Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

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