Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

apparent, the eyes. 12 Then we have a slave who awaits a centaur. And in the same way thatDante 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, asColeridge 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, EiríkrMagnússon, 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 ofMorris’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