Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

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 indispensableChesterton, 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