew from the beginning that he was
destined for poetry was, nevertheless, a dramatic one. So much so that it was
later brought to the stage and then the movie screen. That is to say, it is a life
that arouses interest because of its plot. The woman who would be his wife,
Elizabeth Barrett, suffered a terrible fall when she was young, which
damaged her spine.1 From that time on, she lived at home, surrounded by
doctors, and people who whispered, who spoke in low voices. She was
dominated by her father, who thought that his daughter’s duty was to resign
herself to being an invalid. So as to prevent anybody from upsetting her, she
was absolutely prohibited from receiving visitors. Elizabeth, however, had a
poetic vocation. She finally published a book, Sonnets from Portuguese, that
strongly attracted the interest of Robert Browning.2 Miss Barrett’s book was
undoubtedly the book of a passionate woman. So Browning wrote to her, and
they established an epistolary relationship. The letters are difficult to
understand, written in a dialect they shared, of their own making, constructed
out of allusions to Greek poets. Until finally Browning proposed that he visit
her. She reacted with great alarm. She told him it was impossible, that the
doctors had forbidden her from any agitation that might be caused by a visit
from a stranger. They fell in love, and he proposed to her. She then took the
most decisive step of her life: she agreed to go out for a ride with him behind
her father’s back. It had been years since she had left her house. She was
amazed. She got out of the carriage, walked a few steps, and saw that the cold
afternoon air did her no harm. She touched a tree, in silence. And she told
Browning that she would run away with him, and they would marry secretly.
A few days after they were married, they ran off to Italy. Her father
never forgave her, not even when her illness worsened. He played his hand,
as he always had, and never forgave what he considered to be a betrayal.
Robert and Elizabeth settled in Italy. It was the period of the national
liberation movement. The Brownings’ house was under constant surveillance.
Browning felt an intense love for Italy, as did many of his contemporaries.
He was interested in the struggle of one country against another for its
freedom, and so he was interested in Italy’s struggle against Austria. He
managed to bring about such an improvement in his wife’s health that she
was able to climb mountains with him. They did not have children, but they
were very happy.3 Until, at last, she dies, and then Browning writes his major
work: The Ring and the Book. He finally returns to London and devotes
himself to literature. He is already a famous author, but he is considered
obscure—as Góngora and others were. In London, a “Browning Society” was
even founded that was dedicated to interpreting his poems. Today, for every
one of his poems, there are two or more explanations. In an encyclopedia,
you can look for the titles of Browning’s poems and find one or several
explanations that have been given. . . . So, at the meetings of this society, the
members sometimes read controversial articles, each of which offered an
interpretation of a poem, and Browning often attended these meetings. He
would go, drink a cup of tea, listen to the interpretations, then he would thank
them and say that they had given him much to think about. But he never
committed himself to any one in particular.
It is remarkable that Browning was such a good friend of Tennyson,
who boasted that his entire oeuvre had a Virgilian clarity. Nevertheless, the
two were friends and neither accepted that anybody else would speak badly
of the other. Robert Browning continued to publish books, among which was
a translation of Euripides. He knew Latin, German, Greek, and Old English.
Browning dies in 1889, wrapped in a kind of strange glory. After the death of
his wife, he had another love, but this was never reliably proven. Elizabeth
was not just a poet, she was also interested in Italian politics. Browning’s
obscurity is not a verbal one. There is not a single line in his poems that is
incomprehensible. But the overall interpretation of his poems is obscure, and
some have been declared impossible to understand. It is a psychological
difficulty. Oscar Wilde said of the work of novelist George Meredith that he
was Browning in prose.4 According to him, Browning used verse as a means
to write prose.5
Browning had an almost fatal facility with writing verse. He abounded
in rhymes that Valle Inclán then continued to use in his book La Pipa de Kif;
his poems were written exclusively with rhymes of this kind.6 If Browning
had chosen prose rather than poetry, he would have been one of the great
short-story writers in the English language. But during that era, poetry was
given the greatest importance, and Browning’s verses particularly stand out
for their musical qualities. Browning was also interested in studies of
casuistry, a branch of philosophy that deals with ethics. He was interested in
contradictory and complex characters. So he invented a form of first-person
lyrical-dramatic poetry in which it is not the author but rather a character who
is speaking. This has a distant precedent in “Deor’s Lament.”7
Now, let us look at the poems. Let us look at one of his less well-
known, but most characteristic ones, “Fears and Scruples.” The poem is two
pages long, is not obscure, but like all of Browning’s poems it has the virtue
of not being at all like any of his other poems. The protagonist, the “I” of the
poem, is an unknown man. We are not told his name or what era he lived in.
This man counts on—or thinks he can count on—a famous friend whom he
has seen on only a few occasions. The friend has looked at him and smiled.
The friend has performed great deeds, he is famous throughout the world, and
the two of them have maintained a correspondence. The poor man finally
says that his great deeds have not been attributed to his illustrious friend. He
has brought the letters he received to be analyzed by handwriting experts, and
they have told him they are apocryphal. But he ends up saying that he
believes in these letters, in their authenticity and in the great deeds, and that
his whole life has been enriched by this friendship. The others reject this,
they try to destroy his faith. And in the end, there appears the question:
“What if this friend happen to be—God?” And so the poem ends up being a
parable about the man who prays and doesn’t know if his prayer falls into a
vacuum or is heard by somebody, by a distant listener. What is that friend
who is God?
Let us now look at another poem. This one is “My Last Duchess,” in
which the speaker is the Duke of Ferrara from the Renaissance.8 He is
speaking to an emissary of another aristocrat, who has come to arrange the
marriage of the duke, who is a widower, to the aristocrat’s daughter. The
duke ushers his guest into one of the rooms, where he shows him a curtain
and says, “That curtain is usually not open.” Here we see the duke’s jealous
nature, because behind the curtain is a portrait of his first wife. The guest is
finally able to admire the splendid painting. The duke then speaks about his
wife’s smile. He says that she smiled at everybody, that she smiled easily,
perhaps too easily. She was very beautiful, but “paint cannot exactly
reproduce her cheeks.” She was very beautiful and “su corazón se alegraba
fácilmente” [“her heart … too soon made glad”]. They loved each other; he
loved her and she loved him. But seeing her so happy made him suspicious
that in his absence, she kept being happy, she kept smiling. So then he gave
the command, and “todas sus sonrisas cesaron.” [“Then all smiles stopped
together.”] We understand from this that the duke had his wife poisoned.…
Then they descend the staircase to eat, and the duke shows his guest a statue.
Previously a dowry was spoken of, but that causes no concern because the
duke trusts the aristocrat’s generosity. He also trusts that his future wife will
know how to be the Duchess of Ferrara, an honor she accepts—we don’t
know if as a duty, or because she does not realize what it means. The general
purpose of the poem is to show the duke’s character, just as he is presented.
“How It Strikes a Contemporary” is the title of an unusual poem that
takes place in Valladolid.9 The protagonist could be, perhaps, Cervantes, or
some other famous Spanish writer. The “I” of the poem is a bourgeois
gentleman, who says that he has known only one poet his whole life, that he
can give an approximate description of him, though he is not at all certain
that he was a poet. And he describes him, saying that he was a man who
dressed modestly, but with dignity, whom everybody knew. The suit he wore
was threadbare at the elbows and along the hems of the pants. His cape had
once been elegant. He walked around the city followed by his dog, and as he
walked, he cast a tall, black shadow onto the sun-filled streets. He did not
look at anybody, but everybody seemed to look at him. And although he
didn’t look at anybody, he seemed to notice everything. Word spread in the
city that it was this man who really ruled the city, not the governor. In this we
are reminded of Victor Hugo’s comment that even though he was in exile, he
considered himself “a sort of witness of God” and the “sleepwalker of the
sea.” It’s remarkable that Shakespeare also speaks of “God’s spies.”10
It was said [of this man] that every night he sent letters to the king—
here we should think of the word “king” as the same as “God”—and that his
house was sumptuously furnished, and he was served by naked slave girls,
and great tapestries by Titian hung on the walls. But the gentleman followed
him once and found out that this was untrue: the man sat in a doorway, his
legs crossed over his dog. The house was new, recently painted, and he ate at
a table with his maid. Then he played cribbage, and before midnight, he went
to bed. He then imagines him dying, and then imagines a host of angels
surrounding him and taking him to God for his service or vocation of
observing men. The gentleman concludes by saying, “I could never write a
verse, let’s go have fun.”11
Another poem is “Karshish,” narrated by an Arab doctor.12 It is a long
poem, written by the doctor to his master, and takes place in an era before
Islam. He says the master knows everything, that he simply collects the
crumbs that fall from all that wisdom.
The first part of the poem is purely professional; it shows Browning’s
interest in medicine. The essence of the poem is a case of catalepsy. Before
that, the narrator tells of his strange experiences: he was attacked by brigands
and wounded; he had to use a pumice stone, medicinal herbs, snake skin. As I
said, the essence of the poem is a case of catalepsy induced in order to work a
cure.
He is taken to a village. There a sick man was cured by a doctor who
put him into a death-like state. Even his heart stopped beating; and then the
doctor went to see the sick man, who told him that he had been dead and then
resuscitated. The doctor tried to talk to him, but the other heard nothing,
cared about nothing—or rather he cared about everything. Then the narrator
wanted to meet the doctor, and they told him that this doctor had been killed
in a riot, and others told him he had been executed. Then he returns to greet
the master, and the poem ends. The resuscitated man is Lazarus; the dead
doctor is Christ. All this is simply touched on by the poet in passing.
An analogous poem is the one in which a “tyrant of Syracuse”
appears.13 A universal artist receives a letter from the tyrant, and this artist
happens to live in a later era. His poems are perfect, like those of Homer,
only he has arrived after Homer. He has written about philosophy. The poet-
philosopher did not understand how man could return to a state of ignorance.
And the tyrant wants to know if there is any hope for man’s immortality. The
philosopher, who has read the Platonic dialogues, who talks about Socrates,
says there is a sect that claims there is, that claims God has been embodied in
a man. And the philosopher says that the sect is wrong. The philosopher and
the tyrant have come close to the Christian truth, but neither sees it or realizes
it. We can find a similar story in Anatole France.
 CLASS 19

ROBERT BROWNING'S POEMS. A CHAT WITH ALFONSO

REYES. THE RING AND THE BOOK.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1966

We will now continue our discussion of the work of Robert Browning. I

recall that they once asked him the meaning of one of his poems, and he
answered: “I wrote it long ago. When I wrote it, only God and I knew what it
meant; now, only God knows,” in order to avoid answering.
I spoke about some of his minor poems, and there is a poem I would
like to recommend to you, but I cannot explain it, not even vaguely. It is
perhaps the strangest of all, and it is called “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
Came.”1 “Childe” does not mean “child” here. It is an ancient title for the
nobility and is written with a final “e.” The line is taken from Shakespeare; it
is also the name of a ballad that has been lost.2 And it is perhaps the strangest
of all of Browning’s poems. The great American poet Carl Sandburg has
written a poem titled “Manitoba Childe Roland.”3 It tells how he read that
poem to a boy on a farm in Minnesota, and how the child did not understand
anything—perhaps the person reading also did not really understand it—but
how both of them were carried away, fascinated by the mystery of the poem
that has never been explained.4 It is full of magical details. It apparently
takes place in the Middle Ages. Not in an historic Middle Ages, but rather the
Middle Ages of books about knights errant, of the books in Don Quixote’s
library.
And now, before talking about The Ring and the Book, I would like to
mention, a bit randomly, a few other poems by Browning. There is one titled
“Mr. Sludge, the Medium.”5 The protagonist of this poem is a medium, a
fake medium who takes a lot of money from an American millionaire who is
in despair over the recent death of his wife. Mr. Sludge has put the widower
in communication with the spirit of the dead woman. And then he is found
out, by the American millionaire himself, and he says he is going to report
him to the police as an imposter, but finally he says that he will not on the
condition that Mr. Sludge, the fake medium, tell him the true story of his
career, a career built on deception. And the other says that he heard about
spiritualism and thought that he could take advantage of it, for it is not
difficult to deceive people who want to be deceived. That, in fact, those who
have been deceived by him—not excluding the angry gentleman who is
threatening him—have been his accomplices, have closed their eyes when
confronting clumsy lies. He tells about how at first he showed his victims
texts he said were written in Homer’s handwriting, and as he did not know
the Greek alphabet, the Greek words were represented with circles and dots
“antes que encontrara el libro útil que sabe” [“before I found the useful book
that knows”]. Then he grows more confident and in some way exalts in
himself and then, suddenly, he becomes desolate. Then he tries to recover his
victim’s trust. He asks him if he hears at that moment the voice of his
beloved wife, of that woman he himself has learned to love through the
man’s love of her, and through the dialogue with her spirit. The other then
threatens him with physical violence. Mr. Sludge continues confessing the
truth and then we reach the end of the poem. It is a long poem, because
Browning had studied the subject very well, the subject of fake mediums.
And then we come to the end, to a conclusion that is wholly unexpected by
the reader and for those who have been following the story of Mr. Sludge’s
deceptions and the way he worked them. In the end, the medium, whom the
other is on the verge of attacking, of physically assaulting, says that
everything he has told him has been the truth, that he has not been deceiving
him. That he was carrying the dead woman’s letters hidden in the sleeves of
his jacket. “Nevertheless,” he adds, in spite of all his tricks, “I do believe
there is something in spiritualism, I do believe in the other world.” That is,
the protagonist admits that he has been an imposter, but that does not mean
that there is no other world, that there are no spirits. One can see how
Browning liked ambiguous situations and souls. For example, in this case, the
imposter is also a believer.
There is a short poem titled “Memorabilia,” “things worth
remembering” in Latin.6 I think the title is taken from some interspersed
scenes in the work of the great Swedish mystic Swedenborg. It is about two
gentlemen who are conversing, and it turns out that one of them met the well-
known atheist poet Shelley, that poet who had so much influence on young
people. And the other says to him, “What, did you talk to Shelley? Did you
see him, he talked to you, and you answered him? How strange that all is, and
yet it is true!” And he says, once he had to cross a moor, a moor that had a
name and undoubtedly had some use, some purpose, some destiny in the
world. But he has forgotten everything. Everything else—all the blank miles
—have been erased. What he remembers is an eagle feather. There, he saw
and picked up and placed in his breast the eagle feather—and he has
forgotten everything else. This is what happens in life. He has forgotten, but
he does remember his encounter with Shelley.7
This year, I met Alfonso Reyes.8 He spoke to me about the great
Mexican poet Othón, and he said to me, “What? You know Othón?”9 And
then Reyes immediately remembered Browning’s poem and repeated the first
stanza:

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,

And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!

And then, at the end:

A moulted feather, an eagle-feather—

Well, I forget the rest.

And there is another poem about a man who is dying, and a minister
comes, a Protestant minister, who tells him that the world is a vale of tears.10
And the man says to him: “Do I see the world as a valley of tears? No,
reverend Sir, not I,” “¿Veo yo acaso el mundo como un valle de lágrimas?
No, reverendo señor, no yo.” And then he, who is disfigured and dying, tells
the minister that what he remembers of the world has nothing to do with a
vale of tears. That what he remembers is a house, a country house where
there lived a woman, probably a servant with whom he had a love affair. And
to describe the topography of the house, he makes use of the medicine bottles
on his bedside table. And he says, “That curtain there is green or blue for a
healthy person, but it reminds me of the blinds of the house, how they were,
and the lane along the side, because I, scurrying along it, could reach a door,
and there she would be, waiting for me.” “I know,” he says, “that all this is
improper,” “that it is all indecent, but I am dying.”11 And then he says that
he remembers these illicit loves with the servant. That is the only thing he
remembers, the only thing life has left him at those final moments, and what
he remembers at the end, without any remorse.
There’s another poem whose protagonist is Caliban.12 Browning had
read a book about the sources Shakespeare used, about the Patagonian gods
—a god named Setebos. And Browning uses this information about the
religion of the Patagonian Indians as the basis for his poem titled “Caliban
upon Setebos.”
There’s another poem, “Love Among the Ruins,” and this takes place
in the countryside of Rome.13 There is a man—we can assume a shepherd—
who speaks about the ruins and describes the splendor of a city that once
existed there. He speaks of the kings, of the thousands of horsemen, the
palaces, the banquets, a subject similar to the Anglo-Saxon elegy called “The
Ruin.” And then he says that he often met a girl there, and that this girl would
wait for him, and that he would see the love in her eye before he approached
and embraced her. He ends by saying that of everything in the world, love is
best, love is enough for him, what does he care about kings and empires that
have disappeared? Because Browning has—and I have not spoken enough
about this—many poems about love, physical love as well. And it is this
theme of love that is the subject of the book we will discuss today, before we
speak about Dante Gabriel Rossetti—who founded the group the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood, and that comes after Browning’s time. But
Browning’s major work, a book written with a very strange technique, is The
Ring and the Book.
I don’t know if any of you have seen the admirable Japanese film that
came out many years ago called Rashomon.14 Akutagawa, who wrote the
story on which the film was based, was Browning’s first Japanese
translator.15 The technique used in the story (and in the film) is taken from
Browning’s The Ring and the Book.The Ring and the Book is much more
complex than the film. Which is understandable, because a book can be much
more complex than a film. In the film, we have the story of a samurai who
goes through the jungle with his wife. They are attacked by a bandit. The
bandit kills the woman, and then we have three different versions of the same
event. One is told by the samurai, the other by the bandit, and the other by the
spirit of the woman through the mouth of a witch. And the three stories are
different. They do, however, all refer to the same event. Now, Browning
attempted something similar, but much more difficult, because Browning was
interested in seeking the truth. Let’s begin with the title of the book: The Ring
and the Book. This can be explained in the following way: Browning begins
by saying that to make a ring—and the ring becomes a metaphor for the book
that he is about to write, that he has already begun to write—it is necessary to
use a metal alloy. The ring cannot be made of pure gold, one must mix the
gold with other, baser, metals. And for him to make this book, The Ring and
the Book, he has had to add to the gold—this humility is also typical of
Browning—baser metals, the metals of his own imagination. As for the pure
metal, he has found it. He found it, but he has had to extract it from a book
that he found at a stand in Florence, and that book is the story of a criminal
trial that took place one century earlier in Rome.
That book was translated into English, published by Everyman’s
Library, and you would know it under the title The Old Yellow Book.16 This
book contains the entire story of a criminal trial, which is sordid, and a rather
horrible story. It is about a count who married a peasant woman believing she
was wealthy. Then he repudiates her and locks her up in a convent. She
manages to escape from the convent to go live at the home of her parents.
Then the count appears, because he suspects her of being an adulteress, of
having had a love affair with a priest. The count is accompanied by several
murderers; they enter the house and kill her. Then he is arrested, and the book
records the declarations of the murderer and some letters. Browning read and
reread the book, and learned all the details of this sordid story. Finally, the
count is sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. And then Browning
decided to discover the truth and wrote The Ring and the Book.
 And in The Ring and the Book, the story is repeated I think ten times,
the same story. And what is curious, what is original, is that the story—as
opposed to what happens in Rashomon—as far as the facts, is the same. The
reader of the book learns them perfectly. The difference is in the point of
view of each character.17 It is possible that Browning was inspired by the
epistolary novels that were in fashion in the eighteenth and the beginning of
the nineteenth centuries. I think that Die Wahlverwandtschaften, by Goethe,
belongs to this genre.18 And he was also inspired by the novels of Wilkie
Collins. Collins, in order to lighten up the long narrative of his detective
plots, would pass the story around from character to character. And this
worked for satirical purposes. For example, we have a chapter narrated by
one of the characters. That character tells how he had just conversed with So-
and-so, who had impressed him greatly with the wit and depth of his
conversation. And then we go to the next chapter, narrated by his
interlocutor, and in that chapter we see that he has just spoken with the
narrator of the previous chapter, and that the other bored him to death with
his imbecilities. That is, there is a game of contrast and satire.
Now, Browning takes this method of having several people tell the
story, but he does not do it in succession. That is, one character does not pass
on the story to another. Each character tells the whole story, the same story,
from beginning to end. And Browning dedicates the first part to Elizabeth
Barrett, who had died. And at the end he says, “Oh, lírico amor, mitad ángel,
mitad pájaro, toda una maravilla y un incontenible deseo.” And he says how
sometimes he has looked at the sky and he seems to have seen a place where
the blue of the sky is more blue, more passionate, and he thought that she
might be there. I remember those first lines. “Ah, lyric Love, half angel, half
bird, and all a wonder, and a wild desire.” And then we have the first canto of
the poem, titled “Half-Rome.” And there we have the facts, the facts told by a
random individual who saw Pompilia—Pompilia is the murdered woman—
and was impressed by her beauty and is certain of the guilt of the murderer,
of the injustice of her murder. Then we have another chapter that is called
“Half-Rome” also. There, the same story is told by a gentleman, a gentleman
of a certain age, who is telling it to his nephew. And he tells him that the
count, by killing his wife, has acted justly. He is on the count’s side, the side
of the murderer. Then we have “Tertium Quid,” and this character tells the
story with what he believes is impartiality: that the woman is partially right,
and the killer also is partially right. He tells the story halfheartedly.
We then have the defense of the priest. Then we have the defense of
the count. And then we have what the prosecutor and the defense attorney
say. The prosecutor and the defense attorney use legal jargon, and it is as if
they were not even talking about the story: they are continually held up by
legal issues. That is, they speak, we can say, from outside the story.
Then there is something that could be what the woman would have
said. And at the end, we have a kind of monologue by the count, who has
been sentenced to death. Here the count abandons all subterfuge, all lies, and
he tells the truth. He tells how he has been tortured by jealousy, and how his
wife deceived him, how she took part in the first deception of him. When he
married her, he believed that he was marrying a woman with money. They
deceived him, and she was an accomplice in this deception. And as he is
saying these things dawn is breaking. And, horrified, he sees the gray light of
morning. They come to get him to take him to the scaffold. And then he
concludes with these words: “Pompilia, ¿vas a dejar que me asesinen?”
That’s what the man who murdered her says. “Pompilia, will you let them
murder me?” And then the pope speaks. The pope here represents wisdom
and truth. The pope thinks it is just for the murderer to be executed. And then
we have a few reflections of Browning’s.
Now, I have compared Browning to Kafka.19 You might remember
that poem “Fears and Scruples,” I looked at at the beginning, that poem about
the ambiguity of the relationship between the believer and God. The believer
prays but does not know if there is a listener, an interlocutor. He does not
know if there is really a dialogue. But in this book—and this is the
fundamental difference between Browning and Kafka—Browning knows. He
is not just playing with his imagination, Browning believes that there is a
truth. Browning believes there is, or is not, a guilty party. He believes, that is,
he was always attracted to, the ambiguity, the essential mystery of the human
relationship to the universe, but Browning believed in a truth. Browning
wrote this book, he imagined, he re-created this criminal episode in order to
be able to confer a truth. And he believed he had come to it by using, of
course, that metal he called baser, the metal in the gold alloy, the metal of his
imagination.
 Browning was essentially an optimist. There is a poem by Browning
titled “Rabbi Ben Ezra.”20 Rabbi Ben Ezra was a Spanish rabbi.21Chesterton
says that it is typical of Browning that, when he wanted to pronounce his
final truth about the world, about mankind, about our hopes, he put this truth
in the mouth of an obscure Spanish rabbi from the Middle Ages, a forgotten
rabbi, about whom we know only that he lived in Toledo and afterwards in
Italy, and who was always complaining about his bad luck. He said that he
had such bad luck that if he had taken to selling candles, the sun would have
never set, and if he had taken to selling shrouds, men would suddenly have
become immortal. And Browning puts in the mouth of this Rabbi Ben Ezra
the idea he came to about the world, the idea that everything we do not
achieve on earth, we will achieve—or we are achieving—in heaven. And he
says that what happens to us, what we see, is like the arc of a circumference.
We see merely a fragment or even a very small curve, but the circumference
—happiness, plenitude—exists elsewhere, and it will exist for us. Browning
comes to the idea that old age is not only a decline, a mutilation, an
impoverishment. Old age is also a plenitude, because in old age we
understand things.22 He came to believe this. This poem is another of
Browning’s great poems, and it concludes with this idea: that old age is the
perfection of youth.
I began with the metaphor of the arc fragment and the full and
complete circumference. There is a vast bibliography about Browning. There
is an encyclopedia written about Browning, with often absurd explanations of
his poems.23 It says, for example, that the poem “Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower Came” is a poem about vivisection.24 There are other absurd
explanations. But perhaps the best book about Browning, a delightful book to
read, is a book that Chesterton published in the first decade of this century, in
the year 1907 or 1909, I think, and it is part of that admirable series, English
Men of Letters.25 Reading a biography of Chesterton, written by his
secretary, Maisie Ward, I read that all of Chesterton’s quotations of
Browning in the book were wrong.26 But they were wrong because
Chesterton had read Browning so much that he had learned him by heart.
And he had learned it so well that he had not needed to consult Browning’s
work a single time. He was wrong precisely because he knew it.27 It is a pity
that the editor of the series, English Men of Letters, Virginia Woolf’s father,
Leslie Stephen, reinstated the original text. It would have been interesting to
compare Browning’s original text to how they appear in Chesterton’s text.
Unfortunately, they were corrected, and the printed book contains
Browning’s texts. It would have been lovely to know how Chesterton
transformed in his memory Browning’s verses—for memory is also made up
of forgetting.
I feel some kind of remorse. I think I have been unfair to Browning.
But with Browning something happens that happens with all poets, that we
must question them directly. I think, in any case, that I have done enough to
interest you in Browning’s work. The pity is, as I already said, that Browning
wrote his work in verse. If not, he would now be known as one of the great
novelists and one of the most original short-story writers in the English
language. Though if he had written in prose, we would have lost much
admirable music. Because Browning was a consummate master of English
verse. He mastered it as well as Tennyson, or Swinburne, or any other. But
there is no doubt that for a book like The Ring and the Book—a book made
up of the same story repeated several times—it would have been better in
prose. The curious thing about The Ring and the Book, to which I will now
return, is that although each character recounts the same events, and although
there is no difference in what they tell, there is a fundamental difference,
which belongs to the realm of human psychology, the fact that each of us
believes we are justified. For example, the count admits he is a murderer, but
the word “murderer” is too general. We know this from reading other books.
If we read Macbeth, for example, or if we read Crime and Punishment by
Dostoyevsky—I think the original is called “Guilt and Expiation”—we do
not feel that Macbeth or Raskolnikov are murderers. That word is too blunt.
We see how events have led them to commit a murder, which is not the same
as being a murderer. Is a man defined by what he has done? Cannot a man
commit a crime, and cannot his crime be justified? A man is led to the
execution of a crime through thousands of circumstances. In the case of
Macbeth, for example, we have the first scene with the three witches, who are
also the three Fates. These witches prophesize what will take place. And so
Macbeth, upon seeing that these prophecies are correct, comes to think that
he was predestined to murder Duncan, his king, and then he commits other
murders. And the same thing happens in The Ring and the Book: none of the
characters lies, but each one of the characters feels justified. Now, Browning
believes there is a guilty party, that this guilty party is the count, even though
he thinks he is justified, given the circumstances, for murdering his wife.
And Chesterton, in his book about Browning, writes about other great
poets; he says that Homer might have thought, for example, “I will tell them
the truth about the world, and I will tell them the truth based on the fall of a
great city, on the defense of that city,” and he made the Iliad. And then
another poet, whose name has been forgotten, says: “I will tell them the truth
about the world, and I will tell it based on what a just man suffered, his
friends’ reproaches, the voice of God who descends in a swirl,” and he wrote
the Book of Job. And another poet could say, “I will tell them the truth about
the world, and I will tell it by describing to them an imaginary or visionary
journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise,” and that poet is Dante. And
Shakespeare could have thought, “I will tell them the truth about the world by
telling stories about a son who learned, from a ghost’s revelations, that his
mother had been an adulteress and a murderer,” and he wrote Hamlet. But
what Browning did was stranger. He said, “I have found this story of a
criminal trial, a sordid story of adultery, the story of a murder, the story of
lies and deceptions. And based on that story, which all of Italy talked about,
and which all of Italy has forgotten, I will reveal to them the truth about the
world,” and he wrote The Ring and the Book.
In the next class I will discuss the great English poet of Italian origin,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and I will begin by describing his tragic personal
history. And then we will look at two or three of his poems, without
excluding several of his sonnets, sonnets that are considered to be perhaps the
most excellent in the English language.
 CLASS 20

THE LIFE OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. EVALUATION OF

ROSSETTI AS A POET AND A PAINTER. THE THEME OF THE
DOUBLE (FETCH). A BOOK OF EXHUMED POEMS. ROSSETTI'S
POEMS. HISTORY CYCLICALLY REPEATED.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1966

Today we will talk about a poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who is quite
different from Robert Browning, even though they were contemporaries, and
even though Browning at first exercised a considerable influence over him.
Rossetti’s dates are easy to remember, for we have 1828 for his birth, and
1882—the two digits inverted—for his death. Moreover, there is a link
between the two, which is the profound love they both felt toward Italy. In
general, it is typical for the northern nations to love the Mediterranean
nations, a love that is not always returned, of course. In Rossetti’s case there
is also the circumstance of his blood, which, except for that of one English
grandmother, was Italian.
Rossetti was born in London. His father was an Italian refugee, a
liberal, who had devoted himself—for good reason, like so many other
Italians—to the study of The Divine Comedy.1 At home I have eleven or
twelve annotated editions of the Comedy, from the most ancient to the most
modern, let us say. But I have not been able to acquire the edition of The
Divine Comedy done by Rossetti’s father.2 Dante [Alighieri], in a letter to
Cangrande della Scala, says his poem can be read in four ways.3 We can read
it as a fantasy tale of a journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise. But
also, as a son of Dante’s suggested, we can read it as a description of the life
of a sinner, symbolized by hell; the life of a penitent, symbolized by
purgatory; and the life of a righteous man, symbolized by the fortunate in
paradise.4 And now that I have said this, I recall that the great pantheistic and
mystical Irishman, Johannes Scotus Eriugena, said that the Holy Scriptures
could contain an infinite number of interpretations, like the iridescent
plumage of a peacock. And I believe there was a rabbi who wrote that the
Holy Scriptures were specifically destined, predestined, for each of its
readers. That is, it has a different meaning if any of you read it or if I read it,
or if it is read by men in the future or in the past.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s father’s interpretation was mystical.
Rossetti’s biographers write that when Rossetti’s father said the book was
“sommamente mistico,” this was the highest praise he could give it. Rossetti’s
mother was related to Byron’s doctor, an Italian doctor whose name I now
forget.5 Rossetti’s home had an intellectual and political ambiance, for all the
Italian refugees who went to London visited the Rossettis. Therefore, Rossetti
grew up in a literary environment and was bilingual as a child. That is, he
was equally familiar with the English of London and the Italian of his elders.
From the time he was a child, Rossetti was raised in the cult of Dante and
poets like Cavalcanti and others, and in addition he was drawn to the study of
drawing and painting. His drawings are among the most delicate in England.
As a painter … I confess I have done everything possible—and there are, I
think, friends of mine who have also had this experience—I have tried to
admire—in the Tate Gallery, I believe—Rossetti’s paintings; and I have
always failed. It has been said as an all-too-obvious joke that as a painter he
was a great poet, and as a poet he was a great painter. Or, as Chesterton
expresses it, he was too good a painter to be an entirely great poet, and too
good a poet to be an entirely great painter. For my part, I understand very
little about painting, but I think I understand something about poetry. And I
am convinced—a conviction I am not sure the current literary fashions share
—that Rossetti is one of the great English poets, that is, one of the world’s
great poets.
At first, Rossetti dedicated himself to drawing. His drawings were
singularly delicate: there is that vibration in each of them, that beginning of
movement that seems to be characteristic of great drawings. As for his
paintings, the figures are awkward, the colors seem to me too coarse and
vivid. Moreover, they are supposed to be illustrations, illustrations sometimes
of his own poems. It is an odd labor to take a poem that is decidedly visual—
as are many of Rossetti’s, such as “The Blessed Damozel”—and compare it
to its felicitous version in an oil painting. In the British Museum, Rossetti
became somewhat familiar (at the time, reproductions as we have now did
not exist) with the work of painters prior to Raphael. And he reached the
conclusion—scandalous at the time and still not accepted by all—that
Raphael represented not the apogee of painting as everybody then affirmed,
but rather the beginning of the decline of that art. He believed that the Italian
and Flemish artists before Rafael were superior to him. And along with a
group of friends, William Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones, who were then joined
by some famous poets, William Morris and Swinburne first of all, founded a
society called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.6 But they were less interested
in imitating the pre-Raphaelites than painting with the honesty, simplicity,
and deep emotion that they saw in those men, “the early men” at the
beginning, we can say. And they founded a magazine with the unfortunate
title The Germ to spread their ideas, and that of the new painting and their
poetry. I have said that aesthetic movements are rare in England. I don’t
mean they don’t exist. What I mean to say is that poets and painters do not, as
in France, tend to form coteries and publish manifestos. This seems to be in
keeping with English individualism, and also a certain modesty, a certain
bashfulness. I remember the case of Thackeray, whom some people from a
magazine went to see in order to write an article about him. He was famous
as a novelist, Dickens’s rival, and in answer he said, “I am a private
gentleman,” and did not allow them to write about him or portray him. He
thought that the work of the writer should be public, but his life should not
be.
Now, as far as poetry is concerned, the theories of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood did not differ much from those of Wordsworth, though their
application, as often happens in these circumstances, was totally different, for
there is no similarity at all between a poem by Wordsworth and a poem by
Swinburne, Rossetti, or Morris. Moreover, Rossetti began, like Coleridge,
using a deliberate and artificial medieval language, like the subjects of his
paintings. In this course we have not had time to talk about the cycle of
legends of Celtic origin that arose in England and were then taken to Brittany
by the British who fled from the Saxon and Anglo invasions. You know these
legends, they are the nucleus of Quixote’s library: the stories of King Arthur,
of the Round Table, the guilty love between the queen and Lancelot, the
search for the Holy Grail, etcetera.7 And these subjects, which are later
written about in England in a book called Le Morte d’Arthur, were at first the
pre-Raphaelists’ favorite subjects, though many also painted contemporary
subjects (several of these paintings, to their viewers’ shock, were of workers,
railways, a newspaper tossed on the ground).8 All of this was new at the
time. The earlier belief, that poetry should seek noble subjects, was applied to
painting. And what was noble, of course, was what had the patina, the
prestige, of the past.
But let us now return to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s biography. Dante
Rossetti has been called—after the title of a poem by Browning—“the Italian
in England.” It is curious that he never wanted to visit Italy. Perhaps he felt
that such a visit was unnecessary, since Italy was in his reading and ran in his
veins. The fact is that Rossetti did undertake a “trip to the continent,” as they
say in English, but he did not go beyond France and the Low Countries. He
never went to Italy, though in Italy they would not have been able to tell that
he was English. And since he was born in London, he liked to take on—this
seems typical of men of letters—the dialect of the city, cockney. This would
be as if he had been born in Buenos Aires and felt obliged to speak in
lunfardo.9 Rossetti was a man of strong passions, with a violent nature, as
was Browning. By the way, Browning never liked Rosssetti’s poems; he
thought they were, as he said, “artificially perfumed.” That is, that in addition
to the natural passion arising from a subject—which Wordsworth sought and
found in his best pages—Rossetti liked to add adornments, sometimes foreign
to the subject itself. Rossetti actually studied Shakespeare a lot, and in many
of his poems, his language, no less passionate than Shakespeare’s for being
more artificial, shows this. For example, there is a poem in which he speaks
of insomnia, and he says that sleep watches him from afar while he is awake
“with cold commemorative eyes,” “con fríos ojos conmemorativos.”10 You
see, it is perhaps the first time that the word “eye” is joined with
“commemorative,” which surely can be justified etymologically, for it is eyes
that remember, that commemorate the past.
Rossetti frequented drawing academies, painting academies, and met a
girl named Siddal, who was his model for almost all his paintings.11 And
thereby was created a type, the Rossetti type, as other painters have done
subsequently. This girl was a tall girl with red hair, and a long neck (like
Edith Swanneck about whom we spoke when we talked about the death of the
last Saxon king of England, Harold) and with full lips, very sensual lips, that
I think are now again in fashion. But this type was new then, and so Miss
Siddal was the Black Queen or Mary Magdalene, or any other Greek or
medieval character. They fell in love. Rossetti married very young and then
found out what he already knew: that this woman had a very sickly
constitution. Rossetti taught drawing at a night school for workers founded
by the great critic and writer [John] Ruskin, who was a patron of the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood. Now, Rossetti had other models. One model he used
only a few times, but he fell in love with her, physically in love, according to
what has been said. She was a large woman, also with red hair—red hair
always held a fascination for Rossetti—and she was so large that he jokingly
called her “the elephant.” But he could do so with impunity, for she was not
offended by it.
And now we come to the tragic event, one of the most tragic events of
Rossetti’s life. This event does not figure in all the biographies, as it has only
recently come to light. Because until the beginning of this century, it was
understood in England that these things were not to be spoken of. But the last
biography of Rossetti speaks quite frankly about this episode, and I think I
can recount it without lacking in decorum.
One night, the poet Swinburne went to Rossetti’s house to eat. They
ate together, and after dinner, Rossetti told him that he had to go teach a class
at the college for workers founded by Ruskin, and he invited Swinburne to
accompany him. Swinburne and Rossetti said goodbye to Rossetti’s wife, and
once they had turned the corner, Rossetti told Swinburne that he did not have
to teach a class that night, that he was going to visit “the elephant.”
Swinburne understood perfectly, and the two men said goodbye to each other.
Swinburne, anyway, already knew this about Rossetti and was not unduly
surprised. Rossetti remained very late at the house of “the elephant,” let’s say
—I forgot her name. And when he returned, he found that his house was
dark, and his wife was dead. She had died from swallowing a fatal dose of
chloral, which she often took for insomnia.12 Rossetti immediately
understood that she knew everything and had committed suicide.
 I forgot to say that Rossetti spent his honeymoon with his wife in Paris,
and that while there, he painted a very strange painting, considering what
happened later, and considering Rossetti’s superstitious nature. The canvas,
which does not have—in my opinion—any artistic merits, is in the Tate
Gallery or maybe the British Museum, I don’t remember, and is called “How
They Met Themselves.” I don’t know if you know about a superstition that
exists in many countries of the world, the superstition about the double. In
German, the double is called the Doppelgänger, and means the one who
walks next to us.13 In Scotland, where this superstition still exists, the double
is called the “fetch” (“fetch” in English means “to seek”), and it is understood
that if a man meets himself, it is a sign that death is approaching.14 In other
words, that the apparition of the double is coming to fetch him. And there is a
ballad by Stevenson, which we will look at later, called “Ticonderoga,” about
the “fetch.”15 Now, this painting by Rossetti is not about an individual who
meets himself, but about a pair of lovers who meet (with themselves) at
twilight in a forest, and one of the lovers is Rossetti and the other is his wife.
Now, we will never know why Rossetti painted this painting. He might have
thought that by painting it, he was dispelling the possibility of it happening,
and we can also conjecture—though there is no letter by Rossetti that verifies
this—that Rossetti and his wife did meet themselves in Fontainebleau, or in
some other place in France. The Hebrews also had this superstition, about
meeting one’s double. But for them, the fact that a man meets himself does
not mean that death is approaching, but rather than he has arrived at a
prophetic state. There is a Talmudic legend about three men who go in search
of God. One became insane, the other died, and the third met himself. But let
us return to Rossetti.
Rossetti returns home and finds [his wife] poisoned, and suspects or
understands what has happened. When Rossetti discovers that she has died
from an overdose of chloral, he assumes she took too much; he accepts this—
Rossetti accepts it—but feels deeply guilty. She is buried the next day, and
Rossetti takes advantage of a moment of inattention by his friends to place on
the dead woman’s chest a notebook manuscript, a notebook of the sonnets
that would later be collected under the title The House of Life. Surely,
Rossetti thought this was a way he could carry out an act of expiation.
Rossetti thought that because he was in some way guilty of her death, was his
wife’s murderer, he could do nothing better than sacrifice his work to her.
Rossetti had already published one book—you will find its contents in the
edition of Rossetti’s poems and translations in Everyman’s Library—a
translation of La Vita Nuova by Dante.16 It is a literal translation, except that
it is written in archaic English. Moreover, as you know, La Vita Nuova by
Dante includes many sonnets, and those sonnets were admirably translated
into English by Rossetti together with poems by Cavalcanti and other
contemporary poets. Rossetti had published some versions of the poems that
would make him famous in the magazine The Germ—poems he later
corrected heavily—for example, “The Blessed Damozel,” “I Have Been Here
Before,” and, I believe, the strange ballad “Troy Town,” and others.17 When
I spoke about Coleridge, I said that in his first version of “The Ancient
Mariner,” he used an English that was deliberately and purely archaic, and
that in the versions we now study, he modernized the language, made it more
accessible and plain. The same thing happens with the ballad “The Blessed
Damozel.”
Rossetti, after the death of his wife, broke off his liaison with “the
elephant” and lived alone. He bought a kind of country estate on the outskirts
of London and there he devoted himself to poetry, and especially to painting.
He saw very few people. He, who had so liked conversation, above all
conversations in the pubs of London. And there he lived retired, alone, until
the year of his death in 1882. He saw very few people. Among them was an
agent of his who took charge of selling his paintings, for which Rossetti
asked very high prices, not so much out of greed but rather out of a kind of
disdain, as if to say, “If people are interested in my paintings, they should pay
well for them, and if they don’t buy them, I don’t care.” Before, he had had
an argument with a Scottish critic, Buchanan, who had been scandalized by
the frankness, we could call it, of some of Rossetti’s poems.18
Three or four years after the death of his wife, Rossetti’s friends
gathered to talk to him: they told him that he had made a useless sacrifice,
and that his wife herself could not have been pleased by the fact that he had
deliberately renounced the fame, perhaps the glory, that the publication of
that manuscript would have brought him. So Rossetti, who had kept no copy
of these poems, relented. And he took some rather disagreeable steps; he
obtained permission to exhume the manuscript that he had placed on his
wife’s chest. Naturally, Rossetti was not present at that scene worthy of Poe.
Rossetti stayed in a pub and got drunk. In the meantime, his friends exhumed
the body and managed—it was not easy because the hands were stiff and
crossed—but they managed to rescue the manuscript. And the manuscript had
white patches from the putrefaction of the body, from death, and this
manuscript was published and brought Rossetti glory. For that reason,
Rossetti is included in the curriculum of the study of English literature in
South America, and that is why we are studying him.
As for his argument with Buchanan, Buchanan published an
anonymous article titled “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” to which Rossetti
answered with a pamphlet titled “The Stealthy School of Criticism,” which
the other could not answer.
Rossetti’s erotic sonnets are among the most beautiful of English
literature. And now they don’t seem to us to be too erotic, as they could have
seemed during the Victorian era. I have an edition of Rossetti published in
1903, and I have looked through it in vain for one of his most admirable
sonnets, titled “Nuptial Sleep,” which refers to a wedding night. We will
return to it later.
Rossetti dies in 1882, at that country estate where there was a small
zoological garden with kangaroos and other strange animals. It was a small
zoo, and all the animals were small. And then Rossetti dies suddenly. Rossetti
became addicted to chloral, and he dies from an overdose. According to all
indications, he repeated the suicide of his wife. That is, both their deaths
justify the painting “How They Met Themselves,” painted in Paris many
years before, because Elizabeth Siddal died young. Hence, we are looking at
a tragic destiny. Some have attributed this destiny to his Italian blood, but it
seems absurd to me that Italian blood necessarily leads to a tragic life, or that
an Italian is necessarily more passionate than an Englishman.
And now let us read some of Rossetti’s work. We are going to begin
with this sonnet I spoke to you about, “Nuptial Sleep.” I do not remember all
the details, but I do remember the plot.19 It begins by saying, “Al fin su largo
beso se separó” [“At length their kiss severed”], and they separated. And
then he compares the two lovers with a branch that forks, and says “their
lips” separated after an act of love, but their lips were still close. And then it
says that just as after the rain, the last drops of water fall from the roof tiles—
here he is alluding to something else, of course—in the same way, each of
their hearts continued beating separately. The two tired lovers fall asleep, but
Rossetti, with a beautiful metaphor, says: “Sleep sank them lower than the
tide of dreams.” “El sueño los hundió más abajo de la marea de los sueños.”
The night passes, and the dawn awakens them, and then their souls, which
were under sleep, wake up. And they slowly emerge from sleep as if it were
water. But he is referring here, not to the woman’s soul, but rather to the
man’s. And then he says that among the drowned remnants of the day—he
sees marvels of new forests and streams—he awoke. That is, he had had a
marvelous dream, he had dreamed of an unknown, splendid land, because his
soul was full of the splendors of love. “Él se despertó y se maravilló aún más
porque ahí estaba ella.” That is, the fact of waking up, of returning from a
fantasy world, returning to reality, and seeing that the reality is there—the
woman he loved and worshipped for so long—and seeing her sleeping by his
side, in his arms, is even more wonderful than the dream. “He woke and
wondered more: for there she lay.” You can see in these lines by a poet of
Italian origins that all the words are Germanic and simple. I don’t think
Rossetti was looking for this effect, because if he had, it would seem artificial
to us, and it is not.
And now I want to recall the beginning of another sonnet by Rossetti,
for today I will not have time to talk about his great poems. This is a poem in
which there is something cinematic, something playful, with a cinematic
vision, even though it was written around 1850, in an era when
cinematography was not even imagined. And he says, “¿Qué hombre se ha
inclinado sobre el rostro de su hijo, para pensar cómo esa cara, ese rostro /
se inclinará sobre él cuando esté muerto?” “What man has bent to his son’s
face and brood, / How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?”20 And
here we have, as I have said, a play of images we would call cinematic. First,
we have the face of the father who bends anxiously over the face of the son,
and then the two images change places because he thinks of a certain future,
when his face is the one that is lying down, dead, and it will be the face of the
son who is bending over him. There is something like a transposition of the
two faces. Then: “O pensó cuando su propia madre le besaba los ojos / lo
que habrá sido su beso cuando su padre la cortejaba.” [“Or thought, as his
own mother kissed his eyes, / Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?”]
That is, we move from the image of a dream and death to this other image,
which is no less profound, of love. And we have the strange rhyme, such a
sweet rhyme: “brood” and “wooed.”
Here is the beginning of another one of Rossetti’s great sonnets, a
poem whose title has been used by Priestley for one of his comedies about
time, in which he plays with time—for example, An Inspector Calls and Time
and the Conways.21 This is the phrase Priestley chose: “I have been here
before.” Rossetti says, “Pero cuándo y dónde no puedo decirlo. / Conozco el
pasto más allá de la puerta, / conozco la brusca y dulce fragancia.” [“But
when or how I cannot tell: / I know the grass beyond the door, / The sweet
keen smell.”] Then there is something I forget, and then speaking with a
woman, he says, “You have been mine before.” Then he says what has
happened thousands of times and will happen again, that they will separate,
they will die, and then they will be born in another life, “yet never break the
chain.” As you know, this is the doctrine of the Stoics, the Pythagoreans,
Nietzsche, the idea that universal history repeats itself cyclically. In The City
of God, Saint Augustine erroneously attributes the idea to Plato, who did not
teach it, [and he also] attributes it to Pythagoras. He says that Pythagoras
would teach it to his students and tell them that this doctrine “that I am
teaching you”—it would later be called eternal return—“shows us that this
has already happened many times, I myself with this staff in my hand, have
explained this to you, and you have listened to me an infinite number of
times, and will go on to hear it an infinite number of times from my lips.” I
wish I had time to talk about the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who was
the first of the eighteenth century to defend that theory, which seems so
fantastical. He says that if the world, the entire universe, is made of a limited
number of elements—now we would call them atoms—this number, though
incalculable, is not infinite. And so, each moment depends on the moment
before. It is enough for one moment to be repeated for all the following ones
to be repeated as well. We should take a rather simple image. Let us take the
image of a deck of cards, and let us suppose that an immortal person is
shuffling them. So, they will be dealt out in different orders. But if time is
infinite, there will come a moment when he will deal the ace of oros, the two
of oros, the three of oros, etcetera, etcetera. This, of course, is rather simple
because it deals with forty elements. But in the universe we can assume there
are forty billion upon billions of elements to the forth or the fifth degree, or to
whatever we wish. But it is always a finite number. In other words, the time
will come when the combinations will repeat themselves, and then each of us
will be born again and repeat each of the circumstances of our life. And I will
pick up this watch, and I will announce that it is seven o’clock and we will
inexorably end our class.
Now, Dickens says that he had an experience of having already lived a
particular moment. According to psychologists, this experience can be simply
a moment of tiredness: we perceive the present, but if we are tired, we forget
it. Then, when we perceive it fully, there is no abyss of thousands of centuries
between one experience and another, but rather the abyss of our distraction.
We could say to Pythagoras and Rossetti that if we, at a particular moment of
our lives, have the sensation of having already lived a particular moment, that
moment is not exactly the same as the moment of the previous life. That is,
the fact of remembering a previous moment is an argument against that
theory. But that is unimportant. The important thing is that Rossetti has
written an admirable poem titled, “I Have Been Here Before,” and Priestley
wrote almost as admirable a play on the same subject: that each of our
biographies is a series of trivial circumstances that have already taken place
thousands of time and will take place again.22
In the next class, we will look at two of Rossetti’s long poems, “The
Blessed Damozel” and “Troy Town,” and perhaps “Eden Bower,” which is
about Adam’s first love—not with Eve, but rather with Lilith, the demon or
serpent.
 CLASS 21

ROSSETTI'S POEM. ROSSETTI AS SEEN BY MAX NORDAU.

"THE BLESSED DAMOZEL," "EDEN BOWER," AND "TROY TOWN."

MONDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1966

In the previous class we looked at some of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s

minor poems—minor in length, though no less worthy. His most famous
poem, archaically titled “The Blessed Damozel”—“damozel” is a Norman
word that means young lady, or demoiselle, and is usually translated into
Spanish as “La Doncella bienaventurada,” which, as you know, is both a
painting and a poem by Rossetti. The plot of “The Blessed Damozel” is
strange. It is about the misfortunes of a person, of a soul in heaven. It is about
her misfortunes because she is awaiting the arrival of another soul. The
blessed damsel has sinned, but her sin has been forgiven, and when the poem
begins, she is in heaven; but—and this first detail is significant—she has her
back to heaven. She is leaning over the gold bar from which she can see the
sun and the earth below. That is, she is so high that she sees the sun far below
her, as if lost, and she also sees a kind of pulse that beats throughout the
universe.
Now, this poem, like almost all of Rossetti’s, is extraordinarily visual.
Heaven is not vague. Everything is extraordinarily vivid, everything has an
increasingly ominous—and at the end a bit terrible—quality, but it is never
simplistic. The first stanza says:

The blessed damozel leaned out

From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
 And the stars in her hair were seven.

That is:

La Doncella Bienaventurada se inclinó

sobre la baranda de oro del Cielo;
sus ojos eran más profundos que la hondura
de aguas aquietadas al atardecer;
tenía tres lirios en la mano
y las estrellas de su pelo eran siete.

The poet does not say “she had three lilies in her hand and seven stars
in her hair” but rather “the stars in her hair were seven.” Then he says that the
blessed damsel feels as if only one day had passed since she arrived in
heaven, but years had passed, because in Heaven time does not pass as it does
on Earth, time is different. This reminds us of that Muslim legend about
Muhammad being carried up to heaven by Burak, the mare.1 The mare, when
she starts flying with him—she is a kind of winged Pegasus, with the feathers
of a peacock, I think—pushes over a water jug. Then she carries Muhammad
to heaven, to the Seventh Heaven. There he talks to the angels and passes
through where the angels live. Finally he talks to the Lord. He feels a kind of
chill when the Lord’s hand touches his shoulder, and then he returns to Earth.
And when he returns, the whole journey has seemed to take so long to him—
the opposite happens in Rossetti’s poem—but all the water has still not
spilled out of the jug. On the contrary, in Rossetti’s poem, the damsel
believes that she has spent a short time in heaven, and years have passed.
That damsel knows she is in heaven, her companions are described, their
names are given, some kind of garden and palaces are described. But she
turns her back on heaven and looks toward Earth, because the lover with
whom she has sinned is on Earth, and she thinks that he will not be long in
coming. She thinks that she will take him by the hand to the Virgin, that the
Virgin will understand and his sin will be forgiven. Then Rossetti describes
heaven. There are some details that are rather terrible. For example, there is a
tree with deep, dark foliage, and sometimes one feels that the dove lives
inside that tree, the dove that is the Holy Spirit, and the leaves seem to
whisper his name. The poem is interrupted by parentheses, and these
parentheses correspond to what the lover on Earth is thinking and feeling.
The lover is in a square and looks up, because he also is looking for her as
she is looking for him from the heights of paradise. And then she thinks about
the delights they will share when he is in heaven, and she thinks that they will
journey together into the deep wells of light. She thinks that there they will
bathe together in God’s sight. And then it says, “all this will be when he
comes, for surely he will come.” But because the poem is long, we see that
all this hope is futile, that he will not be forgiven and that she is condemned,
we could say, to heaven, as he will be condemned to hell when he dies, for
his sin. And she herself seems to feel this, because in the last stanza she leans
over the gold bar of heaven. And she wept; and the stanza ends “y lloró,”
“and wept.” And then, in parentheses, words that belong to the lover’s
conscience, “Yo oí sus lágrimas,” “I heard her tears.”
Dr. Max Nordau, in a book that was famous at the beginning of this
century, titled Degeneration, took this poem as proof that Rossetti was a
degenerate.2 He says that the poem is incoherent, that the poet has already
stated that time passes more quickly in heaven, and many years have passed,
but the look of astonishment in the damsel’s eyes is still there, so she will
have only to wait one or two days at the most before she meets her lover.
That is, Dr. Nordau read and analyzed the poem and did not understand that
the lover would never come, and that this was the theme of the poem: the
misfortune of a soul in heaven because it lacks the happiness it had on Earth.
The poem—according to him—is full of circumstantial details. For example,
the girl is leaning over a gold bar of heaven until—Rossetti tell us—her
breasts must have warmed the metal of the barrier. And there are other
similar details: at first everything is wondrous and then we have details like
the one that says: “de ese árbol en cuya hondura se siente la paloma,” [“that
… tree within whose secret growth the Dove is sometimes felt to be”]. In
other words, it is what Chesterton said, “delight bordering on the edges of
nightmare.” There is the suggestion of a nightmare in the whole poem, and in
the final stanzas we feel that even if paradise is beautiful, it is horrible for the
damsel because her lover is not there, that he will never come, he will not be
forgiven as she was. Now, I don’t know if any of you would like to read out
loud some of the stanzas in English, so that you hear the music. Does
anybody dare?
[A female student volunteers.]
Let’s read the poem from the beginning. Read it slowly, because
perhaps your classmates are not “blessed” and won’t understand very much.3

The blessed damozel leaned out

From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.

In this first stanza we have what is called a visual rhyme. For example,
heaven “rhymes” with even because they are written the same; it is
understood to be a rhyme. Hence Byron says, for example, in one of his lines,
“like the cry of some strong swimmer in his agony,” “como el grito de un
fuerte nadador en su agonía.”4 And I remember that as a child I pronounced
agony as “agonay” to make it rhyme with “cry,” and my father explained to
me that no, it was a “visual rhyme,” that first I had to pronounce cry and then
agony, because that orthographic convention was acceptable in poetry, and it
was even considered a rich element. For example, “come,” rhymes with
“home,” because both words end with o-m-e. And this is not considered a
defect, but rather a way of alleviating, we could say, the weight of the rhyme.
It is as if in England they had not fully grown accustomed to rhymes, and
without realizing it they felt some kind of nostalgia for ancient Anglo-Saxon
poetry, counted in assonants. But let us read it from the beginning, and I
promise to behave myself and not interrupt the stanzas.
[The student reads the first stanza again, then continues.]

Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,

No wrought flowers did adorn,
But a white rose of Mary’s gift,
For service meetly worn;
Her hair that lay along her back
Was yellow like ripe corn.
 That’s a beautiful detail, where he compares her hair to corn.

Herseemed she scarce had been a day

One of God’s choristers;
The wonder was not yet quite gone
From that still look of hers;
Albeit, to them she left, her day
Had counted as ten years.

“Herseemed” is a slightly archaic way of saying “seemed to her”: it

seemed to her that only a day had passed. “Choristers” should be translated
into Spanish as coristas, not a very noble word, but that is the exact
translation. Rossetti, given his Italian heritage, tended to make his words
stressed on the last syllable. We see here “choristers” rhyming with “hers,”
which doesn’t normally happen. It is one of his peculiarities, above all for the
rhyme.

A ella le parecía haber pasado apenas un día

de que era una de las coristas de Dios;
todavía no se había ido del todo el asombro
de su tranquila mirada,
para aquellos a quienes ella había dejado, su día
había sido contado como diez años.

In other words, ten years have passed, but she believes that she has
been in heaven only one day. And then there follows a parenthesis. Now the
lover speaks, in parentheses, and he says he has waited so long that the years
feel like they are truly made of years, and he thinks he feels her hair falling
over his face. But it wasn’t that, it was the leaves of autumn that fell over his
face from the trees in the square.
[The reader continues.]

(To one, it is ten years of years.

. . . Yet now, and in this place,
Surely she leaned o’er me—her hair
 Fell all about my face. . . .
Nothing: the autumn-fall of leaves.
The whole year sets apace.)

It was the rampart of God’s house

That she was standing on;
By God built over the sheer depth
The which is Space begun;
So high, that looking downward thence
She scarce could see the sun.

It lies in Heaven, across the flood

Of ether, as a bridge.
Beneath, the tides of day and night
With flame and darkness ridge
The void, as low as where this earth
Spins like a fretful midge.

She was “sobre la muralla edificada por Dios, sobre la caída, donde
empieza el espacio, tan alto que mirando desde arriba apenas podía ver el
sol” [“It was the rampart of God’s house / That she was standing on; / By
God built over the sheer depth / The which is Space begun …”] and time is
passing quickly, like tides (dark tides and light tides), and these are the day
and the night. In this fantastical poem everything is very precise, and the
precision is contained in the metaphors. Everything is very visual.

Around her, lovers, newly met

’Mid deathless love’s acclaims,
Spoke evermore among themselves
Their heart-remembered names;
And the souls mounting up to God
Went by her like thin flames.

She is surrounded by lovers who have just met. That is, who are more
fortunate than she, who can enjoy full happiness in heaven. “Y las almas que
iban subiendo a Dios” [“And the souls mounting up to God”], among whom
could be the soul of her lover, were “como delgadas llamas” [“like thin
flames”].

And still she bowed herself and stooped

Out of the circling charm;
Until her bosom must have made
The bar she leaned on warm,
And the lilies lay as if asleep
Along her bended arm.

“Y ella seguía inclinándose” [“And still she bowed herself”]—because

she was impatient—“y su pecho debió entibiar el metal de la baranda”
[“Until her bosom must have made / The bar she leaned on warm”] which I
pointed out earlier. “Y los lirios estaban como dormidos” [“And the lilies lay
as if asleep”].

From the fixed place of Heaven she saw

Time like a pulse shake fierce
Through all the worlds. Her gaze still strove
Within the gulf to pierce
Its path; and now she spoke as when
The stars sang in their spheres.

“Y luego ella habló, como cuando las estrellas / cantaron en sus

esferas.” That is, on the first days of Genesis. We also have in this line the
alliteration of “stars” and “sang.”

The sun was gone now; the curled moon

Was like a little feather
Fluttering far down the gulf; and now
She spoke through the still weather.
Her voice was like the voice of the stars
Had when they sang together.
 “Y su voz era como la voz que tenían las estrellas / cuando cantaron
juntas.”

(Ah sweet! Even now, in that bird’s song,

Strove not her accents there,
Fain to be hearkened? When those bells
Possessed the mid-day air,
Strove not her steps to reach my side
Down all the echoing stair?)

“I wish that he were come to me,

For he will come,” she said.
Have I not prayed in Heaven?—on earth,
Lord, Lord, has he not pray’d?
Are not two prayers a perfect strength?
And shall I feel afraid?”

There is a question. It asks “No está tratando su voz de buscar desde la

altura?” [“Strove not her accents there, / Fain to be hearkened?”] And she
says “Yo deseo que él venga a mí, porque él vendra . . . ” [“I wish that he
were come to me, / For he will come . . . ”] And she says that “he will come”
in order to convince herself. She is already feeling uncertain. “‘For he will
come,’ she said.” “¿Acaso no he rezado al Cielo, Señor? ¿Acaso él no ha
rezado?” [“Have not I prayed in Heaven? . . . / Lord, has he not pray’d?”]
She begins to be afraid, but she says: “¿Y debo sentir miedo?” [“And shall I
feel afraid?”]

“When round his head the aureole clings,

And he is clothed in white,
I’ll take his hand and go with him
To the deep wells of light;
As unto a stream we will step down,
And bathe there in God’s sight.”

“Cuando la aureola rodee su cabeza y él esté vestido de blanco . . . ”

[“When round his head the aureole clings, / And he is clothed in white . . . ”]
—that is, when he is dead and has been forgiven—“yo lo tomaré de la mano
y lo llevaré a los hondos pozos de luz . . . ” [“I’ll take his hand and go with
him / To the deep wells of light . . . ”]. Here Nordau said that because the
poet is combining an image of heaven with the erotic vision of two lovers
bathing together in a pond, he must be a degenerate.

“We two will stand beside that shrine,

Occult, withheld, untrod,
Whose lamps are stirred continually
With prayer sent up to God;
And see our old prayers, granted, melt
Each like a little cloud.

“We two will lie i’ the shadow of

That living mystic tree
Within whose secret growth the Dove
Is sometimes felt to be,
While every leaf that His plumes touch
Saith His Name audibly.”

Okay, look at the shrine, “cuyas luces están agitadas continuamente por
las plegarias que suben hacia Dios, y veremos que las plegarias se
disolverán como si fuesen nubecitas, y dormiremos a la sombra de este
místico árbol viviente” [“Whose lamps . . . That living mystic tree . . . ”] here
it is—“Donde se dice que a veces está la paloma . . . ” [Within whose secret
growth the Dove . . . ”], that is, the Holy Spirit, “Y cada hoja que tocan sus
plumas dice audiblemente su nombre” [“While every leaf . . . / Saith His
Name audibly”].

“And I myself will teach to him,

I myself, lying so,
The songs I sing here; which his voice
Shall pause in, hushed and slow,
And find some knowledge at each pause,
 Or some new thing to know.”

And then she says that she is going to teach him the songs she has
learned and each of the verses will reveal something to him.

(Alas! We two, we two, thou say’st!

Yea, one wast thou with me
That once of old. But shall God lift
To endless unity
The soul whose likeness with thy soul
Was but its love for thee?)

Now the lover enters: “Tú dices ‘nosotros dos,’ pero nostoros somos
uno.” [“We two . . . once of old.”] There is a kind of conversation going on
between the two of them, because what he says seems to answer what she
says. Though, of course, he cannot hear her. However, they seem to have
remained united as they had been on Earth. Now, you can see that this poem
is in a way also a story. That is to say, luckily for us, it has been written in
verse, but it could be a story in prose, a fantastical story. It is essentially
narrative.

“We two,” she said, “will seek the groves

Where the lady Mary is,
With her five handmaidens, whose names
Are five sweet symphonies,
Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,
Margaret and Rosalys.

“Circlewise sit they, with bound locks

And foreheads garlanded;
Into the fine cloth white like flame
Weaving the golden thread,
To fashion the birth-robes for them
Who are just born, being dead.”
 “Y buscaremos dónde está Lady Mary con sus cinco doncellas . . . ”
[“We two . . . will seek the groves / Where the lady Mary is, / With her five
handmaidens . . . ”] whom she names. They are weaving the garments for
those who have just been born because they have died, in other words, they
have just been born in heaven.

“He shall fear, haply, and be dumb:

Then will I lay my cheek
To his, and tell about our love,
Not once abashed or weak:
And the dear Mother will approve
My pride, and let me speak.

“Herself shall bring us, hand in hand,

To him round whom all souls
Kneel, the clear-ranged unnumbered heads
Bowed with their aureoles:
And angels meeting us shall sing
To their citherns and citoles.”

She says that she is going to collect myrrh and laurel and will tell the
Virgin of their love, without any shame, and the dear mother will pray for
them. In other words, the Virgin will allow their love to be fruitful. “Y ella
misma nos ayudará ante Aquel frente a quien se arrodillan todas las almas . .
. ” [“Herself shall bring us . . . To him round whom all souls / Kneel . . . ”], in
other words, Jesus Christ.

“There will I ask of Christ the Lord

Thus much for him and me:—
Only to live as once on earth
With Love,—only to be,
As then awhile, for ever now
Together, I and he.”

“Yo le preguntaré a Cristo, el Señor, esto para él y para mí . . . ”

[“There will I ask . . . for him and me”]. She does not want to ask for
anything else. The only thing she wants is to be happy in heaven as she was
once happy on Earth. There is a sonnet by Unamuno on this same subject, in
which he asks for no happiness other than the happiness he has known on
Earth, and this is what she is going to ask of Jesus Christ, that they be happy
in heaven as they were on Earth.5 It is a very passionate plea: “que para
siempre estemos juntos” [“for ever now / Together, I and he”].

She gazed and listened and then said,

Less sad of speech than mild,—
“All this is when he comes.” She ceased.
The light thrilled towards her, fill’d
With angels in strong level flight.
Her eyes prayed, and she smil’d.

(I saw her smile.) But soon their path

Was vague in distant spheres:
And then she cast her arms along
The golden barriers,
And laid her face between her hands,
And wept. (I heard her tears.)

And finally: “Todo eso ocurrirá cuando llegue” [“All this is when he
comes”], and the air was “lleno de ángeles en fuerte vuelo” [“With angels in
strong flight”]. “Sus ojos rezaron, y sonrió.” “Yo vi su sonrisa / Pero pronto /
su camino fue vago . . . Y luego ella puso sus brazos sobre Las barreras de
oro . . . Y lloró.” Then, “I heard her tears.”
Well, there is another poem, also both heavenly and terrible, called
“Eden Bower.” Now “bower” is translated into Spanish in the dictionary as
glorieta [arbor], but here it should be translated as alcoba [bedchamber].
Alcoba suggests a closed place. “Bower” is a place where two lovers meet.
And here, in this poem, Rossetti has taken a Jewish tradition, because I think
that in some Jewish text, it says, “Before Eve came Lilith.” In Eden, Lilith
was a snake and Adam’s first wife before his human wife, Eve. But in
Rossetti’s poem this snake is in the shape of a woman and gives Adam two
children. And Rossetti tells us directly all about these children; but we
understand that the children were snakes, because he says, “shapes that coiled
in the woods and waters” (“formas que se encroscaban en las selvas y en las
aguas”) are “glittering sons and radiant daughters” (“hijos resplandecientes e
hijas radiantes”). Then God puts Adam to sleep and takes Eve out of his rib,
and Lilith obviously is envious, and she has to take revenge. So she seeks out
her first lover, who was a snake, and gives herself to him and asks him to
give her his shape. And then she will take the shape of the snake and she will
tempt Eve, and then Adam and Eve will be expelled from Eden: “And where
there were trees there shall be tares.” And Adam and Even will wander the
Earth, and Eve will give birth to Cain, and then to Abel. Cain will kill Abel,
“and then you,” she tells the snake, “will drink the blood of the dead.”
Now we will listen to a few stanzas of this Rossetti poem—not all,
because it is a long poem. I request the use of your voice again, young lady.

[The student comes up and begins to read.]

It was Lilith the wife of Adam:

(Eden bower’s in flower.)
Not a drop of her blood was human,
But she was made like a soft sweet woman.

There are refrains that are repeated. It has a very strong rhythm:

Era Lilith la mujer de Adán,

(la alcoba de ellos está en flor.)

There is an internal rhyme: “bower” and “flower. And Lilith:

En sus venas no había una gota de sangre humana,

pero ella era como una dulce mujer.

[The student continues reading.]

Lilith stood on the skirts of Eden;

 (And O the bower of the hour!)
She was the first that thence was driven;
With her was hell and with Eve was heaven.

In the ear of the Snake said Lilith:—

(Eden bower’s in flower.)
“To thee I come when the rest is over;
A snake was I when thou wast my lover.

“I was the fairest snake in Eden:

(And O the bower and the hour!)
By the earth’s will, new form and feature
Made me a wife for the earth’s new creature.

“Take me thou as I come from Adam:

(Eden bower’s in flower.)
Once again shall my love subdue thee;
The past is past and I am come to thee.

“Y ella estaba en los confines del Paraíso . . . ” [“Lilith stood on the

skirts of Eden . . . ”]. When she has been expelled from Eden because they
have created Eve. “Con ella está el Infierno y con Eva está el Cielo” [“With
her was hell and with Eve was heaven”]. And this is what she could not bear,
because she was in love with Adam. And so she tells the snake, who was her
first lover: “He aquí, vuelvo a ti cuando ha pasado lo demás, / yo era una
serpiente cuando tú eras mi amante, / yo era la serpiente más hermosa del
Edén . . . ” [“To thee I come when the rest is over; / A snake was I when thou
wast my lover. / I was the fairest snake in Eden . . . ”] This is a bit terrible but
it is lovely, because there must also be beauty in snakes. “Pero me dieron
nueva forma y fui una mujer para la nueva criatura del Cielo” [“ . . . new
form and feature / Made me a wife for the earth’s new creature”], that is, for
man. “Tómame, cuando vuelvo de Adán . . . ” [“Take me thou as I come from
Adam . . . ”]. Because she does not hide from him that she is coming from
Adam and that she has taken on the shape of a woman. She’s a bit like a
witch, according to the Jewish superstition about the witches of the night.
“De nuevo te subyugará mi amor, el pasado ha pasado y yo vuelvo” [“Once
again shall my love subdue thee; / The past is past and I am come to thee”].

“O but Adam was thrall to Lilith!

(And O the bower and the hour!)
All the threads of my hair are golden,
And there in a net his heart was holden.”

“Pero Adán fue un vasallo para Lílith,” and then it continues: “Todas
las hebras de mi pelo son de oro, / y en ese red estaba atado su coarzón.”

“O and Lilith was queen of Adam!

(Eden bower’s in flower.)
All the day and the night together
My breath could shake his soul like a feather.”

And now . . . Lilith was “la reina de Adán,” “todo el día y toda la
noche / podia mi respiración sacudir su alma como una pluma.”

“What great joys had Adam and Lilith!—

(And O the bower and the hour!)
Sweet close rings of the serpent’s twining,
As heart in heart lay sighing and pining.”

We can see Lilith’s monstrous love in these lines and the following
ones. The repetition of the refrain gives it a fatalistic tone.

“What bright babes had Lilith and Adam!—

(Eden bower’s in flower.)
Shapes that coiled in the woods and waters,
Glittering sons and radiant daughters.”

You can see that this poem has a lot in common with the other one, but
there are aesthetic differences. Here, there is something … the poem is
somewhat obsessive, because this man was a touch mad when he imagined
the love of the first man with a snake, there is something monstrous in,
“What bright babes had Lilith and Adam!”
Now, there is another poem, also an erotic poem. I don’t know what is
going on today, but Rossetti liked such things. This poem is a poem about
Helen of Troy.6 Now, Helen, as you know, was kidnapped by Paris. Then
Paris takes her to Troy—Paris is the son of Priam, king of Troy—and this
causes the Trojan War and the destruction of the city.
So, let us look at this poem. The first stanza says “Helena, de origen
celestial, reina de Esparta” [“Heavenborn Helen, Sparta’s queen”], and then
“O, ciudad de Troya” [“O Troy Town!”] because as Rossetti tells this fable—
this fable of the beginning of Prince Paris’s love for Helen—he knows that
the consequence of this love is the destruction of the city. And in the poem he
gives us both time frames simultaneously: the origins of love, of the love
between Helen and Paris, and then the destruction of the city. It is as if the
poem took place in eternity, as if the two things happened at once, even
though they are separated by many years. Now, as far as the future, which for
us is the past, this is between parentheses.
So, it begins like this:

Helena, de orígen celestial, reina de Esparta,

(¡o, ciudad de Troya!)
Tenía dos senos de resplandor celestial,
el sol y la luna del deseo del amor.

[Heavenborn Helen, Sparta’s queen,

(O Troy Town!)
Had two breasts of heavenly sheen,
The sun and moon of the heart’s desire.]

And he already knows, he foresees what will happen one day and says:
“Troya ha caído, la alta Troya está en llamas.” [“O Troy’s down, / Tall
Troy’s on fire!”] Then Helen is alone and she kneels in front of Venus’s
shrine and offers her a cup that has been molded on her breasts, that is, in the
shape of her breasts. Lugones takes up this theme in his poem called “The
Unobtainable Cup,” but in Lugones’s poem, it is a sculptor who wants to
create the perfect cup, and he can only do so when he uses the breasts of a
damsel as a model.7 But here, Helen kneels in front of Venus, tells her she
needs, she requires, love, and offers her that cup. And she explains why it is
that shape, and she reminds her of that now long-gone day when Paris, who
was a prince and a shepherd, had to give an apple to the most beautiful
goddess. And there was Minerva, and there was Juno, and there was Venus.
And he gave the cup to Venus.
And Helen asks Venus to give her Paris’s love, and Venus tells her:
“Tú, que estás arrodillada ahí, haz que el amor te levante.” [“There thou
kneel’st for Love to lift!”] And then she says, “Tu don ha sido aceptado.”
[“Thy gift hath grace!”] Then she calls her son, Eros—Cupid—and tells him
to shoot an arrow. And that arrow travels far, to where Paris is sleeping, and
pierces his heart; and he falls in love with Helen, whom he has never seen.
And he says: “Oh, abrazar su cabeza de oro.” [“Oh to clasp her golden
head!”] And the poem returns with the refrain: “Troya ha caído, la alta Troya
está en llamas.” [“O Troy’s down, / Tall Troy’s on fire!”] That is, from the
moment Paris falls in love with Helen, the future already exists, Troy is
already in flames.
And now let us hear this poem with details I have surely forgotten. In
this poem, the parentheses do not correspond to the thoughts of another
person, but rather to what is fated to happen. It is called “Troy Town.” This is
a medieval expression. Today, nobody would say “Troy Town,” but rather
“the town of Troy.” But in the Middle Ages, people said “Troy Town,” and
they also said it in French. And we have seen that in Anglo-Saxon, to say
“London” they said Londonburh, and to say “Rome,” Romeburh.8 This is an
analogous form.
Now, Andrew Lang said that this ballad was not, obviously, a popular
ballad, because Rossetti apparently did not intend it to be.9 It is a highbrow
poem, an artificial poem in the best sense of the word.
[A student begins to read the poem.]

HEAVENBORN Helen, Sparta’s queen,

(O Troy Town!)
Had two breasts of heavenly sheen,
The sun and moon of the heart’s desire:
 All Love’s lordship lay between.
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)

Helen knelt at Venus’ shrine,

(O Troy Town!)
Saying, “A little gift is mine,
A little gift for a heart’s desire.
Hear me speak and make me a sign!
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)

When she says “Óyeme hablar y hazme una seña!” [“Hear me speak
and make me a sign!”], the moment she says it, Troy has fallen, Troy is
already on fire.

“Look, I bring thee a carven cup;

(O Troy Town!)
See it here as I hold it up,—
Shaped it is to the heart’s desire,
Fit to fill when the gods would sup.
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)

Helen to Venus: “Te traigo una copa esculpida” [“I bring thee a carven
cup”] . . . “digna de llenar el banquete de los dioses” [“Fit to fill when the
Gods would sup”].

“It was moulded like my breast;

(O Troy Town!)
He that sees it may not rest,
Rest at all for his heart’s desire.
O give ear to my heart’s behest!
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)
 “No podrá escapar al anhelo de mi corazón.” [“O give ear to my
heart’s behest!”] And the refrain: “Troya en llamas.”

“See my breast, how like it is;

(O Troy Town!)
See it bare for the air to kiss!
Is the cup to thy heart’s desire?
O for the breast, O make it his!
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)

“Mira mi pecho, cómo se parece. Aquí está desnudo, para que el aire
lo bese.” [“See my breast . . . bare for the air to kiss!”]

“Yea, for my bosom here I sue;

(O Troy Town!)
Thou must give it where ’tis due,
Give it there to the heart’s desire.
Whom do I give my bosom to?
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)

“Each twin breast is an apple sweet.

(O Troy Town!)
Once an apple stirred the beat
Of thy heart with the heart’s desire:—
Say, who brought it then to thy feet?
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)

“Oh, Troy Town, tienese que dármelo, porque me corresponde …”

[“(O Troy Town!) / Thou must give it where ’tis due”]. “¿A quién le daré mi
pecho?” [“Whom do I give my bosom to?”] Because she still doesn’t know.
And here comes the theme of the apple:
 “They that claimed it then were three:
(O Troy Town!)
For thy sake two hearts did he
Make forlorn of the heart’s desire.
Do for him as he did for thee!
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)

“Los que pretendieron esta copa eran tres . . . ” [“They that claimed it
then were three . . . ”] They are rivals, and only one will remain in the end.
“¿Por qué hay derecho de que dos corazones sean despojados del anhelo del
amor?” [“For thy sake two hearts did he / Make forlorn of the heart’s
desire.”]

“Mine are apples grown to the south,

(O Troy Town!)
Grown to taste in the days of drouth,
Taste and waste to the heart’s desire:
Mine are apples meet for his mouth.”
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)

“Las mías son manzanas que crecen hacia el sur, / para gustar en los
días de la sequía. / Las mías son manzanas dignas de su boca.”

Venus looked on Helen’s gift,

(O Troy Town!)
Looked and smiled with subtle drift,
Saw the work of her heart’s desire:—
“There thou kneel’st for Love to lift!”
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)

Venus looked in Helen’s face,

(O Troy Town!)
 Knew far off an hour and place,
And fire lit from the heart’s desire;
Laughed and said, “Thy gift hath grace!”
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)

Cupid looked on Helen’s breast,

(O Troy Town!)
Saw the heart within its nest,
Saw the flame of the heart’s desire,—
Marked his arrow’s burning crest.
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)

Cupid took another dart,

(O Troy Town!)
Fledged it for another heart,
Winged the shaft with the heart’s desire,
Drew the string and said, “Depart!”
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)

Paris turned upon his bed,

(O Troy Town!)
Turned upon his bed and said,
Dead at heart with the heart’s desire—
“Oh to clasp her golden head!”
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)

In these lines, Helen is passionate, begging for love. Paris is asleep, but
at the end it says: “Oh, ¡quién pudiera abrazar su cabeza de oro!” And then
at the very end, the final refrain: “O Troy’s down, / Tall Troy’s on fire!”
In the next class we will talk about William Morris.
 CLASS 22

THE LIFE OF WILLIAM MORRIS. THE THREE SUBJECTS

WORTHY OF POETRY. KING ARTHUR AND THE MYTH OF THE
RETURN OF THE HERO. MORRIS'S INTERESTS. MORRIS AND
CHAUCER. "THE DEFENCE OF GUENEVERE."

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1966

Today we will talk about a colleague of Rossetti’s who was also

involved in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This is the poet William Morris.
His dates are 1834 to 1896. He was good friends with Rossetti, Burne-Jones,
Swinburne, Hunt, and other members of the group. Morris was essentially
different from Rossetti. Their only similarity is that both were great poets.
But Rossetti, as we have seen, was a neurotic man who led a tragic life; he
was one to whom tragic events happened. It is enough to remember the
suicide of his wife, his solitude at the end, his reclusion, and more to the
point, his own suicide. It is also said that Rossetti never went to Italy—he
insisted on being English—and that when speaking—never in writing—he
commonly used cockney, London slang. Nevertheless, he felt confined in
England, though in Italy, he would undoubtedly have felt exiled from
London, a city he greatly loved.
On the other hand, Morris’s life is that of an almost incredibly active
man, a man interested in many things. Not in the way of a man like Goethe,
for example, but rather, in a practical, active, even commercial way. If
William Morris had not exercised the art of poetry, he would still be
remembered for his many and energetic activities in other fields.
“Morris” is a Welsh last name. This fact seems unimportant, but we
will soon see that there is something paradoxical in this, for William Morris
ended up writing in an almost purely Saxon English—within what was
possible in the nineteenth century—and he introduced—or tried to introduce
—Norse voices into the literary English of his era.
Morris belonged to what we would now call a middle-class family. He
was born on the outskirts of London, he studied architecture and drawing,
and then dedicated himself to painting. But Morris’s mind was too curious to
stop for long on only one activity. He studied in Oxford, where he was a
contributor to Oxford’s Magazine, publishing poems and stories.1 According
to Andrew Lang, the famous Scottish critic and Hellenist, these first
creations, almost scribbled with his pen, written almost with indifference, as
one who abandons himself to a pleasure rather than carries out a scrupulous
labor, are among his most felicitous.2 A bit later today we will look at some
of them. I have brought a copy of his first book, The Defence of Guenevere.3
Guenevere—I suppose “Genoveva” would be another form of the name—is
the wife of King Arthur, and her love affair with Sir Lancelot is what led
Paolo and Francesca, in Dante’s imagination, to commit their sin. William
Morris begins his poetry with the subject that in the Middle Ages was called
matière de Bretagne. There are some verses by a French poet (whose name I
have forgotten) that assert that there are three subjects worthy of poetry, and
those subjects are: la matière de France—that is, the stories of Roland and
Charlemagne and their peers, and the Battle of Roncevaux Pass.4 Then, la
matière de Bretagne: the story of King Arthur, who fought against the Saxons
at the beginning of the sixth century and to whom were compared many of
Charlemagne’s great deeds, so that the King Arthur of legend became, like
Charlemagne almost was, a universal king of sorts. They also attribute to him
the invention of the Round Table, a table that had no head, so there would be
no hierarchy among those sitting around it, and that magically adapted to the
number of diners: it shrank when there were six and could grow to
comfortably accommodate over sixty knights. Also forming part of the
legend of matière de Bretagne are the stories about the Holy Grail, that is, the
cup that contained the wine Jesus drank during the last supper. And in that
same cup—the word “grail” is related to the word “crater,” which is also a
kind of cup—in that same cup, Joseph of Arimathea kept the blood of
Christ.5 In other versions of the legend, the Grail is not a cup, it is a precious
supernatural stone that the angels brought from heaven. The knights of King
Arthur devote themselves to searching for the Holy Grail. Lancelot could
have found that cup, but he did not deserve to find it because he had sinned
with the wife of the king. And so it is that a son of his, Sir Galahad, the
Galeotto from Dante’s famous verses, is the one who finally possesses the
cup.6 As for King Arthur, he is said to have fought twelve battles against the
Saxons, and he was defeated in the last one. This inevitably led in the
nineteenth century to King Arthur being identified with a sun myth: twelve is
the number of months. And in the last battle he was defeated, wounded, and
taken by three women in mourning in a black skiff to the magical island of
Avalon; and for a long time it was believed that he would return to rescue his
people.7 The same was said in Norway about Olaf, who was called Rex
perpetuus Norvegiae.8 The same belief about a king returning can be found
in Portugal. There the personage is King Don Sebastian, defeated by the
Moors in the Battle of Alcácer Quibir, and who will one day return.9 And it
is curious that this mystical belief, the sebastianismo, the idea that a king will
return, can also be found in Brazil: at the end of the nineteenth century there
was someone named Antônio Conselheiro among the “jagunços,” the
cowboys of the north of Brazil, who also said that Sebastian would return.10
All of this, the matière de Bretagne, comprises a collection of legends
that were not unknown to Shakespeare and were used by William Morris and
his illustrious contemporary, Tennyson—Browning’s friend—about whom
we will not have time to talk.
There was a third subject allowed to poets of the Middle Ages. The
French poet’s line says “de France, de Bretaigne et de Romme la grant.”11
But the material of Rome was not just Roman history, but also—because
Aeneas was Trojan—the story of Troy, and the story of Alexander the Great.
Alexander the Great is said to have had the desire to conquer paradise, after
having conquered Earth. And in the legend, Alexander arrives at a high wall,
and from the wall he drops one speck of dust. Then Alexander understands
that he is that speck of dust, the material to which he will be reduced in the
end, and he gives up the conquest of paradise. This is like the six feet of earth
the Saxon king promises to the Norwegian king in the Battle of Stamford
Bridge.12
But let us return to William Morris. Morris lived in the Victorian era,
during what was called the Industrial Revolution. That included, partially, the
disappearance of the crafts and their replacement by factory products. This
worried William Morris, the idea that craftsmanship—that is, what is made
with love—could be lost and replaced by the impersonal, commercial
products of the factories. It’s interesting that the English government was
also worried about this. We see this in the case of Lockwood Kipling—
Kipling’s father and a friend of Burne-Jones and William Morris—whom the
British government sent to India to defend Hindu crafts from the inundation
of commercial products from England itself.13 Lockwood Kipling was also
an excellent draftsman.
Morris was interested in the crafts and the guilds. Not so that the
workers could earn more—though he was interested in that as well—but in
the sense that the workers were personally interested in their labor and carried
out some kind of work of love. And so William Morris was one of the fathers
of socialism in England and one of the first members of the Fabian Society,
to which Bernard Shaw, who was one of his disciples, belonged. The society
took that name because during the Punic Wars there was a Roman general
who was given the name Fabius Cunctator, “Fabius the Delayer,” for he
believed that the best way to defeat the enemies of the fatherland was like our
Montoneros when they fought against the generals of independence, or what
the guerrillas do, or the Boers in South Africa.14 That is, not to engage in
battle but rather to tire out the organized armies against whom they are
fighting, by leading them from one place to another—tiring them out, leading
them to places with bad pasture for horses, which is what the Irish did to
Essex.15 So this socialist society is founded in London, because the members
of that society did not believe in revolution, they believed that socialism
should be imposed bit by bit, without forcing events.
In a way, this is what has happened. I was in London a few years ago. I
had to have a small operation, and when I asked the doctor about his fee, he
answered that I had to sign a document, that was all, that he was a doctor
responsible for attending to, and if necessary, operating on, people who
needed him within a certain area of London. And he told me that he was an
employee of the government, so I had only to pay for the medicine. A poor
man can be treated by the king’s surgeon.
So we have Morris as a socialist, as one of the father’s of English
socialism. Moreover, he often spoke in Hyde Park to convince people of the
advantages of socialism. His biographers say that he did so with very little
tact, that he once engaged a worker in conversation and said to him, “I have
been raised and born a gentleman. But now, as you can see, I converse with
people from every class.” Which couldn’t have been very flattering to his
interlocutor.
Morris was—I will say in passing—a robust man, with a red beard;
and someone once asked him if he was Captain So-and-so, the captain of a
ship called, poetically, Sirena. He liked very much that he would be taken for
the captain of a ship. And Morris was interested in design, the arts of
carpentry and cabinetmaking, and he founded a company for the decorative
arts—Morris & Marshall—for decorating houses. Still, in England, you can
find “Morris chairs,” which were designed and even made by him, because
he was interested in manual labor; he liked it.16 Being a writer, he was also
interested in typography and founded the Kelmscott Press.17 At home I have
a few volumes from Saga Library, which he founded, which published his
translations of the Icelandic sagas done by him in collaboration with Eiríkr
Magnússon, which he translated into a slightly archaic English.18 Then he
also published an edition of Chaucer.19 Chaucer was one of his idols. There
is a book of his dedicated to Chaucer. He says to his book that if he met
Chaucer in person—he speaks to his book, as Ovid did to some of his—he
should greet him by name and tell him, “O, master, who is great of heart and
tongue.”20 He came to feel he had a kind of personal friendship with
Chaucer.
So, there is Morris as a political innovator—socialism was a novelty at
the time—and as an innovator in design and the decorative arts—he built and
designed many houses, including his own house, “the red house,” built in the
outskirts of London, near the Thames. And then he also became interested in
typography, and created what are called “font families.” He drew Latin letters
and Gothic letters, which in English are instead called “black letters.” And in
spite of being an essentially modern man, he felt passionate about the Middle
Ages. He was interested in medieval musical instruments—the kinds of
instruments I believe Morpurgo has a collection of in Buenos Aires—and
when Morris was dying he asked them to play old medieval English music on
those instruments.21
One of the people who loved him most was the then young Bernard
Shaw, a man who had no great passion for friendships. When William Morris
died, honored and famous in the year 1896, Bernard Shaw published an
article that has been preserved, in which he said the opposite of what all his
contemporaries did, which was that England and the world had lost a great
man; he wrote that a man like Morris could not be lost after his death, that
Morris’s physical death was an accident, that Morris continued being a friend
to him, a living person.
There is one event in Morris’s life that should be mentioned, and this is
a trip he took, I believe around 1870—I have a poor memory for dates—a trip
to Iceland.22 Or rather, he went on a pilgrimage to Iceland. His friends
suggested a trip to Rome, and he said that “there is nothing in Rome that I
cannot see in London, but I want to make a pilgrimage to Iceland.” Because
he believed that the Germanic culture—the culture, let us say, of Germany,
the Low Countries, Austria, Scandinavia, England, the Flemish part of
Belgium—had reached its peak in Iceland, and that he, as an Englishman, had
a duty to make a pilgrimage to that small lost island, almost inside the Arctic
Circle, that island that had produced such admirable prose and such
admirable poetry.
I think that now a trip to Iceland is not something particularly heroic; it
is a country commonly visited by tourists. But this was not the case at the
time, and Morris had to travel by horse through the mountainous regions.
Morris drank tea made with the water of the geysers, those tall columns of
thermal water they have in Iceland. And Morris visited, for example, the
place where the fugitive Grettir had hid out, and all the other places
celebrated in the historical sagas of Iceland.23 Morris also translated Beowulf
into English.24 Andrew Lang wrote that the translation deserved a reader’s
curiosity, for it was written in an English that was slightly more archaic than
the Anglo-Saxon of the eighth century. Morris also wrote a poem, Sigurd the
Volsung, in which he uses the plot of the Völsungasaga, the plot that Wagner
used for his musical dramas, The Ring of the Nibelung.25
Rossetti, who was not at all interested in anything Norse or Germanic,
said he could not be interested in the story of a man who was brother to a
dragon, and refused to read the book. This did not stop Morris from
continuing to be his friend, though Morris sometimes had a violent temper. I
said before that Morris began writing poetry as a hobby, and he published
stories and then long novels written in lazy prose, novels whose titles are
themselves poems: The Wood at the World’s End, The Story of the Glittering
Plain, etcetera.26 And in addition to the purely fantastical books, which take
place in a vague prehistoric era that is, of course, Germanic, he wrote two
novels to convert people to socialism. One was John Ball’s Dream.27 John
Ball was a companion of Tyler, one of the leaders in the fourteenth century of
a rebellion of serfs (the peasants of England) in which they even burned
down palaces and the archbishops’ residences.28 So the dream of John Ball is
that of England, what this rebel from the fourteenth century might have
dreamed. The other book is News from Nowhere.29 “Nowhere” is the Saxon
word for “utopia,” and it means the same thing, that it is nowhere. In News
from Nowhere, Morris writes, according to what he believed at the time,
about the happy world a universal socialist regime would bring about. In
addition to his oil paintings, which have been preserved, he did wood
engravings and many drawings; and he built and furnished many houses. He
carried on a kind of superhuman level of activity.30 And commercially he
also did well, because he was a good businessman. That is the opposite of
Rossetti, who was as if lost in the inferno of London, as Chesterton said.
Morris published his first poems in the Oxford and Cambridge
Magazine, a magazine written by students and for students. One of his
classmates heard those poems and said, “Topsy”—because that is what his
friends called him, I don’t know why—“you are a great poet.”31 And he said,
“Well, if what I write is poetry, then it is easy, I have only to think about it
and let the poems write themselves.” And his whole life he maintained this
marvelous ease. It is said that one day—I’m going to check the date—he
wrote four or five hundred rhymed couplets.
At the time he was writing The Earthly Paradise, which is perhaps his
most important work, and the epic poem, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, he
was writing hundreds of lines of poetry every day.32 At night, he would sit
with his family and read to them out loud and accept corrections, the changes
they suggested, and the next day he would continue his work, and at the same
time he was also involved in weaving tapestries. He said that a man who was
unable to weave with one hand and write an epic with the other could devote
himself neither to making tapestries nor to poetry. And it seems this was not
merely a boast but rather a fact.
Let us now take a look at an episode that I will recount from his first
book, undoubtedly changing it in the telling.33 Andrew Lang said of this
episode that it had a certain bizarrerie, a French word that is difficult to
translate and was new in the English language. This reminds us of the
generous letter that Victor Hugo wrote to Baudelaire when he published Les
Fleurs du Mal: “You have given new worth to the sky of art.” And Andrew
Lang said something similar about Morris’s first poems.
In this poem, Morris supposes—imagines—a medieval knight. This
knight is dying; he has closed his eyes in his large bed, and at the foot of the
bed is a window. Through this window he sees his river and the forest, his
forest. And suddenly he knows he must open his eyes, so he opens them and
sees “a great God’s angel.” And this powerful angel, this great emanation, is
standing in the light, and the light illuminates him and makes his words seem
like commands from God. The angel has in his hand two cloths, each on a
wand. And one of the cloths, more vibrantly colored, is red, scarlet. And the
other is a little less bright, it is long and blue. The angel says to the dying
man that he must choose one of the two. The poem tells us that “no man
could tell the better of the two.” And the angel tells him that his immortal
destiny depends on his choice, that he cannot make a mistake. If he chooses
“the wrong colour,” he will go to hell, and if he chooses the correct one, he
will go to heaven. The man waits for half an hour. He knows that his fate
depends on this whim, this act that seems capricious, and after trembling for
half an hour he says, “May God help me, blue is the color of heaven.” And
the angel says, “Red,” and the man knows that he has been condemned
forever. Then he says to all men, to the living and the dead, because he is
alone with the angel, “¡Cristo! Si yo lo hubiera sabido, sabido, sabido . . . ”
“Ah Christ! if only I had known, known, known . . . ” And it is understood
that he dies and his soul goes to hell. That is, he loses his soul, as the human
race is lost, because Adam and Eve ate from the lost fruit of the mysterious
garden.
 And now that I have told it—and I did this not because I think I can do
it better than the text, but rather so you can follow it better—I will ask one of
you to read this passage of the poem. The last time we had an excellent
reader, I hope she is here, or perhaps somebody else would like to take her
place. And as for the reading, I ask only that it be read slowly, expressively,
so you can follow the words and hear the music, which is so important in this
poem.
So, I have dared to talk this whole time, which one of you now dares?

[A student comes to the front of the class.]

Now let us watch the death of a medieval knight.

[A student begins to read.]
But, knowing now that they would have her speak,
She threw her wet hair backward from her brow,
Her hand close to her mouth touching her cheek,

As though she had had there a shameful blow,

And feeling it shameful to feel ought but shame
All through her heart, yet felt her cheek burned so,

She must a little touch it; like one lame

She walked away from Gauwaine, with her head
Still lifted up; and on her cheek of flame

The tears dried quick; she stopped at last and said:

“O knights and lords, it seems but little skill
To talk of well-known things past now and dead.

“God wot I ought to say, I have done ill,

And pray you all forgiveness heartily!
Because you must be right such great lords—still

“Listen, suppose your time were come to die,

And you were quite alone and very weak;
 Yea, laid a dying while very mightily.

“The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak

Of river through your broad lands running well:
Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak:

“‘One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,

Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be,
I will not tell you, you must somehow tell.’”

Or, rather:
[Here Borges translates the sixth and seventh stanzas, and he translates
various lines below.]

“Oye, supón que ha llegado la hora de tu muerte,

y tú estuvieras muy solo y muy débil;
y estarías muriendo mientras

el viento está agitando la alameda, está agitando

la corriente del río que atraviesa bien tus amplias tierras;
imagínate que hubiera un silencio,

“Hush” is a difficult word to translate—

y que entonces alguien hablaría.

Excuse me, I was wrong: the angel speaks before he is seen by the
dying man.

Una de las telas es el Cielo, y la otra el Infierno,

elige para siempre un color, cualquiera de los dos,
yo no te lo dire, tú de algún modo tienes que decirlo.

[The student continues reading.]

“‘Of your own strength and mightiness; here, see!’
Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes,
At foot of your familiar bed to see

“A great God’s angel standing, with such dyes,

Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands,
Held out two ways, light from the inner skies

“Showing him well, and making his commands

Seem to be God’s commands, moreover, too,
Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;

“And one of these strange choosing cloths was blue,

Wavy and long, and one cut short and red;
No man could tell the better of the two.

“After a shivering half-hour you said,

‘God help! heaven’s colour, the blue’; and he said, ‘hell.’
Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,

“And cry to all good men that loved you well,

‘Ah Christ! if only I had known, known, known’;
Launcelot went away, then I could tell,

“Like wisest man how all things would be, moan,

And roll and hurt myself, and long to die,
And yet fear much to die for what was sown.”

In other words:

“Tú tienes que decirlo sabiéndolo por tu propia fuerza

y por tu propio poderío,
Sí, sí, mi señor—Morris uses archaic words—que tú
abrieras los ojos
 y al pie de tu cama familiar verías

un gran angel de Dios de pie, y con tales matices

desconocidos en la Tierra en sus grandes alas y manos”

The angel is very real and very strong.

“Y los brazos extendidos, y la luz desde los cielos ulteriores

mostrándolo bien.”

The angel is not nebulous, but rather extremely vivid.

“Y eso hacía que sus órdenes parecieran de Dios

Y teniendo en sus manos la telas sobre varas

Y una de esas extrañas telas para elegir era azul,

ondeada y larga y la otra breve y roja”

He gives the more vivid color to the cloth that is shorter, for balance.

“Nadie podia decir cuál era la major de las dos.”

Then, after half an hour, more than shaking—shivering—he says:

“Dios me salve, el color del cielo es el azul.”

Y el angel dice: ‘Infierno.’
Entonces tú te revolverías sobre tu lecho,

Y dirías, invitarías a todos los hombres buenos que te quieren:

“Ah, Christ! If only I had known, known, known.”

Here, the final syllables are slightly stressed, as they are in Rossetti.
In the next class, we will look at Morris’s most important books, The
Earthly Paradise, among others.
 CLASS 23

"THE TUNE OF THE SEVEN TOWERS," "THE SAILING OF THE

SWORD," AND THE EARTHLY PARADISE, BY WILLIAM MORRIS.
THE ICELANDIC SAGAS. THE STORY OF GUNNAR.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9, 1966

Let us continue today with our discussion of the work of William

Morris. Now, before considering his two greatest works, we could read some
of the poems in his first book, The Defence of Guenevere.
Would any of you like to continue as we did in the last class, and rather
than read a fragment, read a short poem from the book?
We can look at a poem called “The Tune of Seven Towers.”1 It is a
transparent poem, essentially musical, though it does have a plot. There is a
women we can assume to be very beautiful called “fair Yoland of the
flowers,” “la hermosa Yolanda de las flores,” who leads knights—all of this
occurs in some kind of vaguely medieval era—to a castle where they die; she
kills them, undoubtedly using magic.
[A student comes to the front of the class and begins to read the poem.]

No one goes there now:

For what is left to fetch away
From the desolate battlements all arow,
And the lead roof heavy and grey?
“Therefore,” said fair Yoland of the flowers,
“This is the tune of Seven Towers.”

No one walks there now;

Except in the white moonlight
The white ghosts walk in a row;
 If one could see it, an awful sight,
“Listen!” said fair Yoland of the flowers,
“This is the tune of Seven Towers.”

But none can see them now,

Though they sit by the side of the moat,
Feet half in the water, there in a row,
Long hair in the wind afloat.
“Therefore,” said fair Yoland of the flowers,
“This is the tune of Seven Towers.”

If any will go to it now,

He must go to it all alone,
Its gates will not open to any row
Of glittering spears—will you go alone?
“Listen!” said fair Yoland of the flowers,
“This is the tune of Seven Towers.”

The stanzas end with the refrain, “‘This is the tune of the Seven
Towers.’” It is an almost purely musical and ornamental poem: “‘Oíd,’ dijo
la Hermosa Yolanda de las flores, ‘ésta es la melodía de las siete torres.’”
[“‘Listen!’ said fair Yoland of the flowers, / ‘This is the tune of Seven
Towers.’”] But at the same time, there is something ominous and terrible. The
sorceress suggests the knight come alone, to die.

By my love go there now,

To fetch me my coif away,
My coif and my kirtle, with pearls arow,
Oliver, go today!
“Therefore,” said fair Yoland of the flowers,
“This is the tune of Seven Towers.”

I am unhappy now,
I cannot tell you why;
If you go, the priests and I in a row
 Will pray that you may not die.
“Listen!” said fair Yoland of the flowers,
“This is the tune of Seven Towers.”

If you will go for me now,

I will kiss your mouth at last;
[She sayeth inwardly]
(The graves stand grey in a row.)
Oliver, hold me fast!
“Therefore,” said fair Yoland of the flowers,
“This is the tune of Seven Towers.”

These poems were written in Morris’s youth. Soon, we will look at his
mature works, The Earthly Paradise (a cycle of stories), and an epic poem,
Sigurd the Volsung. But he wrote these later—one from the year 1868 to
1870, and the other in the year 1876. Then came other less important poems,
to convert people to socialism.
We will now read another poem, “The Sailing of the Sword.”2 The
Sword is a ship carrying three warriors—I believe, to the Crusades—who
leave behind three sisters and tell them they will return. There is a theme that
repeats itself, a line: “When the Sword went out to sea.” There is alliteration.
One of the sisters speaks. She has been abandoned, because I can tell you
now that the knight will return, but with a splendid woman by his side.
[The student reads the poem.]

Across the empty garden-beds,

When the Sword went out to sea,
I scarcely saw my sisters’ heads
Bowed each beside a tree.
I could not see the castle leads,
When the Sword went out to sea,

Alicia wore a scarlet gown,

When the Sword went out to sea,
But Ursula’s was russet brown:
For the mist we could not see
The scarlet roofs of the good town,
When the Sword went out to sea.

Green holly in Alicia’s hand,

When the Sword went out to sea;
With sere oak-leaves did Ursula stand;
O! yet alas for me!
I did but bear a peel’d white wand,
When the Sword went out to sea.

O, russet brown and scarlet bright,

When the Sword went out to sea,
My sisters wore; I wore but white:
Red, brown, and white, are three;
Three damozels; each had a knight,
When the Sword went out to sea.

Sir Robert shouted loud, and said:

When the Sword went out to sea,
Alicia, while I see thy head,
What shall I bring for thee?
O, my sweet Lord, a ruby red:
The Sword went out to sea.

Sir Miles said, while the sails hung down,

When the Sword went out to sea,
O, Ursula! while I see the town,
What shall I bring for thee?
Dear knight, bring back a falcon brown:
The Sword went out to sea.

But my Roland, no word he said

When the Sword went out to sea,
But only turn’d away his head;
 A quick shriek came from me:
Come back, dear lord, to your white maid.
The Sword went out to sea.

The hot sun bit the garden-beds

When the Sword came back from sea;
Beneath an apple-tree our heads
Stretched out toward the sea;
Grey gleam’d the thirsty castle-leads,
When the Sword came back from sea.

Lord Robert brought a ruby red,

When the Sword came back from sea;
He kissed Alicia on the head:
I am come back to thee;
’Tis time, sweet love, that we were wed,
Now the Sword is back from sea!

Sir Miles he bore a falcon brown,

When the Sword came back from sea;
His arms went round tall Ursula’s gown:
What joy, O love, but thee?
Let us be wed in the good town,
Now the Sword is back from sea!

My heart grew sick, no more afraid,

When the Sword came back from sea;
Upon the deck a tall white maid
Sat on Lord Roland’s knee;
His chin was press’d upon her head,
When the Sword came back from sea!

The two older sisters receive a gift, and as the stanzas continue, we see
that Lord Roland is beginning to forget her. The first is dressed in red. The
next in brown. This foreshadows or predicts that something is going to
happen. The name of the ship is The Sword. At the end, when Roland returns,
he returns with a white maiden. And the narrator was dressed in white at the
beginning. You can see that this poem is like a painting, in addition to the
music of the lines.
Well, as you can see, Morris began by writing visual, musical, and
vaguely medieval poems. But then the years passed; he devoted himself to his
other activities: architecture, design, typography; and he planned out his great
work. And that great work—I think it is his most important work—is called
The Earthly Paradise, and was published in two or three volumes from the
year 1868 to 1870. Now, Morris had always been interested in stories, but he
believed that the best stories had already been invented, that a writer did not
have to invent new stories. That the true work of the poet—and he had an
epic sense of poetry—was to repeat or re-create these ancient stories. This
might seem strange to us as far as literature goes, but painters never thought
so. We could almost say that for centuries painters have repeatedly painted
the same stories, the story of the Passion, for example. How many
crucifixions are there in painting? And as for sculpture, it is exactly the same.
How many sculptors have made equestrian statues? And the story of the
Trojan War has been retold many times, and the Metamorphosis of Ovid
retells myths that readers already knew. And Morris, around the middle of the
nineteenth century, thought that the essential stories already existed and that
his task was to re-imagine them, re-create them, tell them anew. Moreover, he
admired Chaucer, who had not invented plots, either, but rather took Italian,
French, and Latin ones, as well as some from unknown sources but that
undoubtedly existed, like the story of the man who sells pardons. So, Morris
set himself the task of writing a series of stories like The Canterbury Tales,
and he placed them in the same era, the fourteenth century. Now, this book,
which consists of twenty-four stories and which Morris managed to finish in
three years, is written in imitation of Chaucer. But at the same time—and this
is something the critics seem not to have noticed—as a kind of challenge to
Chaucer, not only in terms of the sources but also in terms of the language.
Because, as you know, Chaucer looks for an English that abounds in Latin
words. This intention of his is logical, for with the Norman invasion England
became full of Latin words. Morris, on the other hand—Morris, who
translated Beowulf—was falling in love with Old Norse literature, and wanted
English to return, to whatever degree possible, to its primitive Germanic
roots. So he writes The Earthly Paradise.
I think that Chaucer could have done something similar if he had
wanted to, but Chaucer was drawn to the south—to the Mediterranean, to the
Latin tradition, a tradition that Morris certainly did not scorn, for half the
stories in The Earthly Paradise are Hellenic. There are eleven of Hellenic
origin, and another that is Arabic. Morris took that one from the medieval
book A Thousand and One Nights, which was compiled in Egypt, though its
sources (Hindu and Persian) are much older. Chaucer found a framework for
his stories, the idea of the famous pilgrimage to Becket’s shrine, and Morris
needed a framework, a pretext to tell a lot of stories. So he invented a story, a
more romantic story than, let’s say, Chaucer’s. Because between Chaucer in
the fourteenth century and Morris in the nineteenth century, many things had
happened, among them the romantic movement. Moreover, England had
rediscovered its Germanic roots, which it had forgotten. I think Carlyle, when
talking about Shakespeare, calls him “our Saxon William.” This would have
surprised Shakespeare, for Shakespeare never thought about England’s Saxon
roots. When Shakespeare thought about England’s past, he thought instead
about English history after the Norman conquest, or in England’s Celtic past.
And even when he wrote Hamlet, he felt so distant from all of that, that
except for Yorick, the jester—existing eternally in that dialogue with Hamlet
and the skull—and the two courtesans, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, all of it
comes from other countries. The soldiers who appear in the first scene of
Hamlet have Spanish names, Francisco and Bernardo. Hamlet’s beloved is
Ophelia; her brother is Laertes, the name of Ulysses’s father. That is, the
Germanic was far away from Shakespeare. Though undoubtedly it was in his
blood, and in a large part of his vocabulary, but he was not conscious of it.
He found almost all his plots in Greece, Rome; for Macbeth, he looked to
Scotland; for Hamlet, he found it in a Danish story. Morris, on the other
hand, was very conscious of the Germanic, and above all, of the Norse
aspects of the English past. And so he invented this plot. He takes the
fourteenth century—Chaucer’s era—and in that era, there is a plague that is
sweeping through Europe and especially through England: the Black Plague.
So he imagines a group of knights who want to flee death. Among them is a
Breton; there is also a Norwegian, and a German knight—though the German
knight dies before the end of the adventure. These knights decide to look for
the Earthly Paradise, the paradise of immortal men. The Earthly Paradise was
usually situated—there is an Anglo-Saxon poem with this title—in the
Orient.3 But the Celts had situated it in the West, toward the setting sun, in
the confines of the unknown seas bordering on America, which had yet to be
discovered. The Celts imagined all kinds of marvels: for example, islands
where bronze hounds chased deer of silver or gold; islands over which a river
hung like a rainbow, a river that never emptied, with ships and fish; islands
surrounded by walls of fire; and one of these islands was the Earthly
Paradise.
Those knights of the fourteenth century decide to look for the blessed
islands, the islands of the Earthly Paradise, and they leave London. And when
they leave London, they pass through customs, and at customs, there is a man
who is writing. And we are not told his name, but we are led to understand
that this man is Chaucer, who was a custom’s agent. So Chaucer appears
silently in the poem, like Shakespeare, who appears and does not say a word
in the novel Orlando, by Virginia Woolf. In that novel there is a party in a
palace, and there is a man watching and observing everything and saying
nothing. Both Morris and Virginia Woolf felt incapable of inventing words
worthy of putting in the mouths of Chaucer or Shakespeare.
Then the ship carrying the adventurers puts out to sea, and they pass
another ship. In that ship is a king, one of the kings of England who is going
to fight against France in the long Hundred Years’ War. And the king invites
the knights to board his ship, where he is on deck, and he is surrounded by
the knights, alone and unarmed. He asks them who they are. One says he is
Breton, the other that he is Norwegian, and the king asks them what they are
searching for, and they tell him they are searching for immortality. The king
does not think this adventure is absurd. The king believes an Earthly Paradise
might exist, but at the same time he understands that he is an old man, that
his fate is not immortality but rather battle and death. And so he wishes them
good luck, he tells them that their fate is better than his, that the only thing
left for him is to die “within the four walls of some battlefield.”4 He tells
them to carry on. Then he thinks that although he is a king and they are
strangers, they—perhaps this fits the beliefs of the time—would become
immortal. “And maybe,” he says, “it could come to pass that I, a king, will be
remembered for only one thing; I will be remembered because one morning,
before you crossed the sea, you spoke to me.” Then he thinks that, in spite of
the fact that they most probably will become immortal, and he will be
forgotten and will die like all kings and all men, he must give them
something. It is a way of showing his superiority. He is a king. He gives one
of them, the Breton, a horn, and he says, “So that you will remember this
morning. And you, Norwegian, I give you this ring, so you will remember
me, for I am of Odin’s blood.”5 Because, as you will remember, the kings of
England believed they were descended from Odin.
Then they take leave of the king and start on their journey. The journey
lasts many years. The seafarers land on marvelous islands, but they age. Then
they come to an unknown city on an island, where they remain till the end of
their days. That island is inhabited by Greeks who have preserved the cult of
the old gods. The father of the Norwegian knows Greek because he was a
member of the Scandinavian guard of the Byzantine emperor—that famous
guard of the Byzantine emperors, made up of Swedes, Norwegians, and
Danes that many Saxons joined after the Norman invasion of England in the
year 1066.6 It is strange to think that familiar languages were spoken in the
streets of Constantinople. In the streets of Constantinople, ancient Danish
was spoken and, around the middle of the eleventh century, Anglo-Saxon.
The city on the island is governed by Greeks. They warmly welcome
the travelers, and here we have the framework Morris needed: the elders of
the city suggest to the seafarers that they should all meet twice a month and
tell each other stories. The stories the islanders tell are all Greek myths. There
are the stories of Eros, of Perseus, all taken from Greek mythology. And the
others tell stories of different origins, among them an Icelandic story that
Morris translated into English. It is called “The Lovers of Gudrun.” There is
an Arabic story, a story the father of the Norwegian told him, taken from A
Thousand and One Nights. There are other Scandinavian and Persian stories.
In this way, in a year, twenty-four stories are told. Morris took his meter from
Chaucer. There are also, as in Chaucer, intervals between the twelve stories
of the seafarers and the twelve stories of the Greeks. In these intervals, the
changes of the seasons are described, and by the use of a convention—Morris
was not looking for realism, of course—the landscapes described are the
landscapes of England in the spring, summer, fall, and winter.
At the end, the poet speaks, and the poet says that although he has told
these stories, they are not his, but that he has re-created them for his time and
that, probably, others will tell them after him as they were told before him.
Then he says that he cannot sing about heaven or hell—he was probably
thinking about Dante when he said that—that he cannot make death seem like
a trivial thing, that he cannot stop the passage of time, that it will sweep him
away as it will sweep away the readers.7 We can see he has no faith in the
next world. He says that he is simply “el ocioso cantor de un día vacio.”
[“The idle singer on an empty day.”] Then he speaks to his book, and he tells
the book that if it should ever find Chaucer, that it should greet him and in his
name say: “¡Oh, tú, grande de lengua y de corazón!” [“O thou great of heart
and tongue . . . ”].8 And so the book ends on a melancholy note.
This book is full of fantastical inventions. There is a witches’ Sabbath,
for example, and there is the king of the demons, who rides on a horse of
sculpted and ever-changing fire, so that at every moment the features of the
king and his horse have a precise shape, but this shape lasts only an instant.9
Before publishing this book, Morris published another long poem titled
The Life and Death of Jason.10 I’m convinced it must have originally been
one of the Greek stories of The Earthly Paradise, but the story was so long
Morris published it separately. One of the most notable features of this poem
that came before The Earthly Paradise is that the centaurs of Thessaly appear
on the first pages. It seems impossible to us that a poet of the nineteenth
century would talk about centaurs, because we and he don’t believe in
centaurs.
It is extraordinary to see how Morris prepares the way for the centaur.
First he talks about the forest of Thessaly, then he talks about the lions and
wolves of this forest, and then he tells us that the quick-eyed centaurs shoot
their arrows there.11 He begins with the part of the body where life is most
apparent, the eyes.12 Then we have a slave who awaits a centaur. And in the
same way that Dante in The Divine Comedy shows himself tremulous—not
because he is a coward but because he must communicate to his readers that
hell is a terrible place—the slave feels a kind of horror when, in the middle of
the forest—a dense forest—he hears the hoofs of a centaur approaching
him.13 Then the centaur approaches and Morris describes him with a wreath
of flowers around the part of his body where the human ends and the equine
begins.14 Morris does not tell us that the slave feels this is terrible, but he
shows the slave falling to his knees in front of the monster.15 Then the
centaur speaks, speaks with human words, and the slave feels this is terrible,
too, because the centaur is half man, half horse. In this long poem, which
ends with the death of Medea, everything is told in a way that, while we read
the poem, we believe in it, or, as Coleridge would say when speaking about
Shakespeare’s drama, there is a “willing suspension of disbelief.”
From 1868 to 1870, Morris publishes his The Earthly Paradise. This
poem is recognized by all his contemporaries—even those who were not
close to him—as a great poem. But he, in the meantime, had started a saga
library. These are “novels” written for the most part in Iceland during the
Middle Ages. Morris became friends with an Icelander, Eiríkr Magnússon,
and between the two they translated various parts of the “novels.” This would
later be done in the Scandinavian countries and in Germany. In Germany,
there is a famous collection, the Thule Library, the name the Romans gave
some islands that have been identified as the Shetland Islands, but that
usually are identified with Iceland. Morris embarks on his pilgrimage to
Iceland and translates great poems into English, and among these poems is
the Odyssey. I will recall the first two lines of Pope’s Odyssey and the first of
Morris’s. Pope used a Latinate English, a sonorous English, and the lines are
as follows:

The man, for wisdom’s various arts renown’d,

Long exercis’d in woes, oh muse! resound . . .

Al hombre famoso por las diversas artes de la sabiduía,

Largamente ejercitado en pesares, ¡oh musa, resuena!, !oh musa,
canta!

Morris wanted to limit his vocabulary as far as possible to Germanic

words. So, besides the word “muse,” which he had to keep, we have these
strange lines:

Tell me, O Muse, of the shifty, the man who wandered afar,
After the Holy Burg, Troy-town, he had wasted with war …
 Hábleme musa del astuto, el hombre que erró muy lejos,
después de haber destrozado con Guerra la ciudadela sagrada.

Morris also translated the Aeneid and Beowulf. He translated the sagas.
His versions of the sagas are admirable. In his version of the Odyssey, we feel
a certain incongruity between the fact that Morris is translating a Greek epic
poem and the Germanic English he uses. On the other hand, we feel no
incongruity in Morris’s use of Germanic words to translate Old Norse stories
and “novels.”
I would like to recall one episode from the sagas. The word “saga” is
related to sagen, “to say,” in German. They are stories, tales. They started out
as oral and were later written down, but because they were originally oral, the
narrator was forbidden to enter into the mind of the heroes. He could not
recount what a hero dreamed; he could not say that a person hated or loved:
this would be to intrude upon the mind of the character. Only what the
characters did or what they made could be told. The sagas are told as if they
are real, and if they abound in fantastical elements it is because the narrators
and listeners believed in them. In the sagas, there are fifty or sixty characters,
all historical, characters who lived and died in Iceland and were famous for
their bravery or for their personalities. The episode that I will recount is this:
there is a very beautiful woman, with long, blonde hair that reaches down to
her waist.16 That woman performs a vile act and her husband slaps her. The
narrator does not tell us what she feels, because that is forbidden by the rules
of his art. And then two or three hundred pages go by, and we have forgotten
about the slap. And the husband who slapped her has also forgotten. And then
he is under siege in his house, and being attacked. And the first attacker
manages to climb the tower. And Gunnar, the husband, kills him from inside,
he wounds him with a lance. The man falls to the ground, and his
companions surround him. We don’t know anything about this man, but one
of his companions asks him, “Is Gunnar in the house?” And the man—this
shows us he is courageous—dies with a joke on his lips. He says, “I don’t
know about him, but his lance is,” and he dies with this joke. Then the others
surround the house and continue attacking Gunnar, who defends himself with
arrows. He is with his dog and his wife. The others in his house have all been
killed. But he continues defending himself with arrows, and one of the arrows
of those surrounding the house breaks the cord of Gunnar’s bow. Gunnar
needs another cord, he needs it immediately, and he asks his wife—much has
been mentioned about her long blonde hair—that she weave him a cord with
her hair.17

[The original transcription of the class ends here. Probably Borges’s

final words were not taped.]
 CLASS 24

THE STORY OF SIGURD THE VOLSUNG, BY WILLIAM MORRIS.

THE LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

[PROBABLY] MONDAY, DECEMBER 12, 1966

In literary histories and biographies of Morris, one learns that Morris’s

most important work was Sigurd the Volsung.1 This book is longer than
Beowulf, and was published in 1876. At that time the novel was considered
the most popular genre of literature. The idea of writing an epic poem in the
middle of the nineteenth century was audacious. Milton had written Paradise
Lost, but in the seventeenth century. The only contemporary of Morris who
thought of something similar was the French poet Hugo with The Legend of
the Centuries.2 But this legend, more than an epic poem, is a series of stories.
Morris did not believe a poet needed to invent new plots. He believed
that the plots that dealt with the essential passions of mankind had already
been found, and that each new poet could give them a particular inflection.
Morris had heavily researched Old Norse literature, which he judged to be the
flower of ancient Germanic culture, and there he found the story of Sigurd.
He had translated the Saga of the Volsung, a prose work from the thirteenth
century written in Iceland. There is an earlier version of the same story that
achieved greater fame, which is the German Song of the Nibelungs, dating
from the twelfth century—but that is, contrary to the chronology, a later
version of the same story. The mythological and epic nature of the story is
preserved in the first. On the contrary, Song of the Nibelungs, written in
Austria, went from epic to romantic, and the versification is Latinate, with
rhymed stanzas. In England, it is unusual for the ancient Germanic subject
matter to be lost and the Germanic verse forms to be preserved (although we
have in the fourteenth century in English the alliterative poem by Langland).3
In Germany, the Germanic tradition has been preserved, but new verse forms
from the south have been adopted, with a determined number of syllables,
and rhyme, but no alliteration.
The story of Sigurd was known by all the Germanic peoples. It is
alluded to in Beowulf, though the author of Beowulf preferred a different
story for his eighth-century epic poem. Morris based his on the Norse, not the
German, version. This is why his hero is named Sigurd and not Siegfried.
The Norse names are kept, for the most part. It is true that Morris wrote in
couplets, but his lines are not exempt from the frequent use of German
alliteration. The poem, which is very long, is called Sigurd the Volsung. The
central character is not the hero but rather Brynhild, though the story
continues after her death.4 Morris uses the mythic elements that the German
version ignores, so we have the god Odin at the beginning and at the end of
the story. The story is long and complicated, and there are ancient and
barbaric elements. For example, Sigurd kills a dragon who is guarding a
treasure, then bathes in the hot blood of the dragon. This bath makes him
invulnerable, except for one spot on his back where a leaf fell on him from a
tree. And that is how Sigurd can die. This is reminiscent of Achilles’ heel.
Sigurd is the bravest of men: king of Burgundy, and friend of Gunnar,
king of the Low Countries. Gunnar has heard about a damsel, whose modern
version we know as Sleeping Beauty. This damsel is under the spell of a
magic sleep and surrounded by a wall of fire on a remote island in Iceland.
She will give herself only to the man who can pass through the wall of fire.
Sigurd accompanies his friend Gunnar, and they come to the wall, and
Gunnar does not dare penetrate it. So Sigurd, using magic, disguises himself
as Gunnar. He is going to help his friend; he bandages his horse’s eyes, and
forces him to go through the wall of fire. He reaches the palace, and there is
Brynhild, sleeping. He kisses her, wakes her up, and tells her that he is the
hero destined to perform this feat. She falls in love with him and gives him
her ring. He spends three nights with her, but not wanting to be disloyal to his
friend, he places his sword between them. She asks why he is doing this, and
he answers that if he didn’t, they would both suffer misfortune. This episode
of the sword placed between a man and a woman can be found in one of the
stories of A Thousand and One Nights.
After spending three nights together, he bids her farewell. It is
understood that he will come back to get her. He tells her his name is Gunnar,
because he does not want to betray his friend. And she gives him her ring,
and then she marries Gunnar, who takes her to his kingdom. Sigurd has used
magic, and he forgets what has happened for a long time and marries
Gunnar’s sister, who is named Gudrun; but there is a rivalry between
Brynhild and Gudrun. Then Gudrun learns the truth about the story: Brynhild
tells her that her husband is the most noble king, for he passed through the
wall of fire to win her, and she shows her the ring she gave to Sigurd.
Brynhild then understands the deceit. At that moment, Brynhild realizes that
she is not in love with Gunnar, that she is in love with the man who passed
through the wall of fire, and that man is Sigurd. And she also knows that
there is a spot on Sigurd’s back where he is vulnerable, so she employs a
third person to kill Sigurd. When she hears him shout as he is being killed,
she laughs with a cruel laugh. Once Sigurd is dead, she understands that she
has killed the man she loves, and she calls her husband and tells him to raise
a high funeral pyre. Then she mortally wounds herself and asks to be laid
next to Sigurd, with the sword between them, like before. It is as if she
wanted to return to the past.
She says that when Sigurd dies, his soul will rise to Odin’s paradise.
This paradise is lit by swords. She says that she will follow him to this
paradise where “we will lie together and there will be no sword between us.”
The story continues, we see the death of Atli, and the poem concludes with
Gudrun’s revenge.5 Then the treasure of the Nibelungs is lost again, which is
what provoked this whole tragic story.
It was somewhat ambitious to think about all this in the nineteenth
century. Some contemporary critics say that Sigurd is one of the principle
works of the nineteenth century. But the truth is that for some reason that we
don’t know, the epic poem in verse is, at times, quite distant from our literary
demands. Morris’s work garnered what the French call a succès d’estime. The
defect Morris suffered from is slowness: the descriptions of battles, the death
of the dragon, they are a bit languid. After the death of Brynhild, the poem
falls off. With this, let us leave Morris’s work.
We are now going to talk about Robert Louis Stevenson. He was born
in Edinburgh in 1850 and died in 1894. His life was tragic, because he lived
trying to escape from tuberculosis, which was an incurable illness. This took
him from Edinburgh to London, from London to France, from France to the
United States, and he died on an island in the Pacific. Stevenson carried out a
vast literary labor. His works fill twelve or fourteen volumes. He wrote,
among many other things, a famous book for children, Treasure Island.6 He
also wrote fables, a detective novel, The Wrecker.7 People think of
Stevenson as the author of Treasure Island, a work for children, and they
hold him in less regard. They forget that he was an admirable poet, and that
he is one of the masters of English prose.
Stevenson’s parents and grandparents were lighthouse engineers, and
we find among Stevenson’s work a quite technical treatise on the
construction of lighthouses.8 He has a poem in which he seems to consider
that his work as a writer—work that made the Stevenson family name famous
—was in some way inferior to that work of his parents and grandparents. In
that poem he speaks of “the towers and lamps we lit.”9 It’s a little like our
own Lugones, when in that poem dedicated to his elders he says, “Que
nuestra tierra quiera salvarnos del olvido / por estos cuatro siglos que en
ella hemos servido.” [“That our land will save us from oblivion / for these
four centuries we served her well.”] As if his elders, those of the War of
Independence, were more important than he, Leopoldo Lugones.10
In his poem, Stevenson speaks of a “strenuous lineage that dusted from
its hands the granite sand, and in its decline played with paper like a child.”
That child is he, and that game with paper is his admirable literary work.
Stevenson began by studying law, and then we know his life went through a
dark period. In Edinburgh, Stevenson spent time with thieves and women of
the night; when he says “women of the night” and “thieves,” we should
imagine an essentially Puritan city. Edinburgh was, along with Geneva, one
of the capitals of Calvinism in Europe. This environment was aware of its
guilt, it was an environment of sinners, who acknowledged that they were
sinners. And we can see this in the famous story The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which we will come back to.11
At first, Stevenson was interested in painting. He went to a doctor, who
told him he had tuberculosis and should go south; he thought the south of
France could be beneficial to his health. Stevenson wrote a short article about
the south in which he tells about this. (The article is called “Ordered
South.”)12 Then Stevenson passes through London, which must have seemed
to him like a fantastic city. And in London he wrote his New Arabian
Nights.13 Later we will talk about one story in particular, “The Suicide
Club.” As in A Thousand and One Nights, where we have a caliph named
Harun the Orthodox, who wanders through the streets of Baghdad in disguise,
here in The New Arabian Nights by Stevenson, we have Prince Florizel of
Bohemia, who wanders through the streets of London in disguise.14
Then Stevenson goes to France and dedicates himself to painting,
through which he does not make his fortune; and he and his brother reach a
hotel one winter night, I think in Switzerland, and inside is a group of gypsy
women sitting around the fireplace.15 Stevenson did not want to be alone . . .
there was also a young girl and an older woman—who later turned out to be
the mother of the girl. And then Stevenson says to his brother, “You see that
woman?” And his brother says, “The girl?” “No, no,” Stevenson says, “the
older one, the one on the right. I am going to marry her.” His brother laughs,
he thinks it is a joke. They enter the hotel. He makes friends with the woman,
who is named Fanny Osbourne, and she tells him that she will stay there for
only a few days, that she has to return to the United States, she has to return
to San Francisco, California. Stevenson says nothing to her, but he has
already made the decision to marry her. They don’t write to each other, but a
year later Stevenson sets sail as an immigrant, arriving in the United States
then crossing the vast continent; he works in one place as a miner. Then he
arrives in San Francisco. There is the woman, she is a widow, and he
proposes to her, and she accepts. In the meantime, Stevenson lives from his
literary essays. These essays were written in an admirable prose, though they
did not attract much public attention.
Then Stevenson returns to Scotland, and to entertain himself on the
rainy days that are so frequent there, he draws a map on the ground with
chalk. This map is in the shape of a triangle; there are hills, bays, gulfs. And
his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, with whom he will later co-author The
Wrecker, asks him to tell him about Treasure Island.16 Each morning, he
writes a chapter of Treasure Island and then reads it to his stepson. I think it
has twenty-four chapters, though I’m not certain.17 It is his most famous
work, though not his best.
 Stevenson also tries writing theater, but theater in the nineteenth
century was an inferior genre. Writing for theater then was like writing for
television now, or for the movies. He co-writes several plays with W. E.
Henley, the editor of The Observer, and one is called The Double Life.18
Stevenson went to the city of San Francisco. He described it
admirably. . . . Then, the doctors tell him that California will not cure him,
that he needs to travel through the Pacific. Stevenson knew a lot about
sailing, and he sails through the Pacific. Finally, he settles in a place called
Vailima, and there he makes friends with the king of the island.19 And here
something happens that is somewhat magical: a few years earlier, Stevenson
had published The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and there was a
priest, a French Jesuit, who had spent his life in the leper colony in that
region, Father Damien. A Protestant minister with whom Stevenson dined
one night revealed to him certain irregularities, we could call them, in the life
of Father Damien, and for sectarian reasons, he attacked him. Stevenson
wrote a letter in which he praised the work of Father Damien, and in it he
says that it is the duty of all men to throw a cloak over his guilt, and that what
the other had done, attacking his memory, was despicable. It is one of
Stevenson’s most eloquent passages.20
Stevenson dies when the conflict between the Africans in the south and
the English started, and Stevenson believed that the Dutch were in the right,
that England’s duty was to retreat. He published a letter in the Times saying
just that, which made him very unpopular. But Stevenson did not care.
Stevenson was not a religious man, but he had a strong sense of ethics. He
believed, for example, that one of the duties of literature was to not publish
anything that would depress its readers. This was a sacrifice on Stevenson’s
part, for Stevenson possessed a great tragic strength. But he was most
interested in the heroic. There is an article of Stevenson’s titled “Pulvis et
Umbra,” in which he says that we do not know if God exists or not, but we do
know that there is a single moral law in the universe.21 He begins by
describing how extraordinary mankind is. “How strange,” he says, “that the
surface of the planet is inhabited by bipedal, ambulant beings, capable of
reproducing themselves, and that these beings have a moral sense!” He
believes that this moral law rules the entire universe. For example, he says,
we know nothing about bees and ants, nevertheless, bees and ants form
republics, and we can guess that for a bee and an ant, there are things that are
forbidden, things they shouldn’t do. And then he turns to man, and says,
“Think about the life of a sailor”—that life Dr. Johnson said had the dignity
of danger—“think about the difficulty of his life, think about how he lives
exposed to storms, putting his life on the line. How he then spends a few days
in port, getting drunk in the company of the lowest sort of women.
Nevertheless, this sailor,” he says, “is ready to risk his life for his
companion.” Then he adds that he does not believe in either punishment or
reward. He believes that man dies with his body, that physical death is the
death of the soul. And he anticipates the argument that says: From any lesson
whatsoever nothing good can be expected. If we are hit on the head, we do
not improve, and if we die there is no reason to believe that something rises
from our decay. And Stevenson also believes this, and he says that in spite of
all that, there is no man who does not know intimately when he has done a
good deed and when he has done a bad one.
There’s another essay by Stevenson, which I wish to speak of, about
prose.22 Stevenson says that prose is a more complex art than poetry. The
proof of this is the fact that prose comes after poetry. In poetry, each line,
Stevenson says, creates an expectation and then satisfies it. For example, if
we say, “Oh, dulces prendas por mí mal halladas, / dulces y alegres cuando
Dios quería, / conmigo estáis en la memoria mía, / y con ella en mi muerte
conjuradas,” the ear is already waiting for the conjuradas to rhyme with
halladas.23 But the task of a prose writer is much more difficult, says
Stevenson, because his task consists of creating an expectation in each
paragraph, while the paragraph has to be euphonic. Then, he must disappoint
this expectation, but in a way that is also euphonic. Using this, Stevenson
analyzes a passage from Macaulay to show that from the point of view of the
prose, it is a weak passage, because there are sounds that are repeated too
often. Then he analyzes a passage from Milton, in which he discovers a
single error, but in everything else, in the use of vowels and consonants, it is
admirable.
In the meantime, Stevenson continues to correspond with his friends in
England, and as he is Scottish, he is full of nostalgia for Edinburgh. There is
a poem to the cemetery in Edinburgh. From his exile in the Pacific, he sends
all his writing to London. There, his books are published; they bring him
great fame, and wealth. But he lives like an exile on his island, and the
aborigines call him Tusitala, “the teller of tales,” “the teller of stories.” So
Stevenson, surely, also learned the language of that country. There he lived
with his stepson and his wife, and he received some visitors. One of the
people who visited him was Kipling. Kipling said that he could pass an exam
on Stevenson’s work, that if someone mentioned a secondary character or an
episode from his work, he would immediately recognize it.
Stevenson had strong Scottish features: he was tall, very thin, not very
strong physically, but with a great spirit. Once he was in a café in Paris and
he heard a Frenchman say that Englishmen were cowards. At that moment,
Stevenson felt English—at that moment he believed that the Frenchman was
talking about him. So he rose and slapped the Frenchman. And the
Frenchman said, “Sir, you have slapped me.” And Stevenson said, “So it
seems.” Stevenson was always a great friend of France. He wrote articles
about French poets, and admiring articles about Dumas’s novels, about
Verne, about Baudelaire.
The number of books about Stevenson is quite large. There is a book
by Chesterton about Stevenson, published at the beginning of the century.24
There is another book, one by Stephen Gwynn, an Irish man of letters,
published in the collection English Men of Letters.25
In the next class we will discuss a subject that was very dear to
Stevenson: the subject of schizophrenia. We will look at this and at one of the
stories of New Arabian Nights, and at a bit of Stevenson’s poetry.
 CLASS 25

THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: NEW ARABIAN

NIGHTS, "MARKHEIM," THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR.
HYDE. JEKYLL AND HYDE IN THE MOVIES. THE PICTURE OF
DORIAN GRAY, BY OSCAR WILDE. "REQUIEM," BY STEVENSON.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1966

Today I am going to discuss the New Arabian Nights.1 In English,

people don’t say A Thousand and One Nights, but rather The Arabian Nights.
When a very young Stevenson arrived in London, it was undoubtedly a
fantastic city to him. Stevenson conceived of the idea of writing a
contemporary Arabian Nights, based, above all, on those tales that are about
Harun al-Rashid, who wanders through the streets of Baghdad in disguise. He
invented a prince, Florizel of Bohemia, and his aide-de-camp, Colonel
Geraldine. He has them disguise themselves and wander around London. And
he makes them have fantastic, though not magical, adventures (except in the
sense of the atmosphere, which is magical).
Of all their adventures, I think the most memorable is “The Suicide
Club.” There, Stevenson imagines a character, a kind of cynic, who thinks he
can take advantage of suicide to start a business. He is a man who knows that
there are many people longing to take their own lives, but who do not dare do
so. So he founds a club. In this club they play a weekly or biweekly—I don’t
remember which—game of cards. The prince joins this club out of a spirit of
adventure, and he has to swear not to reveal its secrets. Later he must take
responsibility for carrying out justice because of a mistake his aide commits.
There is one very impressive character. His name is Mr. Malthus, a paralytic.
And this man has nothing left in life, but he has discovered that of all the
sensations, of all the passions, the strongest is fear. And so he toys with fear.
He tells the prince, who is a brave man, “You should envy me, sir, for I am a
coward.” He toys with fear by joining the Suicide Club.
All of this occurs in a neighborhood on the outskirts of London. The
players drink champagne, laugh with false mirth; there is an atmosphere
similar to that in some stories by Edgar Allan Poe, about whom Stevenson
wrote. The game is played like this: there is a table covered in green cloth,
the president of the club deals the cards, and it is said of him—as incredible
as it seems—that he is not interested in suicide. The members of the club
have to pay a fairly high fee. The president must fully trust them. Every care
is taken to make sure no spies join. If the members have a fortune, they make
the president of the club their heir, for he lives off this macabre industry. And
then he deals out the cards. Each of the players, when he receives his card—
the English deck consists of fifty-two cards—looks at it. In the pack there are
just two black aces, and whoever receives one of the black aces is in charge
of carrying out the sentence, he is the executioner, he has to kill the one who
has received the other black ace. He has to kill him so that it seems like an
accident. And in the first session the person who dies—or who is condemned
to die—is Mr. Malthus. Mr. Malthus has been carried to the table. He is
paralytic, he cannot move. But suddenly an almost inhuman sound is heard;
the paralytic man stands up, then falls back into his chair. Then they adjourn.
They will not see one another until the next meeting. The next day they read
that Mr. Malthus, a gentleman held in high esteem by his family, has fallen
from a pier in London. And then the adventure begins, which ends with a
duel in which Prince Florizel, who has sworn not to turn anyone in, kills the
president of the club.
Then there is another adventure in “The Rajah’s Diamond,” which
recounts all the crimes committed for the possession of a diamond. In the last
chapter, the prince, who has the diamond, holds a conversation with a
detective and asks if he is coming to arrest him. The detective says no, then
the prince tells him the story. He tells it to him on a bank of the Thames.
Then he says, “When I think of all the blood that has been spilled, all the
crimes committed for that rock, I think we should condemn it to death.” Then
he quickly pulls it out of his pocket and throws it into the Thames, and it is
lost. The detective says, “I am ruined.” The prince answers, “Many men
would envy your ruin.” Then the detective says, “I think it is my destiny to be
bribed.” “I think so,” says the prince.
This book, the New Arabian Nights, is not only important for the
delight it can bring us, but because when one reads it, one understands that
somehow Chesterton’s entire novelistic oeuvre has come out of it. There we
have the seeds of The Man Who Was Thursday.2 All of Chesterton’s novels,
even if they are more clever than Stevenson’s, have the same atmosphere as
Stevenson’s stories. Then Stevenson does other things. By the time he writes
his detective novel, The Wrecker, there is a totally different atmosphere.
Everything takes place first in California, then in the South Seas. Moreover,
Stevenson believed that the defect of the genre of detective novels was that
no matter how clever, there was something mechanical about them—an
absence of life. So, Stevenson says that in his detective novels he makes his
characters more realistic than the plot, which is the opposite of what is
usually the case in a detective novel.
Let us now take a look at a subject that always preoccupied Stevenson.
There is a very commonly used psychological word, the word
“schizophrenia,” which is the idea of a split personality. That word had not
been coined at the time, I believe. Now it is used very commonly. Stevenson
was very preoccupied with this subject. In the first place, because he was
very interested in ethics, and also because in his house was a chest of drawers
made by a cabinetmaker in Edinburgh, a respectable and respected craftsman,
but at night, on some nights, he would leave his house and become a robber.
That subject of a split personality interested Stevenson, and with Henley he
wrote a play called The Double Life.3
But Stevenson felt he was not finished with the subject. So he wrote
the story “Markheim,” the story of a man who becomes a thief, then a
murderer.4 On Christmas Eve, he enters a pawnshop. Stevenson introduces
the pawnbroker as a very disagreeable person, who does not trust Markheim
because he suspects that the jewels he wants to sell him were stolen. Night
arrives. The pawnbroker says that he has to close early and that Markheim
will have to pay him for his time. Markheim tells him that he has not come to
sell, he has come to buy something, something that is buried deep in the shop.
The other thinks this odd and makes a joke: since Markheim tells him that
everything he sells has been inherited from an uncle of his, the pawnbroker
says to him, “I assume your uncle has left you money, now you want to spend
it.” Markheim accepts the joke, and when they go to the back of the shop, he
stabs the pawnbroker and kills him. When Markheim goes from being a thief
to a murderer, the world changes for him. He thinks, for example, that natural
laws may have been suspended, for he has infringed upon a moral law by
committing the crime. And then, in a curious invention of Stevenson’s, the
shop is filled with mirrors and watches. And these watches seem to be
running some kind of race; they become a symbol of time passing. Markheim
takes the pawnbroker’s keys. He knows the safe is on an upper floor, but he
must hurry because the servant will come. At the same time, he sees his own
image multiplied and moving in the mirrors. And that image he sees becomes
an image of the entire city. Because from the moment he has killed the
pawnbroker, he assumes the whole city is pursuing him or will pursue him.
He climbs up to the back room, pursued by the ticking of the clocks
and the changing images in the mirrors. He hears steps. He thinks those steps
could be those of the housekeeper coming back after seeing her dead master,
and that she will turn him in. But the person climbing the stairs is not a
woman, and Markheim has the impression he knows the person. He does
know him, because it is he himself; hence we are faced with the ancient
theme of the double. In Scottish superstition, the double is called “fetch,”
which means to look for. So when somebody sees his double it is because he
is seeing himself.
This character enters and starts up a conversation with Markheim; he
sits down and tells him that he will not denounce him, that a year ago he
would have thought it a lie to be called a thief, and that now, he is not only a
thief but a murderer. This would have seemed unbelievable just a few months
before. But now that he has killed a person, why would he have a problem
killing another? “The housekeeper is going to come,” he tells him, “the
housekeeper is a weak woman. Another stab and you can leave, because I’m
not going to turn you in.” That “other I” is supernatural, and signifies the evil
side of Markheim. Markheim argues with him. He tells him, “It is true I am a
thief, it is true I am a murderer, those are my acts, but is a man his acts?
Might there not be something in me that does not fit the rigid and senseless
definitions of ‘thief’ and ‘murderer’? Can I not repent? Am I not already
repentant about what I have done?” The other tells him that “these
philosophical considerations are all fine and good, but consider that the
housekeeper is about to come, that if she finds you here she will turn you in.
Your duty right now is to save yourself.”
The dialogue is long and deals with ethical problems. Markheim tells
him that he has killed, but that does not mean that he is a murderer. And then
the character who has, until that moment, been a dark figure, turns into a
radiant character. He is no longer an evil angel but a good one. Then the
double disappears, and the housekeeper approaches. Markheim is there with
the knife in his hand, and he tells her to go get the police because he has just
killed her master. And this is how Markheim saves himself. This story makes
a deep impression when you read it because it is written with a deliberate
slow pace and deliberate delicacy. The protagonist, as you can see, is in an
extreme situation: they are coming, they will discover him, they will arrest
him, they will possibly hang him. But the discussion he has with that other,
who is he himself, is one of delicate, honest casuistry.
The story was praised, but Stevenson thought he still had not finished
with the subject of schizophrenia. Stevenson, many years later, was sleeping
beside his wife and started shouting. She woke him up, and he was feverish—
he had coughed up blood that day. He told her, “What a pity you woke me up
because I was dreaming a beautiful nightmare!” What he was dreaming—
here we can think about Caedmon and the angel, about Coleridge—what he
had dreamed was that scene in which Dr. Jekyll drinks the potion and turns
into Hyde, who represents evil. The scene of the doctor drinking something
he has concocted and then turning into the opposite is what Stevenson’s
dream gave him, and then he had to invent all the rest.
Today, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has a
disadvantage, and that is that the story is so well known that almost all of us
know it before we read it. On the other hand, when Stevenson published Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in the year 1880—that is, long before The Portrait of
Dorian Gray, which was inspired by Stevenson’s novel—when Stevenson
published his book, he published it as if it were a detective novel: only at the
end do we learn that these two people are two facets of the same character.5
Stevenson proceeds with great skill. Already in the title there is a suggested
duality: two characters are introduced. But these two characters never appear
at the same time—Hyde is the projection of Jekyll’s evil—the author does
everything possible to prevent us from thinking they are the same person. He
starts by making a distinction between their ages. Hyde, the evil one, is
younger than Jekyll. One is dark, the other is not: he is blond and tall. Hyde is
not deformed. If you looked at his face you could see no deformity, because
he was pure evil.
Many films have been based on this plot. But all those who have made
films based on this story made a mistake; they used the same actor to play
Jekyll and Hyde. Moreover, in the film, we see the story from the inside. We
see the doctor—the doctor who has the idea of a potion that can separate evil
from good in a man. Then we watch the transformation. So it is all reduced to
something quite secondary. On the other hand, I think a film should be made
with two actors. Then we would have the surprise that these two actors—
already known by the viewer—are in the end the same person. They would
have to change the names of Jekyll and Hyde, because they are too well
known; they would have to be given different names. In all the film versions,
Dr. Jekyll is shown as a severe, Puritan man with unassailable habits, and
Hyde as a drunk, a rake. For Stevenson, evil did not essentially consist of
sexual licentiousness or alcoholism. For him, evil was, above all, gratuitous
cruelty. There is a scene at the beginning of the novel in which a character is
standing at a high window and looking out at the labyrinth of mankind, and
he sees a little girl coming along one street and a man along another. They are
both walking toward the same corner. When they meet at the corner, the man
deliberately tramples on the girl. This was evil for Stevenson—cruelty. Then
we see that man enter Dr. Jekyll’s laboratory, then bribe his pursuers with a
check. We might think that Hyde is the son of Jekyll, or that he knows some
terrible secret in Jekyll’s life. And only in the last chapter do we find out that
he is the same man, when we read Dr. Jekyll’s confessions.
It has been said that the idea that one man is two is a cliché. But as
Chesterton has pointed out, Stevenson’s idea is the opposite, it is the idea that
a man is not two, but that if a man commits a sin, that sin stains him. So at
the beginning, Dr. Jekyll drinks the potion—if he had been more good than
evil, it would have converted him into an angel—and he is changed into a
being who is pure evil—cruel, and merciless—a man who has no conscience
or scruples. He gives himself over to the pleasure of being purely evil, of not
being two persons, as all of us are. At first, it is enough for him to drink the
potion, but then there is a morning when he wakes up and feels smaller. Then
he looks at his hand and that hand is the hairy hand of Hyde. Then he drinks
the potion, and again turns into a respectable man. Some time passes. He is
sitting in Hyde Park. Suddenly he feels that his clothes are too big, and he has
changed into the other. Then, when there is an ingredient for the potion that
he cannot find, it is the same as the trap the devil sets. Finally, one of the
characters kills himself and with him, the other also dies.
This was imitated by Oscar Wilde in the last chapter of The Portrait of
Dorian Gray. You will remember that Dorian Gray is a man who does not
age, a man devoted to vice, who watches his portrait age. In the last chapter,
Dorian, who is young, who looks pure, sees his own image in the portrait, his
reflection. Then he destroys this portrait and he dies. When they find him,
they find that the portrait is as the painter had painted it, and he is an old,
corrupt, monstrous man, identifiable only from his clothes and rings.
I recommend you read Stevenson’s book, The Ebb-Tide; it was very
well translated into Spanish by Ricardo Baeza.6 There is another book,
unfinished, written in Scottish, that is very difficult to read.7
But speaking about Stevenson, I have forgotten something very
important, which is Stevenson’s poetry. There are many nostalgic poems, and
there is a short poem called “Requiem.” This poem, if translated literally,
would not be very impressive. The sense of the poem is more in its
intonation. The literal meaning is not very impressive, as is the case with all
good poems.
It reads like this:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me;

Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Bajo el vasto y estrellado cielo,

Cavad la tumba y dejadme yacer ahí.
Viví con alegría y muero con alegría,
Y me he acostado a descansar con ganas.
 Sea éste el verso que ustedes graben para mí:
Aquí yace donde quería yacer;
Ha vuelto el marinero, ha vuelto del mar,
Y el cazador ha vuelto de la colina.

In English the lines vibrate like a sword, the sharp sounds predominate
from the very first line, with the triple alliteration at the end of the last line. It
is not written in the Scottish dialect, but one can hear the Scottish music.
Then there are, in Stevenson’s work, love poems, poems dedicated to his
wife. There is one in which he compares God to a craftsman and says that He
has made her to suit him like a sword. Then, he has poems about friendship,
poems about landscapes, poems in which he describes the Pacific Ocean, and
others in which he describes Edinburgh. Those poems are more pathetic
because he writes about Edinburgh, about Scotland and its Highlands,
knowing that he will never return there, that he is condemned to die in the
Pacific.
 EPILOGUE 1

I believe that the phrase “obligatory reading” is a contradiction in terms;

reading should not be obligatory. Should we ever speak of “obligatory
pleasure”? What for? Pleasure is not obligatory, pleasure is something we
seek. Obligatory happiness! We seek happiness as well. For twenty years, I
have been a professor of English Literature in the School of Philosophy and
Letters at the University of Buenos Aires, and I have always advised my
students: If a book bores you, leave it; don’t read it because it is famous,
don’t read it because it is modern, don’t read a book because it is old. If a
book is tedious to you, leave it, even if that book is Paradise Lost—which is
not tedious to me—or Don Quixote—which also is not tedious to me. But if a
book is tedious to you, don’t read it; that book was not written for you.
Reading should be a form of happiness, so I would advise all possible readers
of my last will and testament—which I do not plan to write—I would advise
them to read a lot, and not to get intimidated by writers’ reputations, to
continue to look for personal happiness, personal enjoyment. It is the only
way to read.

—JORGE LUIS BORGES

 AFTERWORD

“I love teaching, especially because when I am teaching, I am learning,”

Jorge Luis Borges said in many interviews.1 A little earlier he had referred to
teaching as “one of the few delights left to me.” And there is no doubt about
the double pleasure it gave Borges to be in front of a class.
Such pleasure can be felt in this book, which brings together a
complete course given by the writer in the Department of Philosophy and
Letters of the University of Buenos Aires in 1966. At that time, Borges had
already been teaching for several years at this institution. He had been hired
as a professor of English and North American Literature in 1956, chosen over
another applicant in spite of never having received a university degree.2 On
several occasions, Borges expressed—in that tone of his infused with his
sense of humor and full confidence in his own ability—his surprise at this
appointment.
In his Autobiografía, after mentioning his appointment as the director
of the National Library in 1955 Borges explains: “The following year I
received a new satisfaction, by being named professor of English and North
American literature at the University of Buenos Aires. Other candidates had
sent detailed accounts of their translations, articles, conferences, and other
accomplishments. I limited myself to the following declaration: ‘Without
realizing it, I have been preparing for this position my entire life.’ That
simple statement had the desired effect. They hired me, and I spent twelve
happy years at the university.”3
The course published in this book presents us with a Borges who had
already spent ten years dedicated to teaching, not only his university classes
but also various courses he gave in institutions such as the Argentine
Association of English Culture. It also shows us a different facet of Borges
than does a literary text or an interview, or even a lecture. The classes differ
from a lecture in one essential way: here, the writer—so given to telling
anecdotes and changing the subject—was obliged to restrict himself to the
announced program. He could not, as he frequently did under other
circumstances, after half an hour, ask jokingly, “What was the title of this
lecture?” We can see how he managed to give his classes unity and coherence
while still indulging in considerable digressions.
Borges himself was conscious of this difference. “I preferred classes to
lectures. When I give a lecture, if I talk about Spinoza or Berkeley, the
listener is more interested in my presence than in the content. For example,
my way of talking, my gestures, the color of my tie, or my haircut. In classes
at the university, which have continuity, the only students who come are
those interested in the content of the class. Hence, one can carry on a full
dialogue. I cannot see, but I can feel the atmosphere around me. For example,
if they are listening attentively or are distracted.”4
One important point of these classes is the position Borges gave to
literature. “I judge literature hedonistically,” he said in another interview.
“That is, I judge literature according to the pleasure or the feeling it gives me.
I have been a professor of literature for many years, and I am not unaware of
the fact that the pleasure literature gives is one thing, another is the historic
study of that literature.”5 Such an approach is clear from the very first class,
in which Borges explains that he will discuss history only when the study of
the literary works requires it.
In the same way, Borges places authors above literary movements,
which he defines at the beginning of the class about Dickens as a
“convenience” of historians. Though he does not forget the structural
characteristics of the texts being studied, Borges focuses mostly on the plot
and the individuality of the authors. The course includes texts that the writer
loves, and he shows this constantly through his fascination with telling the
stories and the biographies. What Borges tries to do as a professor, more than
prepare his students for exams, is excite them and entice them to read the
works, to discover the writers. Throughout the entire course there is hardly a
mention of the exams, and his comment at the end of the second class about
Browning is very moving when he says:

I feel some kind of remorse. I think I have been unfair to Browning.

But with Browning something happens that happens with all poets, that
 we must question them directly. I think, in any case, that I have done
enough to interest you in Browning’s work.

More than once that enthusiasm slightly diverts Borges from his path,
and in the second class on Samuel Johnson, after narrating the legend of the
Buddha, he says he is sorry: “You will forgive me this digression, but the
story is beautiful.”
More proof that the books and authors studied here are among
Borges’s favorites is that throughout his life he made certain to write prefaces
to editions of many of them, and he included many of them in his collection,
Biblioteca personal, from Hispamérica. (This was his last selection of other
writers’ texts before he died.) This predilection is even more obvious in his
choice of poems. Borges does not always analyze the author’s most famous
works; instead he deals with the works that made the greatest impression on
him, the ones he discusses throughout his entire literary oeuvre.
Borges’s passion for stories and his admiration for the authors do not
stand in the way of him formulating critical judgments with implacable
frequency. By exposing the failures of the works and the mistakes of the
authors, Borges is not seeking to insult them but rather to perhaps remove
any sacred halo they have and bring them closer to the students. By pointing
out their failures, he also emphasizes their virtues. In this way, he dares assert
on more than one occasion that the fable of Beowulf is “poorly imagined,”
and he describes Samuel Johnson in this way: “Johnson was a wreck,
physically, even though he was very strong. He was heavy and ugly. He had
nervous tics.” This only paves the way for captivating the students’ interest.
Right on its heels comes the conclusion that “he had one of the most sensible
intellects of his era; he had a truly brilliant intellect.”
When faced with literary criticism that questions the role of the author,
Borges emphasizes the human and individual characteristics of the work. Yet
he does not establish a relationship of necessity between the life of the author
and the author’s texts. He is simply fascinated—and fascinates the students—
by narrating the lives of the artists; he buries himself in the poems, the
narratives, with a contemporary critical gaze, in which irony and humor are
always present.
In his effort to bring the texts down to earth, Borges makes surprising
comparisons that frame each work and make its value clear. Hence, when he
explores the theme of boasting and courage in Beowulf, he compares its
characters with those of the compadritos porteños, or riverside roughnecks,
of the last century, and recites not one, but three groups of couplets that must
have sounded quite strange in a class about Anglo-Saxon literature of the
eighth century. The writer, moreover, pauses at exciting details that would
have been expendable in the curriculum, such as the different concepts of
color in Anglo-Saxon, Greek, and Celtic poetry, or the battle of Brunanburh
compared to that of the Argentine battle of Junín.
In his analysis of Saxon texts, Borges devotes himself almost entirely
to narrating, forgetting his role as professor and approaching quite closely
that of the ancient storyteller. He tells stories told by other men who came
long before him, and he does so with absolute fascination, as if each time the
story was repeated, he was discovering it for the first time. In keeping with
this fascination, his comments are almost always about questions of
metaphysics. Borges is constantly asking himself what was going on in the
minds of the ancient Anglo-Saxon poets when they wrote these texts,
suspecting that he will never find the answers.
One typical characteristic of a storyteller is anticipating things that will
be told later, with the goal of keeping the listener in suspense. He does this by
constantly declaring that he will tell later, or in the next class, something
“strange” or “curious” or “interesting.”
Within the framework of the classes, Borges’s erudition is always
apparent. This erudition, however, never limits his communication with his
students. Borges doesn’t quote in order to show off his knowledge, but only
when it seems appropriate to the subject at hand. What matters to him more
than the precise facts are the ideas. In spite of this, and in spite of excusing
himself for his bad memory for dates, it is surprising the number of dates he
does remember, and with what incredible precision. We must remember that
at the time he gave these classes—and since 1955—Borges was almost
completely blind, and certainly unable to read. His quoting of texts, therefore,
and his recitation of poetry, depended on his memory, and are testimony to
the vast extent of his readings.
Through this course wander Leibniz, Dante, Lugones, Virgil,
Cervantes, and certainly the indispensable Chesterton, who seems to have
written about almost everything. There also appear some of Borges’s favorite
excerpts, like Coleridge’s famous dream, which he included in so many
books and lectures. But we also have here a broader and deeper analysis of
certain works than appears in any of his other works: particularly in his class
about Dickens, an author whom he didn’t discuss in detail in any of his
writings, or in his readings of the Anglo-Saxon texts—his last passion—to
which he devotes the first seven classes, where he didn’t have the limitations
of space that he had in his other histories of literature.
As for the textual accuracy of the quotes and narrations, it is interesting
to point to what Borges himself says toward the end of his second class on
Browning. Remembering the volume that Chesterton dedicates to the life and
work of that poet, Borges comments that Chesterton knew Browning’s poetry
so well that he did not consult a single book when he was composing his
study, fully trusting his memory. Apparently, these quotes were often
incorrect, and were subsequently corrected by the editor. Borges laments the
loss of those possibly ingenious changes that Chesterton made to Browning’s
work, and that it would have been fascinating to compare them to the
originals. In the case of these classes, and respecting his position, Borges’s
narratives have been left intact, retaining the changes imposed by his own
memory.
By the same token, the endnotes attempt to complete information
Borges assumed his students understood; they are there to help facilitate the
reading. Even without any changes or additions, though, the classes are clear,
imaginative, and enthralling.
Finally, as we read these classes we can imagine a blind Professor
Borges, sitting before his students, reciting in that very personal tone of voice
verses of unknown Saxon poetry in their original language and participating
in polemics about famous romantic poets with whom he is, perhaps today,
discussing these same issues.

—MARTÍN ARIAS
 BORGES IN CLASS

. . . He ðe us ðas beagas geaf . . .

Beowulf: 2635

Editing this book was like running after a Borges who was constantly
getting lost among the books in a library or—to use a metaphor dear to our
writer—disappearing around corner after corner of a vast labyrinth. As soon
as we found a date or a biography we were looking for, Borges would race
ahead and vanish behind an unknown personage or an obscure Oriental
legend. When, after looking long and hard, we found him again, he would
toss us an anecdote without a date, a quote from an author, and again we
would watch him disappear, escaping through the crack of a door left ajar or
between rows of shelves and racks. In order to recover his words, we
followed him through the pages of innumerable encyclopedias and rooms of
the National Library in Buenos Aires; we searched for him in the pages of the
books he wrote and in dozens of lectures and interviews he gave; we found
him in his nostalgia for Latin, in the Norse sagas, and in the memories of his
colleagues and friends. By the time we finally completed our task, we had
traversed more than two thousand years of history, the seven seas, and the
five continents. But Borges kept fleeing from us, calm and smiling. Running
from ancient India to medieval Europe hadn’t tired him out. Traveling from
Caedmon to Coleridge was, for him, an everyday affair.
Two joys have been ours since completing this labor. The first is that
we managed to open a door onto space and time, allowing others to peek into
the classroom of the University of Buenos Aires on Calle Independencia. The
second is that we were able to enjoy these classes with the same intensity as
did those students who attended them more than thirty years before.
Researching and revising every nook and cranny of the text caused us to
unintentionally memorize every poem and every sentence, to associate each
and every statement with his stories and poems, to formulate (and then often
reject) innumerable hypotheses about every comma, every period, and every
line.
Borges once wrote, “That someone will repeat a cadence of Dunbar or
Frost or of that man who in the middle of the night saw a tree that bleeds, the
Cross, and think that they heard it for the first time from my lips. Nothing
else matters to me.”1
Upon finishing this book, readers will find that they remember with
delight lines of Wordsworth and Coleridge, that William Morris’s music has
bewitched them, that characters as remote as Hugh O’Neill or Harald
Hardrada have become familiar, that thanks to this most universal of
Argentines, their ears echo with the crashing of weapons of the battle of
Brunanburh and the Anglo-Saxon verses from “The Dream of the Rood.”
Borges would surely smile, satisfied.
In the twenty-five classes that make up this course, Borges takes us on
a veritable journey through English literature, always remaining close to his
own readings and the works themselves. This journey begins in the mists of
time with the arrival in England of the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons; continues
on to the works of Samuel Johnson; lingers on Macpherson, the romantic
poets, and the Victorian era; offers a panorama of the life and works of the
pre-Raphaelites; and ends at the nineteenth century, in Samoa, with one of
the writers Borges held most dear, Robert Louis Stevenson.
“I have taught exactly forty terms of English Literature at the
university, but more than that I have tried to convey my love for this
literature,” Borges once said. “I have preferred to teach my students, not
English literature—which I know nothing about—but my love for certain
authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines.
And this is enough, I think. One falls in love with a line, then with a page,
then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process. I have tried to
lead my students toward it.”2
From the very first class it is clear that this will be a very idiosyncratic
journey, guided by the professor’s personal preferences. The thread that
unites these lectures is outright literary enjoyment, the affection with which
Borges treats each of these works, and his clear intention to share his
enthusiasm for every author and period studied.
Among these preferences, there is one that occupies a prominent place
and to which the professor dedicates nothing less than seven classes, more
than a quarter of the syllabus: the language and literature of Anglo-Saxon
England. The extent of this emphasis and focus, highly infrequent for any
course on English literature, is even odder considering that the course was
taught in a Spanish-speaking country. Borges dedicates one class to kennings,
two to the study of Beowulf, and another few to the Anglo-Saxon bestiary, the
war poems of Maldon and Brunanburh, the “Dream of the Rood,” and “The
Grave.” One inevitably wonders why this emphasis on the language and
literature of early medieval England. What did Borges see in this literature?
What did the study of Old English represent to him? The answers to these
questions weave in and out of fiction and reality, Borges’s personal history,
and his philosophical and literary worldview. In order to arrive at those
answers, we should begin by briefly analyzing the history of the English
language, traditionally divided into three stages:

Old English or Anglo-Saxon: fifth century to ca. 1066

Middle English: ca. 1066–1500
Modern English: 1500 to the present

The earliest form, Old English, retained many of the archaic

characteristics of Common Germanic. Its considerably complex grammar
featured three genders (masculine nouns such as se eorl, “the man” or se
hring, “the ring”; neuters such as þæt hus, “the house,” or þæt boc “the
book”; and feminines such as seo sunne, “the sun,” or seo guð “the battle”);
three numbers in the pronouns (singular first person ic, first person plural
“we,” first personal double wit, “we two”); an elaborate system of verb
conjugations; and numerous declensional paradigms, with five cases of
inflection for articles, nouns, and adjectives. The vocabulary was, at first,
almost wholly Germanic, just barely influenced by a handful of Latin and a
smattering of Celtic loanwords. Old English is thus mostly incomprehensible
to speakers of Modern English, who must study it as if it were a foreign
language. Herewith an example, from the entry for the year 793 from the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

Her wæron reðe forebecna cumene ofer Norðhymbra land, and þæt
 folc earmlic bregdon, þæt wæron ormete ligræscas, and fyrenne dracan
wæron gesewene on þam lifte fleogende. Þam tacnum sona fyligde
mycel hunger, and litel æfter þam, þæs ilcan geares on vi Idus Ianuarii,
earmlice heþenra manna hergung adilegode Godes cyrican in
Lindisfarnaee þurh hreaflac ond mansliht.

That Old English was the remote ancestor of the English language, so
beloved of our writer, is sufficient explanation to justify his interest in
studying it: the compositions Professor Borges analyzes in his lectures are
among the first writings in a language we could call English.3 But the Anglo-
Saxon tongue has two features that Borges found irresistibly attractive. In the
first place, Old English held, for him, a personal significance: it was none
other than the language spoken by his remote paternal ancestors, the side of
the family from which he had inherited his literary vocation and his vast
erudition. His British grandmother, Frances Haslam, was born in
Staffordshire. “It may be no more than a romantic superstition of mine,”
Borges wrote in his Autobiografía, “but the fact that the Haslams lived in
Northumbria and Mercia—or, as they are today called, Northumberland and
the Midlands—links me with a Saxon and perhaps a Danish past.”
In his lecture “Blindness,” in Seven Nights, Borges states: “I was a
professor of English Literature at our university. What could I do to teach this
almost infinite literature, this literature that exceeds the length of the life of a
man or even a generation? . . . Some students came to see me after they had
taken and passed their exam. . . . I told these young women (there were nine
or ten of them): ‘I have an idea, now that you have passed and I have fulfilled
my duty as your professor. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we took up the study
of a language and a literature that we barely know?’ They asked me what that
language and that literature would be. ‘Well, naturally, the English language
and English literature. We will begin to study it, now that we have been freed
from the frivolity of exams; we will start studying it from the very
beginning.’”
Secondly, Borges finds in the scenes of this poetry, the authentic “epic
flavor” that so moved him. More than once Borges expresses this delight by
comparing the pen to the sword, the sentimental to the heroic, his role as a
poet to the courage shown by his own ancestors in combat. In this sense, Old
English battle poems represented for Borges the final merging and closure of
what he called “the intimate discord of his two lineages”: the literary legacy
he received from the English side of his family, on the one hand, and the
martial mandate to die courageously in battle that he had inherited from his
maternal Argentine forebears.
In addition, there is the unexpected nature of the discovery. In his
Autobiografía, Borges asserts: “I had always thought of English literature as
the richest in the world; the discovery now of a secret chamber at the very
threshold of that literature came to me as an additional gift. Personally, I
knew that the adventure would be an endless one, that I could go on studying
Old English for the rest of my days. The pleasure of study, not the vanity of
mastery, has been my chief aim, and I have not been disappointed in the last
twelve years.” Borges had spent twelve years studying Old English by the
time he wrote these words, but he actually persisted in this endeavor for
several decades, well into his final years. Old English would accompany
Borges to the end of his days, and beyond. In 1978, at age seventy-eight,
Borges produced a volume of texts translated directly from Old English into
Spanish, in collaboration with María Kodama. He entitled it Breve antología
anglosajona, A Brief Anglo-Saxon Anthology. In its preface, he further
extends and elaborates on the idea of stumbling upon a hidden hoard:
“About two hundred years ago it was discovered that [English
literature] contained a kind of secret chamber, akin to the subterranean gold
guarded by the serpent of myth. That ancient gold was the poetry of the
Anglo-Saxons.”4
What Borges found in this chamber was something at once strange and
remote, precious and captivating, a treasure that, when dug up and restored,
had the power to transport him back to the heroic and adventurous era of his
own military ancestors.
To this primordial and epic appeal we must add an aesthetic factor, the
sheer pleasure that the writer found in the sounds of this language. When he
began to study it, Borges felt as if Old English words resounded with a
strange beauty:
“The verses in a foreign language have a certain prestige they do not
have in one’s own language, because one can hear them, because one can see
each of the words.”5
 Borges would never forget this initial enchantment. Every time he
referred to Old English, he would allude again to this world of auditory
experience:

“ . . . for the Anglo-Saxon language—Old English—was by its very

harshness destined for epic poetry, in other words, to celebrate courage
and loyalty. That is why . . . what these poets do best is describe
battles. As if we can hear the sound of swords clashing, the blow of
spears against shields, the tumult and shouts of the battlefield.”

From such statements, it seems that our professor would have

thoroughly loved to be there in the middle of the brawl, hearing and
witnessing the clash of the warglaives, the rush of the javelins, the crashing
of charges and the smashing of medieval armies. But the evocative power
that these Anglo-Saxon verses have for Borges does not end there. These
auditory images are complemented by visual ones. Each time the frugality of
the original Anglo-Saxon sources leaves a detail or an image without
description, Borges embellishes the verses with scenes from his own
imagination. We find this example in his narration of the “Battle of Maldon.”
The original poem tells us how Byrhtnoth, the Anglo-Saxon earl, rallied his
troops before the encounter:

Het þa hyssa hwæne hors forlætan,

feor afysan, and forð gangan,

[He then ordered each warrior / to let go of his horse, to send it afar /
and to march on.]

Borges’s translation, however, offers a number of subtle variations:

“He ordered his men to break ranks, to get off their horses, to whip
them back to the querencia, and to march on . . .”

The mere presence of the word querencia in the above text points to
the simmering of a strange and potent brew. Querencia is a typical gaucho
word used in the Argentine field and pampas; it literally means “attachment,
fondness, longing,” but its actual, metaphorical meaning refers to a horse’s
perceived home or base. When left alone and without guidance, a horse will
follow its longing or attachment, that is, he will head home. But neither the
whipping of horses nor the goal of sending them back home appear at all in
the original. The Maldon poet just states that the horses were sent off. That
Borges would enrich this scene with such elements, and then weave into it
the very concept of querencia, a rather folkloric word reminiscent of
traditional Argentine rural life, is indeed an amazing act of literary fusion; but
this is a habit that this most universal of writers would often indulge, both
throughout this course and in many of his fictions. These lively South
American additions may have little to do with medieval England, but they
undoubtedly help bring the battle of Maldon and its protagonists from the
tenth century into our era, and closer to his students’ cultural frame of
reference.
Continuing to study this poem, Borges re-creates the landscape and the
initial scene of the battle:

“Then the earl tells them to form a line. Far off, they will see the tall
boats of the Vikings, those boats with the dragon on the prow and the
striped sails, and the Norwegian Vikings, who have already landed.”

Once again, Borges’s description is a free version, enriched by his own

imagination. The earl’s orders that the professor cites can be found in the
verses of “Maldon,” but neither the tall ships nor the striped sails nor the
arrival of the Vikings appear in the poem, whose opening lines were lost.
Borges, however, needs to imagine the setting in detail for the action to begin
to take place, and he tells us of the Saxons “watching the Vikings descend
from their boats.” He immediately adds: “We can imagine the Vikings with
their helmets adorned with horns, imagine all these people arriving.”
Borges doesn’t just want his students to approach the poem as a
philological specimen; his goal is to transport them to the actual scene of the
battle. Borges’s depictions are indeed extremely vivid and often resemble
actual movies.6 He, in fact, associates the poem’s imagery with
cinematography on more than one occasion. Further into his class on
“Maldon,” he states:

“Then there appears in the scene—because this poem is very beautiful

—a young man . . . And this young man . . . has a falcon on his fist;
that is, he is devoted to what is called falconry . . . And something
happens, something that is realistic and has symbolic value, something
a movie director would use now. The young man realizes that the
situation is serious, so he lets his beloved falcon . . . fly off into the
forest, and he joins the battle.”

This most peculiar professor then uses the same cinematic procedure to
describe the battle of Stamford Bridge:

“The Saxon army advanced with thirty or forty men on horseback. We

can imagine them covered in armor, and the horses also might have
had armor. If you have seen [the film] Alexander Nevsky, it might help
you imagine this scene.”

These movie-like descriptions immerse us in the tension of the verses.

In his role as professor, Borges not only describes and analyzes but also
infuses these epic words with life, meaning, and movement, as a film director
would do.
It is this same sensibility that leads Borges to weave history and
legend, myth and reality into his classes. Without the restrictions imposed on
him by a lecture or a set number of pages in a publication, Borges exhibits
here his habit of mixing facts with literary fiction, blurring the line between
these two realms that in the Borgesian universe often split apart only to fuse
together later on.
Thus, in his description of the Battle of Hastings, Borges adds a poetic
episode from Heine or legendary details taken from the Gesta Regum
Anglorum, by William de Malmesbury; in his explanation of the Viking
expeditions, he throws in quotes from Chronicles of the Kings of Norway,
knowing full well that this work weaves historical fact with legendary or
fictitious material. Needless to say, this is never the result of carelessness but
is fully in keeping with the writer’s worldview.7 Borges—for whom history
sometimes represented yet another branch of fantastic literature—was less
worried about the reality of historical facts than the literary pleasure or
emotion evoked by every scene and story. In keeping with this, after
explaining the context that led up to the battle of Stamford Bridge, our
professor laments:

“So, we have King Harold and his brother, Earl Toste or Tostig,
depending on the text. Now, the earl believed that he had a right to part
of the kingdom, that the king should divide England between them.
King Harold did not agree, so Tostig left England and allied himself
with the king of Norway, who was named Harald Hardrada, Harald the
Resolute, the Hard . . . Pity he has almost the same name as Harold, but
history cannot be changed.”

Borges would like to go as far as change the names of the protagonists

in order to improve the literary quality of this episode!
In conclusion: It doesn’t matter if in reality there was a Viking who
sacked a city, believing it was Rome; it doesn’t matter if King Olaf
Haraldsson really possessed extraordinary agility; it doesn’t matter if the
minstrel Taillefer really entered into the Battle of Hastings doing acrobatics
with his sword. Beyond their veracity, these scenes have value because of
how they contribute to the creation of an atmosphere.
Given over to the literary enjoyment produced by these words, exalting
in the bravery and the iron syllables of the language, Borges plays in these
classes with etymologies, weaving into his analysis Anglo-Saxon words and
verses; he recites them, explains and analyzes them, and attempts—above all
—to awaken in his students the same pleasure that he derives from this
language and this literature.
In other words, Borges feels that his vocation is to share this ancient
gold. In the last lines of the famous epic, the Geats claim that Beowulf was
the mildest of kings, kind to his kin and eager for praise. We know that
Borges was at once mild and gentle; we know for a fact that he had no
interest in fame. We can be certain that he would have been delighted,
however, to receive the royal title of which this course makes him a worthy
recipient: beahgifa, “giver of rings,” “distributor of treasures,” “sharer of
wealth,” the expression the Anglo-Saxons used to extoll the generosity of
monarchs when they passed out gold to their men.
—MARTÍN HADIS
ENDNOTES

CLASS 1

1. Borges is referring here to the first edition of Literaturas germánicas

medievales [Medieval Germanic Literature] (Buenos Aires: Falbo
Librero Editor, 1965). Co-authored with María Esther Vázquez, it is
a revised version of a book titled Antiguas literaturas germánicas
[Ancient Germanic Literature], originally co-authored with Delia
Ingenieros and published in the Breviarios collection of Fondo de
Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1951. The book was also published by
Emecé Editores, Buenos Aires, in 1978 and 1996.
2. Throughout these classes, Borges uses both “Hengest” and
“Hengist” to refer to this legendary character. In order to facilitate
matters, we will use “Hengest” throughout.
3. The two anthologies of mythology and legend of ancient Icelandic
literature are called Eddas. The Prose Edda, or Younger Edda, was
written around the year 1200 by the Icelandic historian Snorri
Sturluson. It is a manual of Skaldic poetry. The first part, titled
Gylfaginning, “The Tricking of Gylfi,” was translated by Borges into
Spanish as La alucinación de Gylfi (Madrid: Alianza Editorial,
1984). The second, titled Skáldskaparmal, or “The Language of
Skaldic Poetry,” deals extensively with kennings. The third, titled
Háttatal or “List of Verse Forms,” exemplifies the metric forms
Snorri Sturluson knew. The Poetic Edda, or Elder Edda, written
anonymously, is a collection of heroic and mythological poems;
though produced in the second half of the eighteenth century, the
poems are much older. They were probably composed between the
eighth and the eleventh centuries. The compilations done by Snorri
Sturluson and the anonymous author of the Poetic Edda were
responsible, to a large extent, for the preservation of Old Norse
 mythology, legends, and forms of poetic composition. In most other
Germanic nations, this material has either completely disappeared or
remained in an extremely fragmentary form. Borges laments more
than once “the treatise on Saxon mythology that Bede did not write.”
The Eddas constitute the most detailed and complete source of
Germanic mythology that has survived to this day.
4. The Venerable Bede (673–735), Anglo-Saxon historian, theologian,
and chronicler. He was one of the most erudite figures in Europe
during the Middle Ages. His most famous work is The Ecclesiastical
History of the English People, though he produced many other
scientific, historical, and theological works. Bede spent most of his
life at St. Paul’s Monastery in Jarrow and was known in his lifetime
for his erudition as well as his pious character. In 1899, Bede was
canonized; his saint’s day is May 25. Borges explores the
fundamental aspects of his life in Medieval Germanic Literature,
OCC, 882–85.
Borges is also referring here to Rædwald, King of East Anglia
(d. ca. 624), who is believed to be buried in Sutton Hoo. The
Venerable Bede writes, “Rædwald had long before been initiated into
the mysteries of the Christian faith in Kent, but in vain; for on his
return home, he was seduced by his wife and by certain evil teachers
and perverted from the sincerity of his faith, so that his last state was
worse than his first. After the manner of the ancient Samaritans, he
seemed to be serving both Christ and the gods whom he had
previously served; in the same temple, he had one altar for the
Christian sacrifice and another small altar on which to offer victims
to devils.” The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book II,
Chapter XV, ed. and trans. by Judith McClure and Roger Collins
(London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 98. This fragment seems
to have particularly impressed Borges, for he includes it, with slight
changes, under the title “Por si acaso” [“Just in Case”] in his book
Cuentos breves y extraordinarios [Extraordinary Tales], written with
Adolfo Bioy Casares.
5. Borges is referring to the four codices containing most of the Anglo-
Saxon poetry that has survived to this day. The codices are: 1) Cotton
Vitellius A. xv, in the collection of the British Museum and contains
 Beowulf and Judith; 2) Junius 11, in the Bodleian Library at Oxford
University, which contains the poems “Genesis,” Exodus,” “Daniel,”
and “Christ and Satan”; 3) Codex Exoniensis or Exeter Book, held at
the cathedral of the same name, which contains the elegies, “The
Wanderer,” “The Seafarer,” “The Ruin,” some riddles, and several
minor poems; 4) Codex Vercellensis or the Vercelli Book, which
Borges mentions here, and is in the Vercelli cathedral, near Milan,
and contains “The Dream of the Rood.” In addition, there are
approximately four hundred manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon prose texts,
a fact Borges fails to mention here but which he explicitly mentions
at the beginning of class 6.
6. A Spanish translation of the prose dialogue between Saturn and
Solomon appears under the title “Un diálogo anglosajón del siglo
XI” [“An Anglo-Saxon dialogue from the eleventh century”] in
Borges’s Breve antología anglosajona [Brief Anglo-Saxon
Anthology], a book he wrote with María Kodama and included in his
Obras completas en colaboración [Complete Collaborative Works].
7. Borges is probably referring here to the Dharma Shastras, verses
derived from the Dharma Sutras or “Hindu Law.” The Dharma
Sutras are manuals of conduct and contain maxims that guide all
aspects of human life—legal, social, ethical—from the religious
point of view. They define, among other things, the caste system and
each person’s role in society. The Dharma Sutras were originally
written in prose but with time illustrative stanzas were added after
each maxim. This finally led to codices that were written in verse,
called the Dharma Shastras. Today this term is used to refer
collectively to the rules and laws of the Hindu religion.
8. Borges develops this subject in his essay “Las kenningar,” from his
History of Eternity. There he uses the Norse plural kenningar,
whereas in these classes he preferred using the plural “kennings.”
9. The ancient Germanic inhabitants of England called their own
language englisc. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
their language was called “Anglo-Saxon” from the Latin anglo-
saxonicus. In 1872, the philologist Henry Sweet, in his preface to a
collection of texts by King Alfred, explained that he would use the
term “Old English” to refer to “the pure flexional state of the English
 language … the barbarous and erroneous sense of Anglo-Saxon.” At
the time Sweet wrote those words, English philology enjoyed an
antiquarian prestige. The term “Old English” was meant to evoke—
for patriotic as well as philological reasons—a cultural and linguistic
continuum from the early Middle Ages to the current modern form of
the English language.
10. Chanson de Roland, the most well-known of all the French
chansons de geste, was written around the year 1100. It recounts the
Battle of Roncesvalles in the year 778 and the feats of Roland, a
knight of Charlamagne’s court. Nibelungenlied or The Song of the
Nibelungs is an epic poem written in approximately 1200 in High
German. Many of the facts and stories recounted in the poem,
however, took place much earlier and appear in the Völsungasaga
and the songs of the Poetic Edda or Elder Edda of Old Norse
literature. Richard Wagner composed his Ring Cycle based on those
three sources. Borges analyzed and translated parts of The Song of
the Nibelungs in Medieval Germanic Literature, OCC, 910–15.

CLASS 2

1. This is the first of three undated classes. Borges held classes on

Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The first class was held on
Friday, October 14, and the third on Monday, October 17. Classes
were not held on Sundays. It is likely this class was held on Saturday,
October 15, perhaps to make up for the class not held on Wednesday,
October 12, which perhaps was a holiday, or on Wednesday, October
19, which had been cancelled.
2. Luis de Góngora (1561–1627), Spanish Baroque lyric poet.
3. See the section on the Norns in the Book of Imaginary Beings, OCC,
674.
4. William Paton Ker (1855–1923), British scholar and writer, born in
Glasgow. He taught at Cardiff, at University College London, and in
1920 was named professor at Oxford University. His works include
Epic and Romance (1897), The Dark Ages (1904), and The Art of
 Poetry (1923).
5. In his Medieval Germanic Literature, Borges asserts that the geatas
or Geats were “a nation in the south of Sweden, which some have
identified with the Jutes and others with the Goths.” Friedrich
Klaeber, in his edition of Beowulf, explains that the identity of the
Geats “has been the subject of a prolonged controversy, which has
manifold aspects: linguistic, geographic, historic, and literary.
Grundtvig assigns the Geats to the island Gotland (or, for a second
choice, Bornholm); Kemble assigned them to Angeln, Schleswig;
Haigh (as a matter of course) to North England. But the only peoples
who have been actually admitted as rival claimants to the title are the
Jutes in the northern part of the Jutish peninsula, and those called in
Old Norse guatar, in Old Swedish gøtar, i.e. the inhabitants of
Västergötland and Östergötland, south of the great Swedish lakes.
Phonetically, OE geatas answers precisely to ON gautar.” Friedrich
Klaeber, Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, (Boston: D.C. Heath &
Co., 1922) p. XLVI.
6. The fragment about Scyld Scefing can be found translated into
Spanish by Borges in his Brief Anglo-Saxon Anthology, under the
title “Fragmento de la gesta de Beowulf.”
7. By Percival Christopher Wren (1875–1941), published in 1924.

CLASS 3

1. In fact, fus, which means “frozen.” Ond means “and” in modern

English.
2. See Class 2, note 4.
3. When the monks in Anglo-Saxon England began to write in Old
English, they did so using the Latin alphabet. They had to deal,
however, with two consonant sounds that had no corollary in Latin.
These are the interdental consonants that in modern English are
written with th (for both the unvoiced consonant in “thin” and the
voiced consonant of “this”). To represent those two sounds, scribes
added two letters: they borrowed “thorn,” þ, from the Runic alphabet,
 and invented a new letter “eth,” ð, transformed from the Latin “d.” In
Old English each of these two letters was used to represent both the
unvoiced and the voiced consonants; they were interchangeable. In
Late Old English, scribes tended to separate their use, writing þ at the
beginning and s in all other positions. The letter ð was no longer used
in Middle English; þ continued until the sixteenth century. Borges’s
explanation shows that he remembers the name of the king in its
original spelling (using the letter þ: Hroþgar), but he wanted to
explain to his students how to write it using the letters they knew.
4. It is clear that here Borges gave several examples of the phonetic
differences.
5. A character in the comedic plays of Plautus and Terence who
bragged about his great feats in battle.
6. The Arimaspians are “men famous for having only one eye in the
middle of their forehead. They live in perpetual war against the
griffins, a species of winged monster, in order to steal from them the
gold they extract from the bowels of the earth and that they defend
with no less covetousness than the Arimaspians use to steal it from
them.” Pliny, Natural History, VII, 2. This is quoted by Borges on
the page he dedicates to one-eyed creatures in his Book of Imaginary
Beings, OCC, 666.
7. Borges is referring to Jordanes’s De origine actibusque Getarum.
Also known as Getica, it was written in the middle of the sixth
century and based on a much more extensive work by Magnus
Aurelius Cassiodorus, which has been lost. The Getica preserves the
legends the Goths told of their own Scandinavian origins; it is also a
particularly valuable source of information on the Hun peoples. The
work includes a detailed description of Attila’s funeral, which Borges
compares to Beowulf’s.
8. The Finnsburh Fragment was translated into Spanish by Borges and
published in his Brief Anglo-Saxon Anthology.
9. Ulfilas or Wulfilas, “the wolf cub” (ca. 311–83), Gothic bishop.
Preached Arianism, a theological doctrine that denied the divinity of
Christ and the consubstantiality of the Trinity. He is credited with the
invention of the Gothic alphabet, which he used to produce the first
translation of the Bible into a Germanic language. Philostorgus, the
 historian, as well as Socrates Scholasticus, the Byzantine, confirm
that he translated the entire Bible; Philostorgus says that Ulfilas
skipped the Book of Kings in order to avoid instigating the warrior
nature of the Gothic tribes. Much of the material translated by
Ulfilas, however, has been lost, and what has survived has reached us
in fragments. The most important is the so-called Codex Argenteus,
written in gold and silver lettering on purple parchment, preserved
today in the library of the University of Uppsala in Sweden. Ulfilas
worked as a missionary from the time of his consecration, around the
year 341, until his death.
John Wycliff (ca. 1330–84), English theologian and
philosopher, a forerunner of ecclesiastic reform. He believed the
Church should give up its material possessions. Wycliff rebelled
against papal authority and was opposed to the ecclesiastical
magisterium. He maintained that the Bible was the only legitimate
authority and initiated the first complete translation of the Bible into
English.
10. Francis Palgrave (1788–1861), historian and founder of the Public
Records Office. His works include A History of England, The History
of Normandy and England, and Truths and Fictions of the Middle
Ages: the Merchant and the Friar.

CLASS 4

1. Hrothgar’s minstrel recites this story in Beowulf, lines 1063–59.

2. Les Burgraves was written by Victor Hugo around 1843.
3. The Völsungasaga is one of the fornaldarsögur or “sagas of ancient
times.” Borges gives a summary of this saga in class 24, when he
analyzes The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, by William Morris.
4. He is referring to Olaf Tryggvason (ca. 964–1000), who was king of
Norway from around 995 until his death. The saga carrying his name
belongs to the Heimskringla.
5. In Old English, as in Modern English, there were three third-person
singular pronouns: he (written the same as in Modern English), hit
 (neuter), and heo (feminine). The plural pronoun was hi or hie for all
three genders. These were replaced by “they,” “theirs,” and “them,”
all of Norse origin.
6. Borges tells other anecdotes from this trip in his Autobiografia.
7. Cnut the Great (ca. 985–1035), king of Denmark, England, Sweden,
and Norway.
8. The Vikings’ voyages to lands that seem to be the east coast of
North America are described in the Saga of the Greenlanders and the
Saga of Erik the Red. At the beginning of the 1960s, the Norwegian
explorer Helge Ingstad discovered a Viking settlement in L’Anse aux
Meadows, at the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, Canada. Antón
and Pedro Casariego Córdoba [the Spanish editors and translators]
write that there were “eight houses, one of them large ... several rusty
needles, a piece of a Nordic-type bone needle, a lamp made of stone
of the same type as those in medieval Iceland, and a small
ironmonger shop with a stone anvil, an oven for extracting iron from
minerals, slag, pieces of molten iron, and a piece of copper.”
Archeological dating as well as the presence of iron smelting and the
architecture prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were
Vikings in America around the year 1000, approximately five
centuries before Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World.
9. Borges is referring to the so-called Varangian Guard, organized at
the end of the tenth century by Emperor Basil II. Famous for its
fearlessness, its ferocity in battle, and its loyalty to the emperor, the
Varangians or Væringjar were the best-paid soldiers of the empire;
serving in this guard was an honor that proferred a lifetime of great
prestige and wealth.
10. Viking seafarers occupied these islands in the eighth and ninth
centuries.
11. Borges is referring to the Viking expeditions to the Holy Land.
This “traveler” or “pilgrim to Jerusalem” is Sigurd “Jórsalafari”
Magnusson (ca. 1090–1130), son of King Magnus III. Jórsalir was
the name the Vikings gave to Jerusalem; the Norse word fari means
“traveler” or “pilgrim.” According to Heimskringla, Sigurd
Magnusson left Norway for Spain with sixty ships in the year 1107.
He stopped in Lisbon, Gibraltar, and Sicily before arriving in
 Palestine in 1110. For more information, see Saga of Sigurd the
Pilgrim, in Heimskringla or the Chronicle of the Kings of Norway, by
Snorri Sturluson, or the anonymous Orkneyinga Saga.
12. Borges is surely referring here to the extravagant adventures of a
Viking named Hastein, recounted by Benoît de Saint-Maure and by
the chronicler Dudo of Saint-Quentin in his work De moribus et actis
primorum Normanniae ducum. The story is of a legendary nature,
and it is unlikely that it contains any historical truth.
13. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a collection of annals chronicling
the events that took place in medieval England. The original
chronicle is thought to have been compiled during the reign of Alfred
the Great (871–99). Since then, several other copies have been in
circulation, each different according to their geographic locations.
The manuscripts are different, all having incorporated material of
local interest. Six of these manuscripts have been preserved and are
designated by letters of the alphabet. The relationship among them is
so complex that several authors assert that instead of talking about a
single Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it would be preferable to use the
plural. The “Battle of Brunanburh” appears in the annals from the
year 937. The last annals, from the year 1154, appear in the
Peterborough Chronicle (E) and tell of the death of King Stephen.
14. At the end of 1876, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote his version of
“The Battle of Brunanburh” based on the prose translation by his son,
Hallam, which had appeared in Contemporary Review in November
of that year.
15. The Anglo-Saxon appendix includes Tennyson’s translation of
“The Battle of Brunanburh.”
16. The Battle of Brunanburh took place in the year 937.
17. Borges’s great-grandfather, Colonel Isidoro Suárez, took part in the
Battle of Junín, on August 6, 1824, leading a famous Peruvian and
Colombian cavalry attack, which was decisive in the outcome of the
battle.
18. Borges alternately refers to this character as Anlaf and Olaf. For
the sake of simplicity, here and elsewhere we will always use Anlaf,
the name Borges uses in his summary of the poem in Mevieval
Germanic Literature, OCC, 885–86.
 19. Egil’s Saga includes the story of the Battle of Vinheid (ch. 54), in
which Egil and his brother Thorolf fight under the Saxon king
Athelstan. Some authors, including Borges, claim that the Batttle of
Vinheid is the same as that of Brunanburh, but many doubts remain.
Egil’s Saga is included in volume 72 of Biblioteca personal
(Hyspamérica editions), published at the beginning of 1986, a
collection of Borges’s favorite books with his prologues.
20. This line and the others in this paragraph are from Tennyson’s
translation.

CLASS 5

1. The Battle of Maldon took place on August 10 or 11, 991. (Medieval

sources differ as to the exact date.)
2. Æthelred II, called Unræd, later “the Unready” (968–1016). He
became king in 978. The name Æthelred means “noble counsel.”
Shortly after he became king, Æthelred suffered from waves of
Viking attacks. He responded with measures that were both
unpopular and futile. Making a pun of his name, his contemporaries
nicknamed him Unræd, which actually means “poorly counseled” or
“maker of bad decisions.”
3. In the offer of the Viking messenger (beagas wið gebeorge, “rings in
exchange for peace”) as in Byrhnoth’s response (To heanlic me
þinceð þæt ge mid urum sceattum to scype gangon unbefohtene, “I
think it would be shameful for us to let you go with our riches to your
ships without confronting you”), the words beagas (bracelets, rings)
and sceattas (the term for Anglo-Saxon silver coins, but probably at
the time a weight measure) can also mean, in the poetic sense,
“riches” generally. Money did circulate, but tributes to the Vikings
were paid in a combination of gold, silver, jewels, rings, and coins,
and anything else at hand.
4. There is no Godric in the Finnsburh Fragment. Perhaps Borges is
confusing this name with Guthere, Garulf, or Guthlaf, all of whom
appear in that poem.
 5. The original title of this novel in Swedish is Röde Orm. It was
originally published in two volumes in 1941 and 1945, and its author,
Frans Gunnar Bengtsson (1894– 1954), was a poet, novelist, and
essayist. The chapter Borges is referring to is the first of the second
part and is called “Concerning the battle that was fought at Maldon,
and what came after it.”
6. Anglo-Saxon Poetry, by R. K. Gordon, volume 794 of Everyman’s
Library.
7. Borges is commenting on a passage from Book IV of Historia
Ecclesiastica, which tells the story of Caedmon. It can be found in
Medieval Germanic Literature, OCC, 881.
8. Caedmon’s “mediocre” verses are the following:
Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard,
meotodes meahte and his modgeþanc,
weorc wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs,
ece drihten, or onstealde.
He ærest sceop eorðan bearnum
heofon to hrofe, halig scyppend;
þa middangeard moncynnes weard,
ece drihten, æfter teode
firum foldan, frea ælmihtig.
9. “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, / Turbulent fleshy,
sensual, eat- ing, drinking, and breeding.” Walt Whitman, “Song of
Myself” XXIV, from Leaves of Grass.
10. The poem is titled “Salut au Monde!” and belongs to the section
“Calamus” of Leaves of Grass.
11. Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585), French poet.
12. Leopoldo Lugones Argüello (1874–1938), Argentine writer and
journalist.
13. In lines 797–807 of the poem titled “Christ,” the letters of the name
of Cynewulf are woven into the story of the final judgment. Using a
similar method, Cynewulf also “signed” the following poems:
“Elena,” “Juliana,” and “The Fate of the Apostles.” Cynewulf’s
identity remains cloaked in mystery. The author of these poems has
been identified as: Cenwulf, abbot of Peterborough (d. 1006);
Cynewulf, bishop of Lindisfarne (d. 782); and Cynwulf, a priest from
Dunwich.
14. See the appendix for the Runic alphabet.
 15. The British Cemetery, at 4568 El Cano Avenue, Buenos Aires,
Argentina.
16. A section of this elegy has been translated by Borges and appears
in his Brief Anglo-Saxon Anthology with the title “El navegante.”
17. From “Sonatina,” by the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867–
1916).
18. Following are the first lines of Pound’s translation with the Old
English original:
Mæg ic be me sylfum soðgied wrecan,
siþas secgan, hu ic geswincdagum
earfoðhwile oft þrowade,
bitre breostceare gebiden hæbbe,
gecunnad in ceole cearselda fela,
atol yþa gewealc, þær mec oft bigeat
nearo nihtwaco æt nacan stefnan,
þonne he be clifum cnossað. Calde geþrungen
wæron mine fet, forste gebunden

May I for my own self song’s truth reckon,

Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days
Hardship endured oft.
Bitter breast-cares have I abided,
Known on my keel many a care’s hold,
And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent
Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head
While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,
My feet were by frost benumbed.

CLASS 6

1. Borges refers to this spell on the page dedicated to the valkyries

(OCC, 708) as well as the one dedicated to the elves (OCC, 624) in
his Book of Imaginary Beings.
2. Ese in Old English is Æsir in Old Norse.
3. The letter to Cangrande della Scala of Verona is the last of Dante’s
surviving letters. It was written around the year 1303 and is
important because it includes a commentary on The Divine Comedy
 by the author himself. Until 1920, the letter was considered
apocryphal, until a group of Italian and international scholars and
critics established its authenticity through exhaustive analysis.
4. William Langland (ca. 1332–1440), English poet and putative author
of Piers Plowman.
5. Stefan George (1868–1933), German poet.
6. Borges includes a translation of this poem in his book Medieval
Germanic Literature, OCC, 877–78. Bath, called Aquae Sulis by the
Romans, is next to the Avon River. The ruins of the thermal baths are
a modern archeological and tourist at- traction.
7. The poet’s rhetorical questions, the wind that blows through the
rooms, and the shapes of serpents carved into the walls do not in fact
belong to the poem “The Ruin,” but rather to a passage of similar
themes and tones in “The Wanderer.” Both poems include
descriptions of ruins and walls eroded by time.
8. This poem was translated by Borges into Spanish and appears in
Brief Anglo-Saxon Anthology under the simple title “Deor.”
9. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Canto III, Hell, lines 1–3 and
10.
10. “Beam” in modern English is related to the German word baum,
which has the same meaning.
11. The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway (or Heimskringla) was
written by Snorri Sturluson at the beginning of the eighteenth
century. It consists of sixteen sagas, each corresponding to a
sovereign who occupied the throne of Norway between 850 and
1177. As Borges explains, the first page is missing from the first
codex of this work. The second page begins with the words “Kringla
Heimsins,” which means “the round ball of the world.” For this
reason the codex was called Kringla Heimsins or Kringla or
Heimskringla. Two random words became the title of the work, two
words that nonetheless imply the vastness of its scope.” Jorge Luis
Borges, Medieval Germanic Literature, OCC, 960.

CLASS 7
1. Bestiaries, also called Physiologus, enjoyed enormous popularity
during the Middle Ages. They consisted of forty-eight sections, each
of which described attributes or habits of beings that were real or
imaginary, and served to exemplify Christian virtues, creating
biblical allegories about sins or deviations from faith. Bestiaries were
translated into many languages and circulated for more than fifteen
centuries; all the translations descended from the Greek original,
which was supposed to have been written in Alexandria in the second
century. The word, physiologus, means “naturalist,” and is used as
the title of the bestiary, but it actually corresponds to the author or
the original source of the book.
2. Borges refers to the Anglo-Saxon poem about the panther in his
Book of Imaginary Beings, OCC, 679.
3. This is actually the twentieth line in the poem “Gerontion,” which is
not in Four Quartets, as Borges thought, but rather in the book
Poems (1920). The stanza reads as follows: “Signs are taken for
wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’ / The word within a word, unable to
speak a word, / Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the
year / Came Christ the tiger.”
4. “Fastitocalon” is a corruption of the Greek aspidochelone, from
aspís, “shield,” and chelone, “turtle.” The word was further corrupted
with each successive translation and copy of the bestiary. Borges
offers a summary of the poem of the whale on the pages dedicated to
Fastitocalon in his Book of Imaginary Beings, OCC, 628.
5. Borges analyzes the origin of this legend on the page about
“Zaratán” in his Book of Imaginary Beings, OCC, 711. There, he also
mentions the Anglo-Saxon poem about the whale and translates a
fragment of the Voyage of St. Brendan.
6. Saint Brendan the Voyager (ca. 486–578) founded several
monasteries and churches, the most famous of which is in Clonfert,
where he is buried. The work that tells of his legendary voyage to the
Promised Land and his encounter with the whale described by
Borges is called Navigatio Sancti Brandani or Voyage of St.
Brendan.
7. “...or that sea-beast / Leviathan, which God of all his works /
Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream / Him, haply, slumbering
on the Norway foam...” (John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I.)
8. An imaginary beast with the body of a lion and the head and wings
of an eagle. Borges devotes a page to the griffin in his Book of
Imaginary Beings, OCC, 639.
9. Borges included six of his translations of these Anglo-Saxon riddles
—about fish, the garlic seller, the swan, the bookmoth, the chalice,
the sun, and the moon—in Medieval Germanic Literature, OCC,
890–91.
10. See the page about the Sphinx in Book of Imaginary Beings, OCC,
627.
11. Robert K. Gordon, Anglo-Saxon Poetry (New York: Dutton Books,
1954).
12. Jorge Manrique (1440–1479), a major Spanish poet whose main
work is Coplas a la muerte de su padre (Stanzas about the Death of
his Father). See appendix for Longfellow’s translation of “The
Grave.”
13. This poem was translated into Spanish by Borges and published in
his Brief Anglo-Saxon Anthology.
14. This story, which appears in several collections of stories by
Eduardo Wilde, was included by Borges in his collection Cuentistas
y pintores argentinos [Argentine painters and short-story writers],
Ediciones de Arte Gaglianone, 1985. Eduardo Wilde (1844–1913)
was one of the most prominent intellectual figures of his time in
Argentina.
15. Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959), Mexican writer, philosopher, and
diplomat.
16. Borges includes this book by Leopoldo Lugones as volume 12 in
his collection Biblioteca personal.
17. In Old English, cnif.
18. William the Conqueror (ca.1028–87), duke of Normandy and king
of England after he defeated the Saxon king Harold at Hastings in the
year 1066.
19. King Alfred (849–99), known as Alfred the Great. From the
moment of his coro- nation as king of Wessex in 871, Alfred was
 forced to confront constant threats from Viking invaders. In the year
878, the Danish captured Wessex, and Alfred was forced to flee. But
he returned soon thereafter and defeated the invaders at Eddington. In
the year 886, Alfred and the Danes signed the Treaty of Wedmore,
which established the partition of England. The north and east of the
island re- mained under Danish control, but in exchange, Alfred was
able to extend his do- main beyond the border of Wessex, thereby
King Guthrum converted to Christianity. Alfred never ruled over all
of England, but his reforms and military victories marked the
beginning of a territorial consolidation that allowed his suc- cessors
to carry out the unification of Anglo-Saxon England.
20. This episode appears in King Harald’s Saga, part II, chapter 94, of
Heimskringla, by Snorri Sturluson.
21. Borges is probably referring here to James Lewis Farley (1823–
85), English writer and journalist, born in Dublin. He was consul to
Turkey in Bristol and contributed to the improvement of relations
between Turkey and England. Some of his works include: Two Years
Travel in Syria, The Massacres in Syria, New Bulgaria, The Druses
and the Maronites, Mondern Turkey, The Resources of Turkey, and
Egypt, Cyprus and Asiatic Turkey.
22. Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), Icelandic poet, scholar, and
historian, was the most famous medieval writer of Iceland. He wrote
Heimskringla or Chronicle of the Kings of Norway and Prose Edda
or Younger Edda. Egil’s Saga is also attributed to him. Snorri
Sturluson studied in Oddi under the tutelage of Jon Loptsson, and
was not only the most outstanding scholar of his time but also
probably the man of most noble lineage in all of Iceland. In addition
to scholarship, Snorri was interested in wealth and power, and lacked
neither. He participated in political intrigues involving the king of
Norway, Haakon IV, and promised to give Iceland to his crown; then
—for reasons no longer fully understood—he delayed turning it over
to him for a long time. As Borges points out, Snorri Sturluson’s life
has been described as “a complex chronicle of betrayals.” In the year
1241, after being snubbed by Snorri Sturluson, King Haakon lost his
patience and ordered his assassination. Borges explores these
fundamental aspects of his life in Medieval Germanic Literature,
 OCC, 950–51. See also Borges’s prologue to his translation of the
first part of the Prose Edda or Younger Edda, titled Gylfaginning or
The Tricking of Gylfi.
23. The famous movie by Sergei M. Eisenstein, first shown in 1938.
24. The “ancient English chronicle” mentioned by Borges is the Gesta
Regum Anglorum, or The History of the English Kings, written by the
English historian William de Malmesbury (ca.1090–1143) around the
year 1125.

CLASS 8

1. Jerónimo Lobo (1596–1678), a Portuguese Jesuit. He joined the

Jesuit Order in Lisbon and devoted his life to being a missionary.
2. Decimus Junius Juvenalis (ca. 60–140), Latin poet. The two poems
by Samuel Johnson mentioned by Borges were inspired by his work.
“London: A Poem,” from 1738, is based on Juvenal’s Satire 3. “The
Vanity of Human Wishes,” from 1749, is modeled after Satire 10.
3. Paul Groussac (1848–1929), Argentine writer born in France.
4. Published in 1755.
5. Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711), French poet and critic.
6. This English–Italian Dictionary was published in 1598 by the
lexicographer and translator Giovanni Florio (1553–1652).
7. Noah Webster (1758–1843), American lexicographer. In 1806,
Webster published his Compendious Dictionary of the English
Language, and in 1828, An American Dictionary, a much more
exhaustive dictionary.
8. Borges is probably remembering line 48 of the poem, “The Vanity
of Human Wishes,” in which Johnson talks about the hardships
endured by anyone who chooses the profession of writer. In the first
edition of this poem, from 1749, Johnson wrote the line, “Toil, Envy,
Want, the Garret, and the Jail.” After his bitter experience with Lord
Chesterfield, who refused to help him, Johnson changed the poem,
substituting “garret” with “patron” in his list of ills: “Toil, Envy,
Want, the Patron, and the Jail.”
CLASS 9

1. When Johnson began his dictionary, he approached Lord

Chesterfield as a potential patron, but Chesterfield gave him only a
token sum. Seven years later, after Johnson had completed his task,
Lord Chesterfield published two essays in the World magazine, in
which he congratulated him. Johnson replied by publishing a letter in
which he reminded him of his prior attitude, writing, among other
things, “Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a
man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached
ground, encumbers him with help?”
The Rambler, was a two-penny sheet of essays Johnson
published for several years.
2. Samuel Johnson, La historia de Raselas, príncipe de Abisinia,
translation and prologue by Mariano de Vedia y Mitre (Buenos
Aires: Editorial Guillermo Kraft Limitada [Colección Vértice]),
1951.
3. The manuscript that tells of Father Lobo’s experiences in Abyssinia,
originally written in Portuguese, wasn’t published until it was
translated into French by Abad Legrand. Legrand’s translation was
published in 1728 with the title: Voyage historique d’Abissinie du
R.P. Jerome Lobo de la Compagnie de Jesus; traduit du Portugais;
continuée et augm. de plusieurs dissertations, lettres et memoires par
M. Le Grand.
4. “Barlaam and Josaphat” is a Christian adaptation of the legend of
Buddha, written in Greek in the seventh century by a monk named
Juan of the Sabbas monastery near Jerusalem. This work was widely
read in the Middle Ages and influenced many Spanish-language
writers, among them Lope de Vega, Raimundo Lulio, and Don Juan
Manuel.
5. Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959), Mexican writer, philosopher, and
diplomat. This passage can be found in an essay called “Un
precursor teórico de la aviación en el siglo XVII.”
6. Antoine Galland (1646–1715), French Orientalist and scholar. He is
best known for his French adaptation of The Arabian Nights, titled
 Mille et une Nuits, a free adaptation based on Syrian manuscripts.
Borges critiques and compares the many translations of this work in
his essay, “The Translators of the 1001 Nights,” in A History of
Eternity (1936). Borges also includes a selection of Galland’s
translation as volume 52 in his Biblioteca personal from
Hyspamérica.
7. One of the three divisions of Ancient Egypt, also called Upper
Egypt, whose capital was Thebes. At the end of the third century, the
first Christian hermits took refuge in the desert in the western part of
this region to escape persecution by the Romans.
8. Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82). He wrote Religio medici around
1635. His other works include Pseudodoxia epidemic (1646), Urn
Burial (1658), and, mentioned here below, The Garden of Cyrus
(1658).
This sentence can be found in one of the last paragraphs of The
Garden of Cyrus. In this passage, the author comments on how
deceptive the images of plants in dreams can be, and mentions that
dreaming impoverishes the sense of smell: “Beside Hippocrates hath
spoke so little and the Oneirocriticall Masters, have left such frigid
Interpretations from plants, that there is little encouragement to
dream of Paradise it self. Nor will the sweetest delight of Gardens
afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dulnesse of that sense
shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the Bed of
Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a Rose”
(chapter V).
9. In chapter 32 of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.
10. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), German philosopher and
mathematician.
11. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s comments are, in a fact, a double-
edged sword. In Thomas Macaulay’s review of John Croker’s new
edition of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (which appeared in
September 1831), Macaulay states that Boswell was an imbecile who
happened to have a good memory. In spite of this, his encounter with
Johnson led to the best biography every written. “We are not sure
that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a
phænomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived
 have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that
ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any
credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew
him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect.”

CLASS 10

1. From Sartor Resartus, chapter VIII: “Could anything be more

miraculous than an actual authentic Ghost? The English Johnson
longed, all his life, to see one; but could not, though he went to Cock
Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish
Doctor! Did he never, with the mind’s eye as well as with the body’s,
look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he
never so much as look into Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost,
as actual and authentic as heart could wish; well-nigh a million of
Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. Once more I say,
sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the threescore years into
three minutes: what else was he, what else are we? Are we not
Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade
away again into air and Invisibility? This is no metaphor, it is a
simple scientific fact: we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and
are Apparitions; round us, as round the veriest spectre, is Eternity;
and to Eternity minutes are as years and aeons.”
2. John Stuart (1713–92), Third Earl of Bute, British statesman born in
Edinburgh, Scotland. He was the tutor and personal friend to George
III. When George II acceded to the throne, he received a position in
his court, and was named Secretary of State, and in 1762, Prime
Minister. He quickly became very unpopular, however, and was
forced to resign in 1763.
3. Pasquale di Paoli (1725–1807), leader of the struggle for Corsican
independence, first against Genoa and then against France. Boswell
took a six-week trip to Corsica in 1765 to interview Di Paoli, with
whom he established a long friendship.
4. “Mr. Thomas Davies, the actor, who then kept a bookseller’s shop in
 Russell Street, Covent Garden” (The Life of Samuel Johnson, by
James Boswell).
5. See note 12 from Class 9 above. Thomas Babington Macaulay,
Baron of Rothley (1800–59), English historian, politician, and
essayist. Macaulay’s essay appeared in September 1831, in response
to John Wilson Croker’s edition of Boswell’s biography.
6. In his 1831 review of Life of Johnson, Macaulay writes: “Those
weaknesses which most men keep covered up in the most secret
places of the mind, not to be disclosed to the eye of friendship or of
love, were precisely the weaknesses which Boswell paraded before
all the world. He was perfectly frank, because the weakness of his
understanding and the tumult of his spirits prevented him from
knowing when he made himself ridiculous.... His fame is great; and it
will, we have no doubt be lasting; but it is fame of a peculiar kind,
and indeed marvellously resembles infamy.”
7. The phrase “whose name I do not wish to recall” is probably a take
on the first sentence of Don Quixote.
8. Leopoldo Lugones Argüello (1874–1938) was an Argentine writer.
9. This would have been accompanied by a gesture.
10. Paul Valéry (1871–1945), French poet and critic.
11. This phrase is found in Book VIII of Pope’s translation of the Iliad.
12. First published in two volumes in 1791 under the title The Life of
Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
13. Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92), English painter born in Devon,
Great Britain. He painted portraits of important persons of his era. In
1768, Reynolds was named first president of the Royal Academy of
Arts, and in 1784, Principal Painter in Ordinary to the King. Oliver
Goldsmith (1728–74), Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, and poet.
14. Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), Spanish writer and philosopher.
15. From All’s well that ends well, act 4, scene 3.
16. Henri L. Bergson (1859–1941), French philosopher.
17. Joseph Wood Krutch (1893–1970), North American naturalist,
conservationist, writer, and critic. He wrote a biography of Johnson
in 1944, and taught at Columbia University from 1937–52. His
autobiography, More Lives Than One, was published in 1962.
18. Selections of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of
 the Roman Empire are found in volume 27 of Biblioteca personal.
Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975), English historian.

CLASS 11

1.Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), German philosopher. The work

Borges is referring to, whose original title in German is Der
Untergang des Abendlandes, was published in two volumes between
1918 and 1922.
From The Decline of the West, volume 2, part 1, chapter IV.
2. Gray’s poem titled “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” was
first published in 1751. The poem was inspired by the graveyard of
the church in Stoke Podges in Buckinghamshire, England, where
Gray himself is buried.
3. José Antonio Miralla (1789–1825), Argentine poet and fighter for
independence, born in Cordoba, Argentina. When in England, he did
an admirable translation into Spanish of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard.” Among his works are also
included A la Muerte de Mr. William Winston, La Libertad, and La
Palomilla Ausente.
4. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), German philosopher.
5. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836–1870), a Spanish post-romantic
writer of poetry and stories, is a major figure of Spanish literature.
Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), German poet and essayist.
6. Corrientes is a province in northeast Argentina. Guaraní is spoken
by communities there.
7. By James Macpherson, published in 1760.
8. He is referring to Hugh Blair (1718–1800), a famous priest, friend of
Alexander Carlyle, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and James
Macpherson, for whom Blair wrote A Critical Dissertation on the
Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (1763). The book of rhetoric
Borges is referring to is Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,
published in 1783 and used as a textbook until well into the
nineteenth century.
9. Fingal: Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books was published in 1762. One
year later, Macpherson published a supposedly new collection of
Celtic legends and poems called Temora: An Ancient Epic Poem in
Eight Books.
10. Johannes Scotus Eriugena (ca. 830–880), Irish philosopher and
theologian.
11. “The English park with its atmospheric suggestion, which
supplanted the French about 1750 and abandoned the great
perspective idea of the latter in favour of the “Nature” of Addison,
Pope and sensibility, introduced into its stock of motives perhaps the
most astonishing bizarrerie ever perpetrated, the artificial ruin, in
order to deepen the historical character in the presented landscape,”
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (Oxford University Press,
1991), p. 134.
12. The word Borges is referring to is probably “baritus,” a term used
by Tacitus in his Germania. “They say that Hercules, too, once
visited them; and when going into battle, they sing of him first of all
heroes. They have also those songs of theirs, by the recital of which
(‘baritus,’ they call it), they rouse their courage, while from the note
they augur the result of the approaching conflict. For, as their line
shouts, they inspire or feel alarm. It is not so much an articulate
sound, as a general cry of valor.” The Agricola and Germania, trans.
A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb (London: Macmillan, 1877), 87–
110. The origin of this word is unknown. It has been associated with
the Celtic bards, as well as the sounds made by elephants.
13. Melchiore Cesarotti (1730–1808), Italian poet and essayist. His
verse translation of Macpherson’s work is called Poesie di Ossian
(1763–72).
14. Macpherson’s texts also attracted the romantic musicians. Between
1815 and 1817, the celebrated Austrian, Franz Schubert, put to music
more than ten long texts of Ossian, which came to him in German
translations by E. Baron de Harold. In a newspaper article as late as
1843, the German composer Robert Schumann (who was also a
writer) mentioned the premier of an overture dedicated to Ossian,
Nachklänge aus Ossian, by the young Danish composer Niels Gade.
15. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). The author, whom
 Borges mentions below, was the English scholar and bishop Thomas
Percy (1729–1811), not Gray.

CLASS 12

1. Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959), Mexican writer and diplomat. Miguel

de Unamuno (1864–1936), Spanish writer and philosopher.
2. Thomas Quincey (1785–1859), known as De Quincey, British
writer.
3. Borges is probably remembering lines 238–68 of The Recluse, Part
First, Book First, Home at Grasmere. Wordsworth writes: “... But
two are missing, two, a lonely pair / Of milk-white Swans; wherefore
are they not seen / Partaking this day’s pleasure,” then offers the
explanation of the Dalesmen’s tube as a possible explanation.
4. The sonnet is titled “Composed upon Westminster Bridge” from
September 3, 1802. “Earth has not anything to show more fair: / Dull
would he be of soul who could pass by / A sight so touching in its
majesty: / This City now doth, like a garment, wear / The beauty of
the morning; silent, bare, / Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and
temples lie / Open unto the fields, and to the sky; / All bright and
glittering in the smokeless air. / Never did sun more beautifully steep
/ In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; / Ne’er saw I, never felt,
a calm so deep! / The river glideth at his own sweet will: / Dear God!
the very houses seem asleep; / And all that mighty heart is lying
still!”
5. The untitled sonnet begins with the line, “With shops the sea was
sprinkled far and nigh.” Borges quotes from this poem again toward
the end of the class. See note 13 for the entire sonnet.
6. The poem was composed between 1802 and 1806 and first published
in 1807. Borges quotes from the fourth line, which actually reads
“The glory and the freshness of a dream,” inadvertently changing the
order of the words. We mustn’t forget that he is speaking from
memory, without notes.
7. The passage is in the fifth, not second book.
8. Borges does not finish the sentence.
9. The title of the poem is “The Solitary Reaper,” and was written
between 1803 and 1805 and published in 1807. The text reads as
follows: “Behold her, single in the field, / Yon solitary Highland
Lass! / Reaping and singing by herself; / Stop here, or gently pass! /
Alone she cuts and binds the grain, / And sings a melancholy strain; /
O listen! for the Vale profound / Is overflowing with the sound. // No
Nightingale did ever chaunt / More welcome notes to weary bands /
Of travellers in some shady haunt, / Among Arabian sands: / A voice
so thrilling ne’er was heard / In springtime from the Cuckoo-bird, /
Breaking the silence of the seas / Among the farthest Hebrides. //
Will no one tell me what she sings?— / Perhaps the plaintive
numbers flow / For old, unhappy, far-off things, / And battles long
ago: / Or is it some more humble lay, Familiar matter of to-day? /
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, / That has been, and may be
again? // Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang / As if her song could
have no ending; / I saw her singing at her work, / And o’er the sickle
bending;— / I listened, motionless and still; / And, as I mounted up
the hill / The music in my heart I bore, / Long after it was heard no
more.”
10. The sonnet, titled “November, 1806,” was written in 1806 and
published the following year. It reads as follows: “Another year!—
another deadly blow! / Another mighty Empire overthrown! / And
We are left, or shall be left, alone / The last that dare to struggle with
the Foes. / ‘Tis well! from this day forward we shall know / That in
ourselves our safety must be sought; / That by our own right hands it
must be wrought; / That we must stand un propped, or be laid low. /
O dastard whom such foretaste doth not cheer! / We shall exult, if
they who rule the land / Be men who hold its many blessings dear, /
Wise, upright, valiant; not a servile band, / Who are to judge of
danger which they fear, / And honour which they do not understand.”
11. Borges is remembering lines 58–63 of “Book Third” of The
Prelude: “And from my pillow, looking forth by light / Of moon or
favouring stars, I could behold / The antechapel where the statue
stood / Of Newton with his prism and silent face, / The marble index
of a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of thought,
 alone.”
12. See note 1.
13. This line comes from Wordsworth’s untitled sonnet mentioned in
note 7 in this same class: “With Ships the sea was sprinkled far and
nigh, / Like stars in heaven, and joyously it showed; / Some lying fast
at anchor in the road, / Some veering up and down, one knew not
why. / A goodly Vessel did I then espy / Come like a Giant from a
haven broad; / And lustily along the bay she strode, / Her tackling
rich, and of apparel high. / The Ship was nought to me, nor I to her, /
Yet I pursued her with a Lover’s look; / This Ship to all the rest did I
prefer: / When will she turn, and whither? She will brook / No
tarrying; where She comes the winds must stir: / On went She, and
due north her journey took.”

CLASS 13

1. This story first appeared in the magazine The Yellow Book in July
1894, and was first published in the book Terminations, in London
by Heinemann and in New York by Harper in 1895.
2. Martino Dobrizhoffer (1717–91), Austrian Jesuit. He worked as a
minister among the Abipones, a tribe north of the Guaraní zone,
along with Father Florian Baucke or Paucke in the middle of the
eighteenth century. The original version of his book is written in
Latin and consists of three volumes. It is called Historia de
Abiponibus: equestri bellicosaque Paraquariae natione. It was
published in Vienna by Josph Nob de Kurzbek in 1784, translated
into German the same year, then into English in 1822. A copy of the
original Latin can be found in the Sala del Tesoro of the National
Library in Buenos Aires.
3. Originally published in 1817.
4. Coleridge studied at Christ’s Hospital, not at Christ Church.
5. The Fall of Robespierre was first published in 1794. Joan of Arc
(1796) is actually an epic poem.
6. Borges refers to Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as “The
 Ancient Mariner” throughout.
7. According to John Spencer Hill, “The entire Biographia, written as
it was in under four months, shows signs of hasty composition; but
nowhere has this haste left more clearly defined marks than in
chapters 12 and 13, the last to be composed, in September 1815. As
has long been known, chapter 12 of the Biographia Literaria consists
largely of extended passages of translation, some of them verbatim
and none of them acknowledged, from F.W.J. Schelling’s
Abhandlungen zur Erlaüterung des Idealismus der
Wissenschaftslehre and System des transcendentalen Idealismus.
Chapter 12 is not the only place, nor is Schelling the only German
philosopher from whom Coleridge plagiarises in the course of
Biographia Literaria; but the fact remains that the bulk of
unacknowledged borrowings in the book appear in this chapter,
which Coleridge must have composed with Schelling’s works open
before him. Speed of execution will not, of course, excuse such
behaviour (the case for exculpation rests on other and more complex
proofs), but it surely does go a long way toward explaining why the
borrowings are so extensive at this particular point.” A Coleridge
Companion (New York: Macmillian Press, 1985), p. 218.
8. Macedonio Fernández (1874–1952), Argentine writer, humorist, and
philosopher.
9. Amado Nervo (1870–1919), Mexican poet.
10. Johannes Scotus Eriugena (815–77), Irish theologian, philosopher,
and poet.
11. In Chapter 15 of his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge asserts “that
Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no
passive vehicle of inspiration, possessed by the spirit, not possessing
it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till
knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his
habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power ...
attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own
ideal.... Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining
himself.”
12. As well as a son, whom Borges fails to mention.
13. See Class 8, note 3.
CLASS 14

1. Everyman is one of the morality plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries that deal with the urgent need to repent, the ephemerality of
life, and the fate of the human soul in God’s hands. Probably based
on a Flemish original, Everyman was written around the year 1495.
2. The Golden Book of Coleridge, edited by Stopford A. Brooke,
volume 43 of Everyman’s Library.
3. “Dejection: An Ode” was written on April 4, 1802. The idea Borges
is referring to is found in section VI of “Dejection: An Ode,” which
reads as follows: “There was a time when, though my path was
rough, / This joy within me dallied with distress, / And all
misfortunes were but as the stuff / Whence Fancy made me dreams
of happiness: / For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, / And
fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine. / But now afflictions
bow me down to earth: / Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth; /
But oh! each visitation / Suspends what Nature gave me at my birth, /
My shaping spirit of Imagination. / For not to think of what I needs
must feel, / But to be still and patient, all I can; / And haply by
abstruse research to steal / From my own nature all the natural man—
/ This was my sole resource, my only plan: / Till that which suits a
part infects the whole, / And now is almost grown the habit of my
soul.”
4. There is no book about Coleridge with this title; the book Borges is
remembering is undoubtedly George Wilson Knight, The Starlit
Dome (London: Oxford University Press, 1941). The Starlit Dome
includes a chapter titled “Coleridge’s Divine Comedy,” in which the
author asserts that Christabel, The Ancient Mariner, and Kubla Khan
can be seen together as a Divine Comedy, exploring successively
hell, purgatory, and heaven.
5. Jacopo Alighieri (c. 1291–1348)
6. Cangrande della Scala (1291–1329), Italian nobleman, known as the
leading patron of Dante Aligheri.
 7. “The Turn of the Screw” appeared in Collier’s Weekly in 1898 and
for the first time in a book in The Two Magics, published the same
year.
8. The two versions of this poem appear on facing pages in Coleridge,
Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Stephen Potter (London: Nonesuch
Press and New York: Random House, 1962).
9. The second version of the poem begins as follows: “It is an ancient
Mariner, / And he stoppeth one of three. / ‘By thy long grey beard
and glittering eye, / Now wherefore stopp’st thou me? / The
Bridegroom’s doors are opened wide, / And I am next of kin; / The
guests are met, the feast is set: / May’st hear the merry din.’ / He
holds him with his skinny hand, / ‘There was a ship,’ quoth he. /
‘Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’ / Eftsoons his hand dropt
he.”
10. Borges quotes from the fourth stanza: “He holds him with his
glittering eye— / The Wedding-Guest stood still, / And listens like a
three years’ child: / The Mariner hath his will.”
11. Arbaleses does not appear in any of the large dictionaries of the
Spanish language, however its etymology corresponds to the French
arabletes, the Latin arcus, “arc,” and ballista, “crossbow.”
12. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale” from The Canterbury
Tales, lines 265– 68: “Ne deeth, allas! ne wol nat han my lyf / Thus
walke I, lyk a restelees kaityf, / And on the ground, which is my
moodres gate, / I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late.”
13. The Flying Dutchman, an opera in three acts, words and music by
Richard Wagner, debuted in 1843.
14. John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Way
of the Imagination (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927).
15. Samuel Purchas (1575–1626), English writer and priest. The book
was Purchas, his Pilgrimage, published in 1625.

CLASS 15

1. Borges included Poesía completa, Pablo Mañé Garzón’s translation

 of Blake, as volume 62 in his Biblioteca personal. In the prologue,
Borges offers a brief biography of the English poet.
2. Denis Saurat, (Paris: La Colombe, 1954).
3. For example, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (ca. 1790).
4. The poems included in Songs of Experience were written between
1789 and 1794. The poem “The Tyger,” which Borges continually
refers to, was then corrected twice by Blake and published
separately.
5. See Class 9, note 10.
6. Saint Irenaeus (ca.130–202), bishop of Lyon. In his Adversus
haereses, he describes Gnostic ideas in detail in order to refute them.
7. He is quoting from the poem “Sonnet (Suggested by some of the
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research),” written in 1913
and included in the book The South Seas. The text is as follows:

Not with vain tears, when we’re beyond the sun,

We’ll beat on the substantial doors, nor tread
Those dusty high-roads of the aimless dead
Plaintive for Earth; but rather turn and run
Down some close-covered by-way of the air,
Some low sweet alley between wind and wind,
Stoop under faint gleams, thread the shadows, find
Some whispering ghost-forgotten nook, and there

Spend in pure converse our eternal day;

Think each in each, immediately wise;
Learn all we lacked before; hear, know, and say
What this tumultuous body now denies;
And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;
And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.
8. The quote, from Blake, is, “If the doors of perception were cleansed
every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.” Huxley’s book,
mentioned here by Borges, is The Doors of Perception (New York:
Harper, 1954). A review of this book, written by Alicia Jurado, was
published in the first number of the magazine La Biblioteca (Jan–
 March, 1957), edited by Borges in his position as director of the
National Library.
9. The last poem of Lyrical Ballads (1798) published in collaboration
with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Lines Composed a Few Miles
Above Tintern Abbey”:

“For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”
10. From A Vision of the Last Judgement.
11. Sixth proverb from “Proverbs of Hell” in The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell.
12. Among Blake’s “prophetic books” are: America, A Prophecy
(1793), Europe, A Prophecy (1794), The Book of Urizen (1794), The
Book of Ahania (1795), The Book of Los (1795), and The Song of Los
(1795).
13. The text is “But silken nets and traps of adamant will Oothoon
spread, / And catch for thee girls of mild silver, or of furious gold.”
(“Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” lines 197–98, 1793).
14. He is certainly referring to Samuel Foster Damon, A Blake
Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (Provincetown:
Brown University Press, 1965), published the year before these
classes were given.
CLASS 16

1. Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Santibáñez Villegas (1580–1645)

was a Spanish nobleman, politician, and writer of the Baroque era.
2. Léon Bloy (1846–1917). Borges includes his Le Salut par les Juifs
[Salvation through the Jews], 1892, in volume 54 of his Biblioteca
personal.
3. Arbeiten und nicht verzweifeln: Auszüge aus seinen Werken,
translated into German by Maria Kühn and A. Kretzschmar.
4. Carlyle contributed sixteen articles to Edinburgh Encyclopaedia
from 1820 to 1825.
5. Life of Schiller was first published in London Magazine (1823–24).
6. Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), novelist and humorist
born in Wunsiedel, Germany.
7. Published in 1824 and 1827, respectively.
8. Sartor Resartus was published in 1833–34.
9. Giuseppe Balsamo, alias Count Cagliostro (1743–95), an Italian
adventurer.
10. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1766–1840), Paraguayan
dictator.
11. Published in 1845.
12. Published in 1837.
13. Borges is referring to A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and
Inductive (1843).
14. Facundo Quiroga (1788–1835) was an Argentine candillo.
Domingo Sarmiento (1811–1888), the seventh president of
Argentina, activist, and writer. He wrote Facundo, Civilization and
Barbarism in 1845.
15. Carlyle published her letters and papers in 1883 under the title
Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. In 1903, New Letters
and Memorials appeared in London.
16. Published in 1858.
17. The Early Kings of Norway (1875). See also Class 1, note 3, and
Class 4, note 4.
18. In German, Weissnichtwo literally means “know not where.”
 19. Pedro Bonifacio Palacios, also known as Almafuerte (1854–1917),
Argentine poet.
20. Miguel de Unamuno, see Class 10, note 14.
21. Published in 1841.
22. “Shooting Niagara: And After?” (1867).
23. John A. Carlyle (1801–79) was a medical doctor.
24. Pedro Bonifacio Palacios (1854–1917), better known as
Almafuerte, was an Argentine poet.
25. Sartor Resartus, chapter VII: “‘The simplest costume,’ observes
our Professor, ‘which I anywhere find alluded to in History, is that
used as regimental, by Bolivar`s Cavalry, in the late Colombian wars.
A square Blanket, twelve feet in diagonal, is provided (some were
wont to cut off the corners, and make it circular): in the centre a slit
is effected eighteen inches long; through this the mother-naked
Trooper introduces his head and neck; and so rides shielded from all
weather, and in battle from many strokes (for he rolls it about his left
arm); and not only dressed, but harnessed and draperied.’”

CLASS 17

1. Sir Richard Francis Burton (1827–90), English explorer, linguist,

soldier, writer, and diplomat. He studied at Oxford, from which he
was expelled for a minor offense. At twenty-one he joined the East
India Company. He was posted in Sindh, where he lived for eight
years. Burton knew Italian, French, Greek, and Latin; during his time
in Sindh he learned to speak many local languages. Eventually,
Burton mastered more than twenty-five languages; forty, counting
dialects. He returned to England in 1850, where he organized a series
of expeditions: he visited the sacred city of Mecca, infiltrated the
forbidden city of Harar, and participated in two expeditions to
discover the source of the Nile. In 1860 he traveled to the United
States, where he observed the life of the Mormons. He then entered
the Foreign Office, and was posted to the island of Fernando Po, near
the coast of Africa, and then Brazil, where he translated the works of
 Camoens. In 1872, he was sent to Trieste. Burton wrote and
translated many texts, among them erotic texts, such as The
Perfumed Garden, Ananda Ranga, and The Kama Sutra of
Vatsayana.
The Perfumed Garden is a translation into English of the Arabic
Rawd al-atir fi nuzhat al-khatir, written by Sheik Umar Ibn
Muhammad al-Nafzawi. Burton based his translation on the French
edition. Burton’s version was published in 1886, under the title The
Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui: A Manual of Arabian
Erotology.
2. It would be interesting to trace the relationship between this
emphatic assertion and Borges’s own work.
3. Published in 1836.
4. He is referring here to many influences, but mostly to Cervantes’s
Exemplary Novels.
5. Miguel de Unamuno, see Class 10, note 14.
6. Paul Groussac, see Class 8, note 3.
7. Written between 1843 and 1844.
8. 1868 and 1860, respectively. Borges included The Moonstone in
volume 23 of El Séptimo Círculo of Emecé Editores, and in volumes
6 and 7 of his Biblioteca personal.
9. Andrew Lang (1812–44) Scottish critic, essayist, historian, and poet.
He studied the folklore and traditions of many peoples, which he
adapted in his Fairy Books series for children. His vast work also
includes books of poetry, a history of Scotland in four volumes, and
direct prose translations from Greek of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
10. This was published in Spanish by Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares
in 1951 as volume 78 of El Séptimo Círculo collection by Emecé
Editores, in a translation by Dora de Alvear and a prologue by G. K.
Chesterton,which Borges quotes at the end of this class.
11. In another paragraph of his study Appreciations and Criticisms of
the Works of Charles Dickens, Chesterton says, “But Dickens, having
had far too little plot in his stories previously, had far too much plot
in the story he never told. Dickens dies in the act of telling, not his
tenth novel, but his first news of murder. He drops down dead as he
is in the act of denouncing the assassin. It is permitted to Dickens, in
 short, to come to a literary end as strange as his literary beginning.
He began by completing the old romance of travel. He ended by
inventing the new detective story.... Edwin Drood may or may not
have really died; but surely Dickens did not really die. Surely our real
detective liveth and shall appear in the latter days of the earth. For a
finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary
sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more
essential and more strange.”

CLASS 18

1. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61). In addition to being

considered an excellent poet, she was a scholar and translator of
Greek, and took strong positions against slavery, for the Italian
nationalist cause, and about the situation of women in the Victorian
society of her era. Oscar Wilde, in his article “The Tomb of Keats”
(originally published in Irish Monthly magazine in July 1877)
includes Elizabeth Barrett with the likes of Edmund Spenser,
Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and even John Keats, as the
“grand court of the sweet singers of England.” He does not include
Robert Browning in this list.
2. The work of Elizabeth Barrett that so impressed Browning was
actually the book Poems, published in 1844. Browning wrote to
Elizabeth saying: “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss
Barrett ... and I love you too.” After a long courtship, Robert
Browning and Elizabeth Barrett were secretly married on September
12, 1846, and ran off to Italy. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese
reflect her feelings for Browning during the first years of their
relationship. Elizabeth began writing those poems in 1845, but did
not show them to anybody—not even Browning—until 1848. They
were not published until 1850, in a new edition of Poems. In spite of
the title, which attempts to hide the personal origin of these poem,
these are not, in fact, translations from Portuguese, but rather original
works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
 3. Robert Browning and Elizabeth, in fact, had a son, Robert
Wiedemann “Pen” Barrett Browning, born on March 9, 1849, in
Florence. After Elizabeth’s death in 1861, Pen Browning returned
with his father to England. In 1887, when he was thirty-eight years
old, Pen married Fannie Coddington, but his marriage did not last
and they separated three years later. He died in Asolo, Italy, in 1912.
4. Oscar Wilde says of George Meredith in the dialogue, “The Decay
of Lying,” “Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos
illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered
everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything,
except tell a story: as an artist he is everything except articulate.”
5. In his article, “Puppets and Actors,” which appeared in The Daily
Telegraph on February 20, 1892, Oscar Wilde describes Robert
Browning’s works as “of introspective method and strange or sterile
psychology.”
6. Ramón María del Valle Inclán (1866–1936), Spanish poet and
writer.
7. See Class 6, note 10.
8. “My Last Duchess, Ferrara,” from Dramatic Romances (1845).
9. In Men and Women (1855).
10. “So we’ll live, / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh /
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues / Talk of court news, and
we’ll talk with them too— / Who loses and who wins, who’s in,
who’s out— / And take upon’s the mystery of things / As if we were
God’s spies...” King Lear, act V, scene III.
11. The poem reads: “Well, I could never write a verse,—could you? /
Let’s to the Prado and make the most of time.”
12. “An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of
Karshish, the Arab Physician” in Men and Women (1855).
13. This poem is called “Cleon,” and is also in the book Men and
Women.

CLASS 19
1. Originally published in Dramatic Romances (1845).
2. King Lear, act III, scene IV. The words are spoken by Edgar,
Gloucester’s eldest son: “Childe Roland to the dark tower came, / His
word was still ‘Fie, foh, and fum, / I smell the blood of a British
man.’”
3. This poem appears in the book Cornhuskers (1918).
4. Actually, a six-year-old girl.
5. Originally published in Dramatis Personae (1864).
6. Originally published in Dramatic Lyrics (1842).
7. The full text of the poem “Memorabilia”: “Ah, did you once see
Shelley plain, / And did he stop and speak to you? /And did you
speak to him again? / How strange it seems, and new! // But you
were living before that, / And you are living after, / And the memory
I started at— / My starting moves your laughter! // I crossed a moor,
with a name of its own / And a certain use in the world no doubt, /
Yet a hand’s-breadth of it shines alone / ‘Mid the blank miles round
about: // For there I picked up on the heather / And there I put inside
my breast /A moulted feather, an eagle-feather— / Well, I forget the
rest.”
8. Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959), Mexican writer, philosopher, and
diplomat.
9. Manuel José Othón (1858–1906), Mexican poet born in San Luis de
Potosí. His poetry is characterized by a profound and vivid
perception of nature. Among his works: Poemas (1880), Poemas
rústicos (1902), En el desierto, Idilio salvaje (1906). He wrote
stories, short novels, and plays.
10. The poem is “Confessions” from Dramatis Personae (1864). The
first stanza says, “What is he buzzing in my ears? / ‘Now that I come
to die, / Do I view the world as a vale of tears?’ / Ah, reverend sir,
not I!”
11. The fifth stanza of the poem is “At a terrace, somewhere near the
stopper, / There watched for me, one June, / A girl: I know, sir, it’s
improper, / My poor mind’s out of tune.”
12. The poem is “Caliban upon Setebos; or Natural Theology in the
Island,” also from Dramatis Personae.
13. From Dramatic Lyrics (1842).
14. Rashomon, which premiered in 1950, was directed by Akira
Kurosawa and starred Toshiro Mifune as a bandit, and Machiko Kyo
in the woman’s role. It received the Golden Lion prize at the Venice
Film Festival in 1951 and made Kurosawa into a world-renowned
artist.
15. Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892–1927), Japanese writer. His stories,
novels, and essays—inspired by historical traditions and legends of
ancient Japan—demonstrate an unusual capacity for reinterpretation
and the incorporation of perspectives and techniques from Western
literature. Two of his works, Rashomon, of 1915, and Yabu no naka,
of 1921, were the inspiration for the film Rashomon by Akira
Kurosawa.
16. Volume 503 of Everyman’s Library, with an introduction by
Charles E. Hodell (1917).
17. Another movie that uses this same mechanism in an ingenious way
is The Killing (1956), directed by Stanley Kubrick.
18. In English, Elective Affinities, published in 1809.
19. In his essay “Kafka and his Precursors.”
20. From Dramatis Personae (1864).
21. Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra (1092–1167), Spanish rabbi,
philosopher, and poet born in Toledo. His great erudition covered
medicine, linguistics, and astronomy; his Biblical exegeses
represented an important contribution to the Golden Age of Spanish
Jewry. He was also knowledgeable in astrology and numerology. He
was called “el Sabio” “the Wise,” as well as “The Great,” and “The
Admirable Doctor.” He traveled around Europe and the Middle East.
He visited London, Rome, Narbonne, Mantua, and Verona, as well as
Egypt and Palestine.
22. The first stanza of the poem: “Grow old along with me! / The best
is yet to be, / The last of life, for which the first was made: / Our
times are in His hand / Who saith ‘A whole I planned, / Youth shows
but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!’”
23. Borges is referring to Browning Cyclopaedia by Edward Berdoe,
first published in 1891 in London by Swan, Sonnenschein and Co.
24. In an article about the poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
Came,” Berdoe asserts that this constitutes a true plea against the
 cruelty of science, which forces students to torture its animal victims,
the only goal being to achieve the “dark tower of Knowledge, which
to them has neither door nor window.” According to Berdoe, when
Browning wrote this poem, he could not have created “a more
faithful picture of the spiritual ruin and desolation which await the
student of medicine who sets forth on the fatal course of an
experimental torturer.” Berdoe goes on to say, “I have good authority
for saying that had Mr. Browning seen this interpretation of his
poem, he would have cordially accepted it as at least one legitimate
explanation.” (104–05). Browning himself always refused to explain
the meaning of those lines, merely affirming that the poem was
inspired by a dream.
25. G. K. Chesterton, Robert Browning, in the English Men of letters
(London: Macmillan & Co, 1911).
26. Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (Sheed & Ward: New
York, 1943).
27. “On my advice the Macmillans had asked him to do Browning in
the ‘English Men of Letters,’ when he was still not quite arrived. Old
Mr. Craik, the Senior Partner, sent for me and I found him in white
fury, with Chesterton’s proofs corrected in pencil; or rather not
corrected; there were still thirteen errors uncorrected on one page;
mostly in quotations from Browning. A selection from a Scotch
ballad had been quoted from memory and three of the four lines were
wrong. I wrote to Chesterton saying that the firm thought the book
was going to ‘disgrace’ them. His reply was like the trumpeting of a
crushed elephant. But the book was a huge success.” Stephen Gwynn
quoted by Cyril Stevens in Ward, Chesterton, 145.

CLASS 20

1. Gabriele Giuseppe Rossetti (1783–1854), Italian poet and scholar.

2. Gabriele Giuseppe Rossetti’s edition of The Divine Comedy was
published in two volumes, in 1826 and 1827 respectively.
3. See Class 14, note 6.
4. See Class 14, note 5.
5. Rossetti’s mother, Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, was the sister of
Dr. John William Polidori (1795–1821), who was Lord Byron’s
doctor when he first went into exile in 1816. At the end of the
summer of that year, Byron and Polidori became enemies. Three
years later, in 1819, there appeared in New Monthly magazine a story
titled “The Vampyre.” This story was at first attributed to Lord
Byron, but the following month Polidori wrote a letter to the
magazine in which he confessed his own authorship and asserted that
he wrote it based on another story originally written by Lord Byron.
Byron, enraged, denied any relationship to the story, asserting, “I
have a personal dislike to Vampires, and the little acquaintance I
have with them would by no means induce me to reveal their
secrets.” Many critics have pointed out that the main character in the
story, the vampire Lord Ruthven, seems to be inspired by Lord Byron
himself, and may be the result of Polidori’s antipathy to the person
who had been his friend and patient.
6. William Holman Hung (1827–1910), British painter.
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833–98), painter and designer
born in Birmingham, England.
7. Borges uses the term “Rey Artús” in Spanish, a variant of the name
of King Arthur.
8. La morte d’Arthur, whose original title was The Book of King Arthur
and His Knights of the Round Table, was written by Sir Thomas
Malory between 1469 and 1470, and published by William Caxton in
1485.
9. Lunfardo is the dialect originating in the late nineteenth century and
spoken by the lower classes of Buenos Aires.
10. Rossetti wrote a poem about insomnia titled “Insomnia.” The line
Borges quotes belongs to the last line of a poem called “A
Superscription.”
11. Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (1829–62). Rossetti met Elizabeth in
1850, but they did not marry until 1860. Elizabeth was a model for
many of Rossetti’s paintings and for many other pre-Raphaelite
painters.
12. Chloral is the oldest sleeping draught known to man. Because of its
 unpleasant taste it was often diluted in orange juice or with ginger.
All other sources we consulted agree that the substance taken by
Elizabeth Siddal was not chloral but laudanum, a pharmaceutical
substance derived from opium.
13. There is a famous poem by Heinrich Heine, “Der Doppelgänger,”
put to music by Franz Schubert in 1828 as part of the posthumous
Lieder, Schwanengesang D.957.
14. Borges mentions the “fetch” in his analysis of the “double” in his
Book of Imaginary Beings, OCC, 616.
15. A long poem found in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Ballads (1890).
Borges does not mention this poem again in any of the classes he
dedicates to Stevenson.
16. Rossetti’s Poems and Translations, with an introduction by E. G.
Gardner, volume 626 of Everyman’s Library.
17. The title of the poem is not “I Have Been Here Before,” but
“Sudden Light.” Borges is quoting the first line.
18. Buchanan’s article appeared in The Contemporary Review in
October 1871.
19. The text of the sonnet is as follows:

“At length their long kiss severed, with sweet smart:

And as the last slow sudden drops are shed
From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,
So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.
Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start
Of married flowers to either side outspread
From the knit stem; yet still their mouths, burnt red,
Fawned on each other where they lay apart.

Sleep sank them lower than the tide of dreams,

And their dreams watched them sink, and slid away.
Slowly their souls swam up again, through gleams Of watered light
and dull drowned waifs of day;
Till from some wonder of new woods and streams
He woke, and wondered more: for there she lay.”
 20. The poem is titled “Inclusiveness” and reads slightly differently
than Borges quotes:

“The changing guests, each in a different mood,

Sit at the roadside table and arise:
And every life among them in likewise
Is a soul’s board set daily with new food.
What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?—
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?

May not this ancient room thou sitt’st in dwell

In separate living souls for joy or pain?
Nay, all its corners may be painted plain
Where Heaven shows pictures of some life spent well,
And may be stamped, a memory all in vain,
Upon the sight of lidless eyes in Hell.”
21. John Boynton Priestley (1894–1984). The works Borges mentions
are I Have Been Here Before (1937), Time and the Conways (1937),
and An Inspector Calls (1946).
22. The title is “Sudden Light.”

CLASS 21

1. Borges recounts this legend in detail in his Book of Imaginary

Beings, OCC, 599.
2. Max Simon Nordau, Hungarian writer and doctor of Jewish origin,
born in Pest, Hungary, in 1849 and died in Paris in 1923. His most
famous work is Die Konventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit,
[The Conventional Lies of our Civilization] (1883).
The German title of Degeneration is Entartung.
3. From here, a student reads the poem and Borges comments on it
stanza by stanza. The readings in English were omitted from the
 original transcript, but have been reinserted here to allow for a better
appreciation of Borges’s comments and translations.
4. Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto II, stanza LIII: “A solitary shriek, the
bubbling cry / Of some strong swimmer in his agony.”
5. Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), Spanish essayist, novelist,
playwright, and philosopher.
6. “Troy Town” was written in 1869.
7. See Class 10, note 8. “The Unobtainable Cup” [La copa inhallable]
is a long eclogue from Leopoldo Lugones’s book, Lunario
sentimental (1909).
8. Borges refers to these two words in his essay “Blindness” [La
Ceguera] in Seven Nights [Siete Noches], OCC Vol III, 280.
9. Andrew Lang (1844–1912) was a Scottish poet, critic, and
contributor to the field of anthropology.

CLASS 22

1. In 1856. The full name of this student publication is Oxford and

Cambridge Magazine.
2. See Class 21, note 9.
3. Published in 1858.
4. Jean Bodel (ca.1167–1210), epic poet, playwright, and author of
French fabliaux. The work Borges refers to and later quotes is La
Chanson des Saisnes [Song of the Saxons], written by Bodel around
the year 1200.
Charlemagne was defeated by the Basques on August 15, 778, in
Roncesvalles, a mountain pass in the western Pyrenees (between
France and the Spanish province of Navarre). It has been idealized by
many poets as an example of glorious military martyrdom.
5. Joseph of Arimathea, according to the Gospels, is the man who
donated his own tomb for the burial of Jesus.
6. According to the source of the legend, the name can also appear as
Galaor or Galehaut.
7. Avalon is a mythological country ruled by Morgan, the sister of
 King Arthur. According to the legend, Arthur is taken there after his
last battle. In spite of the efforts of several researchers, the historical
existence of Arthur has never been proven.
8. He is referring to Olaf II Haraldsson (995–1030), king of Norway
from 1015 to his death. He spent his reign uniting Norway and
converting his people to Christianity. His death in the Battle of
Stiklestad, in the year 1030, turned him into a saint and the eternal
king of Norway, and contributed to the consolidation of the
monarchy as well as the establishment of the church in that country.
9. The battle took place on the outskirts of the city of Alcácer Quibir,
in Morocco in August 1578. There the king of Portugal, Don
Sebastian (1554–78), and in spite of the opposition of his people,
assisted Mohamed the Black, deposed king of Morocco. In spite of
having an army of 13,000 Portuguese, 1,000 Spanish, 3,000
Germans, and 600 Italians, he was unable to overcome the forces of
Abd-al Malik, “El Moluco,” who commanded the insurrection.
Because of a series of calamities, only sixty soldiers of Don
Sebastian escaped with their lives. Sebastian himself died from battle
wounds, though there was a legend about his mysterious
disappearance, and the hope that he could return at any moment to
save his country.
10. Antônio Conselheiro (1830–97) was a peasant from the northeast
of Brazil who led a group of about two hundred people in a failed
rebellion against the government. Apparently Conselheiro believed
he was of divine lineage and proposed the reinstatement of the
monarchy in Brazil. He confronted the army, in which fought the
poet Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909). Euclides da Cunha was at first
against the revolutionaries, but he soon understood that the rebellion
was the result of poverty, and he felt compassion for their fate. He
wrote about his experiences in his work Rebellion in the Backlands.
With difficulty, the army managed to defeat the peasants of
Conselheiro in the battle of Canudos. Conselheiro and his
companions who survived the battle were beheaded by the
government forces and their heads were hung from posts.
11. Seventh verse of the Chanson des Saisnes by Jean Bodel.
Following are the first lines of the poem: “Qui d’oyr et d’entendre a
 loisir ne talant / Face pais, si escoute bonne chançon vaillant / Dont
li livre d’estoire sont tesmoing et garant! / Jamais vilains jougleres
de cesti ne se vant, / Car il n’en saroit dire ne les vers ne le chant. /
N’en sont que trois materes a nul home vivant: / De France et de
Bretaigne et de Romme la grant; / Ne de ces trois materes n’i a nule
samblant. / Le conte de Bretaigne si sont vain et plaisant, / Et cil de
Romme sage et de sens aprendant, / Cil de France sont voir chascun
jour aparant. / Et de ces trois materes tieng la plus voir disant: / La
coronne de France doir estre si avant / Que tout autre roi doivent
estre a li apendant / De la loi crestienne, qui en Dieu sont creant.”
12. See Class 7.
13. John Lockwood Kipling (1837–1911). He wrote a book called
Beast and Man in India.
14. Quintus Fabius Maximus (ca. 280–203 BC), Roman general and
statesman, confronted Hannibal during the Second Punic War (218–
201 BC). His strategy consisted of keeping the enemy busy while
avoiding large confrontations.
The Montoneros was an Argentine leftist guerilla group active
during the nineteen sixties and seventies.
15. Borges is referring here to the tactics used by Hugh O’Neill (1550–
1616), who between 1595 and 1603 led a revolt against the English
control of Ireland.
16. Morris founded his first decorating firm, Morris & Company,
decorator, in 1859. Two years later he expanded the project with the
creation of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., which in 1875 became
Morris & Co.
17. Kelmscott Press was founded at the end of 1890. The first book
Morris published was his own book, Story of the Glittering Plain,
1891.
18. This collection was published in London by Bernard Quaritch
between 1891 and 1905. It includes the following volumes: Vol. 1:
The Story of Howard the Halt. The Story of the Banded Men. The
Story of Hen Thorir; Vol. 2: The Story of the Ere-dwellers
(Eyrbyggja saga), with The Story of the Heath-Slayings (Heidarviga
saga), as appendix; Vols. 3 to 6: The Stories of the Kings of Norway
called the Round world (Heimskringla), by Snorri Sturluson.
19. Borges is referring to the book titled The Works of Geoffrey
Chaucer, designed by Morris and illustrated by Burne-Jones,
published in 1896. This book, considered a masterpiece for the
exquisite harmony of its design, typography, and illustrations,
represents the culmination of Morris’s work at the head of Kelmscott
Press.
20. The lines Borges is remembering come from the epilogue of The
Earthly Paradise, where Morris says goodbye to his book: “Here are
we for the last time face to face / Thou and I, Book.” Morris warns
his book that it might encounter Chaucer in its travels: “Well, think
of him, I bid thee, on the road / And if it hap that midst of thy defeat /
Fainting beneath thy follies’ heavy load, / My Master, Geoffrey
Chaucer, thou do meet, Then shalt thou win a space of rest full sweet
/ Then be thou bold, and speak the words I say, / The idle singer of
an empty day!”
21. Adolfo Morpurgo (1889–1972), Argentine musician, born in
Trieste, Italy. He was a violinist and the director of an orchestra. He
studied cello in Budapest with David Popper and then toured Italy,
Austria, and France. He settled in Argentina in 1913, where he
played with many orchestras and chamber groups and also directed
opera and ballet. He shared the stage with Macagni, Respighi, Wanda
Landowska, Honegger, and Villa-Lobos, among other. He organized
productions of operas and ancient cantatas. He was professor of the
Conservatorio Nacional de Música, the Conservatorio Municipal de
Buenos Aires, and the Universidad de La Plata. In 1937 he founded
the Agrupación Argentina de Instrumentos Antiguos, which he
conducted as a musician on the viola da gamba, and the viola del
perdón. (This instrument was made in Paris at the end of the
sixteenth century, and according to the legend, its creator was a
prisoner condemned to death who was pardoned for inventing it. It
has twenty-six chords: seven real and nineteen that vibrate
sympathetically, producing a peculiar sound effect). Morpurgo
owned an exceptional collection of two thousand ancient instruments,
which he bought during his travels, given to him by embassies, or
obtained under interesting circumstances. One example is an old
oboe that Morpurgo found in an antique store in Buenos Aires, listed
 in the catalogue as a “candelabra.” Morpurgo is mentioned in
Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Eric Blom.
22. Morris made this trip in 1871.
23. Grettir is the central character of Grettir’s Saga. This saga, by an
anonymous author, has been dated to around 1300 and is the latest of
the Sagas of Icelanders. Grettir was an historical character; the saga
that carries his name combines many real events with fiction. Borges
transcribes several paragraphs of this saga and comments on them in
Medieval Germanic Literature, OCC, 934 and 938.
24. Morris’s translation of Beowulf was first published in 1895.
25. Story of Sigurd the Volsung and The Fall of the Niblungs (1876).
Borges analyzes the Völsunga Saga in Medieval Germanic
Literature, OCC, 966–70.
26. He could be referring here to The Wood Beyond the World (1894)
or The Well at the World’s End (1896).
27. The title is A Dream of John Ball. It was published in The
Commonwealth between November 1886 and January 1887, and for
the first time as a book in April 1888.
28. John Ball was an English priest who from an early age preached
against the nobles, the clergy, and the pope, arguing that all men are
equal. In 1381, he joined the uprising in Kent, where a group of serfs
and farmers led by Wat Tyler violently rebelled against the
establishment. Ball gave sermons and urged on the rebels, using a
well-known popular ditty: “When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who
was then the Gentleman?” After the death of Tyler, Ball took over
the leadership of the rebellion, which was finally subdued. Defeated,
Ball surrendered to Richard II. He was condemned to death and in
the same year, 1381, was hung and quartered in Saint Albans.
29. Published in 1890.
30. Shortly before Morris died in 1896, at sixty-two-years old, one of
his doctors came up with the following diagnosis: he asserted that the
writer suffered from the affliction of “simply being William Morris,
and having done more work than most ten men.”
31. Morris’s close friends called him this because his unruly hair
reminded them of the character Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by
Harriet Beecher Stowe.
 32. He wrote The Earthly Paradise in 1868 or 1869.
33. Here and for the rest of the class, Borges is discussing the long
poem “The Defence of Guenevere,” the first of the pieces in the book
of the same title, published in 1858. As in the previous classes, the
reading of the poem in English, removed from the original
transcription, has been put back here to give the context for Borges’s
comments and in order to better evoke the general atmosphere of the
class.

CLASS 23

1. This poem is the nineteenth in the book.

2. The fifteenth poem in The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems.
3. He is talking about the first section of the Anglo-Saxon poem, “The
Phoenix,” which contains a description of neorxnawang or “earthly
paradise.” Borges briefly describes this poem in Class 7.
4. “... the world is wide / For you I say,—for me a narrow space /
Betwixt the four walls of a fighting place.” The Earthly Paradise,
“Prologue: The Wanderers.”
5. “Farewell, it yet may hap that I a king / Shall be remembered but by
this one thing, / That on the morn before ye crossed the sea / Ye gave
and took in common talk with me; / But with this ring keep memory
of the morn, / O Breton, and thou North- man, by this horn /
Remember me, who am of Odin’s blood ...”
6. Borges is referring here to the already mentioned Varangian Guard.
See Class 4, note 9.
7. “Of heaven or Hell I have no power to sing, / I cannot ease the
burden of your fears, / Or make quick-coming death a little thing, /
Or bring again the pleasure of past years, / Nor for my words shall ye
forget your tears, / Or hope again for aught that I can say, / The idle
singer of an empty day.” The Earthly Paradise, “An Apology.”
8. "Oh Master, O thou great of heart and tongue,
Thou well mayst ask me why I wander here,
In raiment rent of stories oft besung!
But of thy gentleness draw thou anear,
And then the heart of one who held thee dear
Mayst thou behold! So near as that I lay
Unto the singer of an empty day.”
9. Borges translates these lines in “A King of Fire and His Steed” [Un
rey de fuego y su caballo] in his Book of Imaginary Beings, OCC,
688.
10. Published in 1867.
11. “In Thessaly, beside the tumbling sea,
Once dwelt a folk, men called the Minyæ;
For, coming from Orchomenus the old,
Bearing their wives and children, beasts and gold,
Through many a league of land they took their way,
And stopped at last, where in a sunny bay
The green Anaurus cleaves the white sea-sand,
And eastward inland doth Mount Pelion stand,
Where bears and wolves the centaurs’ arrows find ...”
The Life and Death of Jason, Book 1, lines 1–10.
12. “There shall the quick-eyed centaurs be they friends.”
The Life and Death of Jason, Book 1, line 87.
13. “But ‘mid his noise the listening man could hear
The sound of hoofs, whereat a little fear
He felt within his heart, and heeded nought
The struggling of the child, who ever sought
To gain the horn all glittering of bright gold,
Wrought by the cunning Dædalus of old.
But louder still the noise he hearkened grew,
Until at last in sight the Centaur drew ...”
The Life and Death of Jason, lines 132–140.
14. "For to the waist was man, but all below
A mighty horse, once roan, now well-nigh white
With lapse of years; with oak-wreaths was he dight
Where man joined unto horse,”
The Life and Death of Jason, lines 145–147.
15. “So, when he saw him coming through the trees,
The trembling slave sunk down upon his knees”
 The Life and Death of Jason, lines 151–152.
16. This episode belongs to Brennu-Njáls saga or Njal’s Saga (chapter
77). The woman was Hallgerd, daughter of Hauskuld.
17. The conclusion of the episode of Gunnar and Borges’s commentary
can be found in the first edition of Antiguas literaturas germánicas
(1951), p. 71.
“Weave me a cord with your hair,” he tells Hallgerd.”
“Is it a question of life or death?” she asks.
“Yes,” Gunnar answers.
“Then remember that slap you gave me and I will watch you
die,” Hallgerd says.
Thus Gunnar dies, overcome by many, and they also killed
Samr, his dog, but first the dog killed a man. The narrator does not tell
us that Hallgerd held this resentment against her husband; we suddenly
find out, as things are often revealed in reality.

CLASS 24

1. The full title is The Story of Sigurd the Volsung.

2. Victor Hugo, La légende des Siècles, perhaps Hugo’s most
important poetic work, was published in three parts in the years 1859,
1877, and 1883. In his preface, Hugo affirmed that he wanted to
express humanity in a kind of cyclical work; paint it successively and
simultaneously in all its aspects—history, fable, philosophy, religion,
science—all summarized as one vast movement toward the light.
3. Borges is referring here to Piers Plowman, attributed to William
Langland, mentioned earlier.
4. In these classes, Borges uses the Spanish version of this name
(Brunilda). In Medieval Germanic Literature, Borges refers to this
character using the original form, Brynhild.
5.In the saga, Gudrun promises to marry her daughter, Svanhild—
described as a woman with a sharp eye and exceptional beauty—to a
powerful king named Jormunrek. Svanhild is unjustly accused of
betraying Jormunrek and is condemned to die. She is trampled by
 horses. The final chapters of the saga tell how Gudrun plans to
avenge Svanhild, and she convinces her other children to kill King
Jormunrek.
Gudrun later married the King Atli (loosely based on Attila the
Hun).
6. Published as a book in 1883.
7. Written in collaboration with Lloyd Osburne. Published in
Scribner’s Magazine 10–12 (August 1891–July 1892), and as a book
the same year.
8. “On a New Form of Intermittent Light and Lighthouses,” from the
Transactions of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts, vol. VIII, 1870–71
(Edinburgh: Neill and Company, 1871).
9. The poem is numbered XXXVIII in the book Underwoods,
published in 1887. It reads: “Say not of me that weakly I declined /
The labours of my sires, and fled to sea, / The towers we founded and
the lamps we lit, / To play at home with paper like a child. / But
rather say: In the afternoon of time / A strenuous family dusted from
its hands / The sand of granite, and beholding far / Along the
sounding coast its pyramids / And tall memorials catch the dying sun,
/ Smiled well content, and to this childish task / Around the fire
addressed its evening hours.”
10. Borges is quoting the last two lines of “Dedicatoria a los
antepasados (1500– 1900)” [Dedication to My Forbearers], the first
poem in Lugones’s Poemas Solariegos [Ancestral Poems] (1927).
11. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published in 1886.
12. Included in Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers, 1881.
13. Published in 1882.
14. Harun al-Rashid (766–809), the fifth caliph of the Abbasid
Dynasty. He is remembered as a great patron of the arts and for the
luxury of his court in Baghdad. He was immortalized in the legends
that make up A Thousand and One Nights.
15. In fact, they were at an international colony for painters in
Barbizon, near Fontainebleau, France.
16. Lloyd Osbourne (1868–1947), North American writer.
17. It has thirty-nine chapters.
18. The full title is Deacon Brodie or The Double Life and was written
 in 1879. Together, Stevenson and his friend William Ernest Henley
also wrote Beau Austin (1884), Admiral Guinea (1884), and Macaire
(1885). Henley was Stevenson’s agent and his inspiration for the
character Long John Silver in Treasure Island.
19. In Samoa, Stevenson himself gave it this name, which means “five
rivers.” There he was buried, on a mountaintop, looking over the
Pacific Ocean.
20. The letter is titled “Father Damien: An open letter to the Reverend
Dr. Hyde of Honolulu,” written in Sydney on February 25, 1890. A
few of the paragraphs are as follows: “You may ask on what
authority I speak. It was my inclement destiny to become acquainted,
not with Damien, but with Dr. Hyde. When I visited the lazaretto,
Damien was already in his resting grave. But such information as I
have, I gathered on the spot in conversation with those who knew
him well and long: some indeed who revered his memory; but others
who had sparred and wrangled with him, who beheld him with no
halo, who perhaps regarded him with small respect, and through
whose unprepared and scarcely partial communications the plain,
human features of the man shone on me convincingly. These gave
me what knowledge I possess; ... we will (if you please) go hand-in-
hand through the different phrases of your letter, and candidly
examine each from the point of view of its truth, its appositeness, and
its charity.
Damien was coarse.
It is very possible. You make us sorry for the lepers, who had
only a coarse old peasant for their friend and father. But you, who were
so refined, why were you not there, to cheer them with the lights of
culture?...
Damien was dirty.
He was. Think of the poor lepers annoyed with this dirty
comrade! But the clean Dr. Hyde was at his food in a fine house.
Damien was headstrong.
I believe you are right again; and I thank God for his strong head
and heart.”
21. The essay was included in the book Across the Plains: With Other
Memories and Essays, 1892.
 22. The essay Borges remembers is titled, “On some technical
elements of style in literature,” and it is the first in Stevenson’s book
Essays in the Art of Writing.
23. This is the first stanza of Sonnet X by Garcilaso de la Vega, a
sixteenth-century Spanish soldier and poet.
24. G. K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson, (London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1927).
25. Stephen Lucius Gwynn (1864–1950), Irish poet, writer, and critic
born in Dublin. Among his principal works are Masters of English
Literature (1904), and his studies of Tennyson, Thomas Moore, Sir
Walter Scott, Horace Walpole, Mary Kingsley, Swift, and Goldsmith.
His Collected Poems appeared in 1923. His autobiography, titled
Experiences of a Literary Man, was published in 1926. Stevenson’s
biography written by Stephen Gwynn is volume X of this collection.

CLASS 25

1. Published in 1882. This book of Stevenson’s was published as

volume 53 in the collection Biblioteca personal, translated by R.
Durán, under the title Las nuevas noches árabes.
2. Published in 1908.
3. See Class 24, note 19.
4. Published first in The Broken Shaft: Tales of Mid-Ocean, in Unwin’s
Christmas Annual, ed. Sir Henry Norman (London: Fisher-Unwin,
1885). Also included in The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables
(1887). It is also included in volume 53 of Biblioteca personal.
5. The Portrait of Dorian Gray was published in 1890.
6. The Ebb-Tide is by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne,
1894. Ricardo Baeza (1890–1956) was born in Cuba but lived most
of his life in Spain. He was a highly esteemed journalist and
translator.
7. Borges is talking about Weir of Hermiston. Stevenson wrote the last
sentences of it the day he died. The novel, which takes place in
Scotland in the nineteenth century, was published posthumously in
 1896.

EPILOGUE

1. From Borges para millones, an interview held at the National

Library in 1979.

AFTERWORD

1. Fernando Sorrentino, Siete conversaciones con Jorge Luis Borges

[Seven Conversations with Borges], (Editorial El Ateneo, 1996) p.
205.
2. Borges taught English literature while his assistant, Jaime Rest, was
responsible for North American literature.
3. Jorge Luis Borges, Autobiografía 1899–1970, (Buenos Aires, El
Ateneo, 1999).
4. Guillermo Gasió, Borges en Japón, Japón en Borges, (Buenos
Aires, Eudeba, 1988) p. 68.
5. Sorrentino, Siete conversaciones, p. 314.

BORGES IN CLASS

1. From “Una oración” [“One line”], in Elogio de la Sombra [In Praise

of Darkness], OC II, p. 392. Borges expresses a similar thought on
pages 204–205 of Enrique Pezzoni, lector de Borges [reader of
Borges]: “One of the most gratifying moments of my life was a few
months ago, when someone I didn’t know at all stopped me in the
street and said, ‘I want to thank you, Borges.’ ‘Why?’ I asked him.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you introduced me to Robert Louis Stevenson.’ I
told him, ‘At this moment I feel justified because of this encounter
with you.’ It is unusual for one to feel justified; I, most of the time,
feel unjustifiable, but at that moment, no; I felt justified: I have done
 good deeds, I have given someone a gift of this greatness that is
Stevenson; may everything else be forgotten.”
2. “Borges visita a Pezzoni,” Class 16. In Enrique Pezzoni (Buenos
Aires, Sudamaericana), p. 204.
3. For the sake of rigor, it must be noted that West-Saxon, the Old
English dialect—which became the literary standard of its time, and
is thus the one most commonly studied—is not the direct ancestor of
modern Standard English. Modern English is mostly derived from an
Anglican dialect.
4. From the preface to A Brief Anglo-Saxon Anthology, OCC, p. 787.
5. From “La cegura” [“On Blindness”], Siete Noches [Seven Nights],
OCC III, p. 280.
6. This may lead us to forgive Borges’s inclusion of historically
inaccurate horned protrusions on the Viking helmets as a
moviemaking license!
7. “As we read through the pages of Heimskringla we feel that even if
the historical characters did not really say those things, they should
have, and with the same economy of words.” (From Borges’s
prologue to his translation of the first part of Snorri Sturluson’s
Younger or Prose Edda, The Deluding of Gylfi.
INDEX

A
Aeneid, the, 8, 23, 40, 85, 104, 140, 234
Akutagawa Rynosuke, 173
Alfred the Great (king of Wessex), 64
Almafuerte, 153, 157
American Notes, 161
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, The, 4, 30, 35, 56, 64
Anglo-Saxons: bestiary of, 57–60; elegies of, 45–46, 48–53, 55;
history of, 1–3, 9, 35, 41, 56; language of, 6-7, 13, 48, 62–64;
literature of, 3–6, 36, 45–46, 48–55, 61–62; mythology of, 2; riddles
of, 60
Arabian Nights. See A Thousand and One Nights
Aristotle, 74, 103
Arthur, King, 182, 213–14
Augustine, Saint, 189

B
Bacon, Francis, 57, 135, 142
Baeza, Ricardo, 250
Barrack-Room Ballads, 111
“Battle of Brunanburh,” 30–34, 60
“Battle of Maldon, The” 35–41, 45, 60–61, 264–66
Baudelaire, Charles, 133, 218, 243
Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo, 101
Bede, Venerable, 3, 4, 41-42
Beowulf: age of, 7; “Battle of Brunanburh” and, 32; bravery and
boastfulness in, 16–17, 20–22; characters of, 9-10, 12-13, 16;
language and style of, 8–9, 15, 23; length of, 4, 8; nature and, 14–15;
 plot of, 9–11, 12–21; translation of, by Morris, 217, 234
Bergson, Henri L., 97
Berkeley, George, 124, 142, 152
Bestiary, Anglo-Saxon, 57–60
Bible, translations of, 23, 73
Biographia Literaria, 121
Blair, Hugh, 103, 106
Blake, William: character of, 137; legacy of, 146–47; life of, 137–38;
philosophy of, 138-45; Swedenborg and, 138, 141, 143–44; works
of, 138–39, 145–46
“Blessed Damozel, The,” 186, 191–202
Bloy, Léon, 148, 153
Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, 73–74, 79
Bolívar, Simón, 157
Book of Thel, 139
Boswell, James, 72, 75, 87, 90–99, 106
Brendan, Saint, 59
Brooke, Rupert, 142
Browne, Thomas, 84
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 164–65, 166, 175
Browning, Robert: life of, 164–66; obscurity of, 166; Rossetti and,
180, 183; works of, 165–79
Buchanan, Robert, 186, 187
Buddha, legend of, 79–80
Burne-Jones, Edward Coley, 182, 212
Burton, Richard, 158
Byron, Lord, 100-101, 115, 149, 194

C
Caedmon, 41–42, 123
“Caliban upon Setebos,” 173
Candide, 76, 84, 86, 140
Canterbury Tales, The, 229
Capote, Truman, 124–25
 Carlyle, John A., 156
Carlyle, Thomas: Coleridge and, 127; Johnson and, 73, 88–89, 154;
languages and, 123, 149, 150; life of, 148–51, 156–57; philosophy
of, 152–56; Shakespeare and, 230; works of, 149-53, 156-57
Cervantes, Miguel de, 95, 149, 160, 168
Cesarotti, Melchiore, 105
Chanson de Roland, 35, 39, 40, 68
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 70, 71, 133, 137, 216, 229–31, 233
Chesterton, G. K., 51, 108, 116, 158, 163, 176, 177, 178, 181, 193,
218, 243, 246, 249, 258
“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” 170, 177
“Christabel,” 120, 129–30
Churchill, Winston, 67
City of God, The, 189
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: character of, 121–22, 128; conversations of,
118, 120, 122, 127-28; Dante and, 129; dreams and, 122–23;
languages and, 123; life of, 118–21, 127–28, 133–34; Shakespeare
and, 119, 123, 124-26, 233–34; Wordsworth and, 109–10, 115–16;
works of, 110, 120, 121, 128–36
Collins, William Wilkie, 162, 175
“Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” 112
Conan Doyle, Arthur, 98
Conversations of Goethe, 95
“Coxon Fund, The,” 118
Crime and Punishment, 178
Cromwell, Oliver, 65, 151
Cynewulf, 43

D
Damien, Father, 241
Dante, 50, 54, 59, 129, 131, 137, 156, 179–81, 185, 213, 233
Darío, Rubén, 137
David Copperfield, 159, 163
Decline of the West, The, 101
 Defence of Guenevere, The, 213, 224–26
“Dejection: An Ode,” 128
“Deor’s Lament,” 52–53, 166
De Quincey, Thomas, 110, 114, 119, 120, 121, 128, 133, 146
Dickens, Charles, 159–63, 164, 190
Dictionary of the English Language, 73–75, 77
Divine Comedy,The, 50, 61, 129, 131, 156, 180–81, 233
Dobrizhoffer, Martino, 119
Doll’s House, A, 159
Don Quixote, 15, 95–96, 113, 114, 149
Doré, Gustave, 131
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 162, 178
Double, theme of, 185
Double Life, The, 241, 246
“Dream of the Rood, The,” 44, 46, 53–55

E
Earthly Paradise, The, 218, 226, 229–33, 234
Ebb-Tide, The, 250
Eckermann, Johann Peter, 95
“Eden Bower,” 202–5
Egil Skallagrímsson, 32
Eiríkr Magnússon, 216, 234
Elegies, Anglo-Saxon, 45–46, 48–53, 55
Eliot, T. S., 53, 58, 162
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 109, 127
English language, history of, 62–64, 70, 71
Euclid, 114
Evil, explanation of, 139–41

F
Fabian Society, 215
Fall of Robespierre, The, 120
 Farley, James Lewis, 66
“Fears and Scruples,” 166–67, 176
Fernández, Macedonio, 121–22
Fingal, 104–5, 107
Finnsburh Fragment, 8, 21–23, 24–27, 39
Flaubert, Gustave, 129
Four Quartets, 58
Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland,
103–4
France, Anatole, 169
“France: An Ode,” 128
Francia, José Gaspar Rodríguez de, 151, 155
Frederick the Great (king of Prussia), 155
French Revolution, The, 151, 153
Funeral rites, ancient, 10–11, 20

G
Galland, Antoine, 82
Garrick, David, 91
George, Stefan, 51
Germ, The, 182, 186
Gibbon, Edward, 99
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 95, 101, 105, 150–51, 154, 175
Gordon, Robert K., 41, 61
“Grave, The,” 61–62
Gray, Thomas, 101, 106
Groussac, Paul, 73, 126, 161
Gwynn, Stephen, 243

H
Hafiz, 43
Hamlet, 179, 230
Harald III (king of Norway), 65–67, 267
 Harold Godwinson (king of England), 65–69, 183, 267
Harris, Frank, 125
Hastings, Battle of, 64, 67–70, 266, 267
Heine, Heinrich, 68–69, 101
Henley, W. E., 240–41, 246
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 101, 107
Hernani, 101
Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, 41
History, cyclic repetition of, 189–90
History of Friedrich II of Prussia, 152, 156
History of the Kings of Norway, 56
Hoffman, E. T. A., 151
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 101
Homer, 91, 103, 105, 169, 171, 178–79
House of Life, The, 185
“How It Strikes a Contemporary,” 167–68
Hugo, Victor, 100, 101, 125–26, 138, 140, 148, 168, 218
Hume, David, 189
Hung, William Holman, 182
Huxley, Aldous, 142

I
Ibsen, Henrik, 159
Icelandic sagas, 217, 232-35
“Idiot Boy, The, ” 115
“I Have Been Here Before,” 186, 190
Iliad, the, 10, 17, 26, 85, 104, 179
In Cold Blood, 124–25
“Intimations of Immortality,” 112, 114, 128

J
James, Henry, 118, 130
John Ball’s Dream, 217–18
 Johnson, Samuel: appearance of, 72, 256; Boswell and, 90–91, 93–98,
106; Carlyle and, 73, 88–89, 154; character of, 86–87, 88–89;
concept of literature held by, 77–78; conversations of, 95, 98, 106,
122; life of, 72–76, 88–90; Macpherson and, 106; works of, 72–73,
75–86, 94
Jordanes, 20
“Judith,” 55
Juvenal, 73

K
Kafka, Franz, 176
Kant, Immanuel, 121, 123–24, 152
“Karshish,” 168–69
Keats, John, 100
Kennings, 5–6
Kierkegaard, Søren, 85–86
King Lear, 125
Kipling, Lockwood, 214–15
Kipling, Rudyard, 18, 50, 90, 111, 243
Krutch, Joseph Wood, 98
“Kubla Khan,” 120, 133–36

L
Lamb, Charles, 119, 127–28
Lang, Andrew, 162, 207, 213, 217-18
Langland, William, 50, 70
Leaves of Grass, 107, 111, 138, 158
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 84–85, 140
Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, The, 151
Life and Death of Jason, The, 233–34
Life of Samuel Johnson, The, 95-96
Lobo, Jerónimo, 72, 77
“London,” 73, 75
 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 61-62
Long Ships, The, 40–41
“Love Among the Ruins,” 173
Lowes, John Livingston, 133
Lugones, Leopoldo, 43, 63, 93, 239
Lyrical Ballads, 110, 133

M
Macaulay, Thomas, 87, 91–92, 150, 242
Macbeth, 178, 230
Macpherson, James, 101–7
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 134
Man and Superman, 146
“Manitoba Childe Roland,” 170
Man Who Was Thursday, The, 246
“Markheim,” 246–48
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The, 145–46
Martin Chuzzlewit, 162, 163
Maugham, Somerset, 64
“Memorabilia,” 171–72
Meredith, George, 166
Mill, John Stuart, 151
Milton, John, 59, 71, 90, 94, 109, 137, 138, 236, 242
Miralla, José Antonio, 101
“Mr. Sludge, the Medium,” 170–71
Moonstone, The, 162
Moore, George, 123
Morris, William: appearance of, 215–16; Chaucer and, 216, 229–31,
233; life of, 212–13, 214–17; Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and, 182;
Rossetti and, 212, 217; Shaw and, 216; socialism and, 215, 217–18;
translations by, 234–35; works of, 213, 217–34, 236–38
Morte d’Arthur, Le, 182
“My Last Duchess,” 167
Mystery of Edwin Drood, The, 162–63
N
Napoleon Bonaparte, 105–6, 115, 155
Nelson, Horatio, 133
Nervo, Amado, 124
New Arabian Nights, 240, 244–46
News from Nowhere, 218
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 63, 95, 145, 156, 189
Nordau, Max, 193, 198
“Nuptial Sleep,” 187–88

O
Odyssey, the, 10, 11, 59, 104, 234
Oliver Twist, 162
Orlando, 231
Osbourne, Fanny, 240
Ossian, invention of, 104–5
Othón, Manuel José, 172
Ovid, 229

P
Palgrave, Francis, 23
Paoli, Pasquale di, 90, 94
Paradise Lost, 59, 71, 138, 236
Percy, Thomas, 107
Perfumed Garden, The, 158
Pickwick Papers, The, 160, 163
Pipa de Kif, La, 166
Plato, 92, 142, 189
Pliny the Elder, 59–60
Poe, Edgar Allan, 43
Pope, Alexander, 73, 94, 104, 137, 234
Portrait of Dorian Gray, The, 248, 250
Pound, Ezra, 46, 51, 116
 Prelude, The, 112–13
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the, 182–83, 184, 212
Priestley, John Boynton, 188–89, 190
Purchas, Samuel, 133
Pythagoras, 189, 190

Q
Quevedo, Francisco de, 148

R
“Rabbi Ben Ezra,” 176–77
Raphael, 182
Rashomon, 173–74
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, 76, 77–86
Read, Herbert, 28
Reading, as form of happiness, 253
Reliques of Ancient Poetry, 106
“Requiem,” 250–51
Reyes, Alfonso, 62, 81, 172
Reynolds, Joshua, 95, 143
Richter, Johann Paul, 150
Riddles, 60
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 114
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The,” 120, 121, 130–33, 135, 186
Ring and the Book, The, 165, 173–76, 178, 179
Romantic movement, 100–101, 106–7, 137, 142
Ronsard, Pierre de, 43
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel: Browning and, 180, 183; drawings and
paintings of, 181–82, 184–86; evaluation of, 181–82, 193; life of,
180–81, 184–87, 212; Morris and, 212, 217
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 90, 94
“Ruin, The,” 46, 51–52, 173
Runic letters, 43–45
 Ruskin, John, 184

S
Saga of the Volsung, 236
“Sailing of the Sword, The,” 226–28
Sandburg, Carl August, 111, 170
Sartor Resartus, 88, 149, 151, 152–53, 156, 157
Saurat, Denise, 138
Schelling, Friedrich W. J. von, 121, 152
Schiller, Friedrich von, 121, 150
“Schlachtfeld bei Hastings,” 68–69
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 97
Scotus Eriugena, Johannes, 104, 124, 180
“Seafarer, The,” 45–46, 49–50, 55
Shakespeare, William: Browning and, 168, 173, 179; Carlyle and, 230;
Coleridge and, 119, 123, 124, 125–26, 233–34; cult of, 123, 125–26,
154; English history and, 230; Johnson and, 75–76, 77, 88, 98;
Rossetti and, 183; Shaw and, 92; Woolf and, 231
Shaw, George Bernard, x392">91, 92–93, 124, 125, 146, 215, 216
Shelley, Percy B., 171–72
Sidney, Philip, 74
Sigurd the Volsung, 217, 218, 226, 236–38
Snorri Sturluson, 56, 66, 152
Song of the Nibelungs, 236
Songs of Experience, 139
Songs of Innocence, 139
Sonnets from Portuguese, 165
Sorrows of Young Werther, The, 105
Southey, Robert, 119, 120, 133
Spengler, Oswald, 101
Spinoza, Baruch, 97, 124, 125
Stamford Bridge, Battle of, 65–67, 266
Stephen, Leslie, 177
Stevenson, Robert Louis: appearance of, 243; life of, 238–43; works
 of, 185, 238–40, 243–51
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The, 239, 241, 248–50
Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 137, 138, 141, 143–44, 171
Swift, Jonathan, 140
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 50, 86, 148, 182, 184, 212

T
Table Talk, 122
Tacitus, 2, 78, 105
Taillefer, 68
“Tale of Paraguay, A,” 119
Tale of Two Cities, A, 159
Tennyson, Alfred, 30, 33, 60, 128, 166, 214
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 160–61, 182
Thousand and One Nights, A, (Arabian Nights), 82, 160, 229–30, 232,
237, 240, 244
Thus Spake Zarathustra, 63
“Ticonderoga,” 185
“Time, Real and Imaginary,” 128
“To a Highland Girl,” 114–15
Tostig Godwinson, 65–67, 267
Toynbee, Arnold, 99
Treasure Island, 239, 240
“Troy Town,” 186, 205–11
“Tune of Seven Towers, The,” 224–26
“Tyger, The,” 139

U
Unamuno, Miguel de, 95, 108, 116, 153, 161, 201

V
Valéry, Paul, 94
 Valle Inclán, Ramón María del, 166
Vallon, Annette, 108, 109
“Vanity of Human Wishes, The,” 73
Vikings, 27–30, 35–41, 55, 63
Vita Nuova, La, 185
Voices of the People, 107
Voltaire, 76, 84, 86, 90, 94, 140
Voyage to Abyssinia, A, 72, 77

W
Wagner, Richard, 26, 133, 217
“Wanderer, The” 51
Ward, Maisie, 177
Watchman, The, 120
Webster, Noah, 75
Welsh, Jane, 149, 156
“Whale, The,” 58–59
Whitehead, Alfred North, 135
Whitman, Walt, 43, 45, 107, 111, 138, 148, 158
Wilde, Eduardo, 61
Wilde, Oscar, 166, 250
William the Conqueror, 64, 68, 69, 155
Woman in White, The, 162
Woolf, Virginia, 124, 177, 231
Wordsworth, William: Coleridge and, 109–10, 115–16; legacy of, 101,
116, 118; life of, 108–9, 119; theory of poetry held by, 110–12, 115–
16, 182; works of, 104, 110, 112–15, 143
Wrecker, The, 239, 240, 246

Z
Zola, Emile, 100
ALSO BY JORGE LUIS BORGES

Available from New Directions

Everything & Nothing

Labyrinths

Seven Nights
 Copyright © 2000 by María Kodama
Copyright © 2000 by Martín Arias and Martín Hadis
Copyright © 2000 by Grupo Editorial SAIC
Copyright © 2013 by Katherine Silver

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper,

magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be
reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

This work was published with the generous support of “Sur” Translation
Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship of the
Argentina Republic. Obra editada en el marco del Programma “Sur” de
Apoya a las Traducciones del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de
la República Argentina.

PUBLISHERS NOTE: Martín Hadis offered valuable factual corrections

to the English translation. Please visit www.martinhadis.com for a
bibliography and additional supplementary material.

The Publisher wishes to thank Eliot Weinberger for his assistance in

publishing this edition.

Book design by Sylvia Frezzolini Severance

First published as a New Directions Book in 2013.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899–1986.

[Borges profesor. English]
Professor Borges : a course on English literature / Jorge Luis Borges
; edited, with an introduction and afterwords, by Martín Arias and
Martín Hadis ; translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver.
 pages cm
Includes index.
A compilation of the twenty-five lectures Borges gave in 1966 at
the
University of Buenos Aires, where he taught English literature.
eISBN 978-0-8112-2117-7
1. English literature—Study and teaching (Higher)—Argentina—
Buenos Aires. 2. Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899-1986—Knowledge—
Literature. 3. English literature—History and criticism. 4. Universidad
de Buenos Aires. 5. Borges, Jorge Luis, 189–1986—Translations into
English. I. Arias, Martín, 1970– editor. II. Hadis, Martín, 1971– editor.
III. Silver, Katherine, translator. IV. Title. V. Title: Course on English
literature.
PR51.A7B6713 2013
820.9—dc23
2012050163

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011