Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

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