Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

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