Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

ancient Japan—demonstrate an unusual capacity for reinterpretation and the incorporation of perspectives and techniques from Western literature. Two of his works,
Rashomon
, of 1915, and
Yabu no naka
, of 1921, were the inspiration for the
film Rashomon
by Akira Kurosawa.
16. Volume 503 of Everyman’s Library, with an introduction by Charles E. Hodell (1917).
17. Another movie that uses this same mechanism in an ingenious way is
The Killing
(1956), directed by Stanley Kubrick.
18. In English,
Elective Affinities
, published in 1809.
19. In his essay “Kafka and his Precursors.”
20. From
Dramatis Personae
(1864).
21. Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra (1092–1167), Spanish rabbi, philosopher, and poet born in Toledo. His great erudition covered medicine, linguistics, and astronomy; his Biblical exegeses represented an important contribution to the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry. He was also knowledgeable in astrology and numerology. He was called “
el Sabio
” “the Wise,” as well as “The Great,” and “The Admirable Doctor.” He traveled around Europe and the Middle East. He visited London, Rome, Narbonne, Mantua, and Verona, as well as Egypt and Palestine.
22. The first stanza of the poem: “Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be, / The last of life, for which the first was made: / Our times are in His hand / Who saith ‘A whole I planned, / Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!’”
23. Borges is referring to
Browning Cyclopaedia
by Edward Berdoe, first published in 1891 in London by Swan, Sonnenschein and Co.
24. In an article about the poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” Berdoe asserts that this constitutes a true plea against the cruelty of science, which forces students to torture its animal victims, the only goal being to achieve the “dark tower of Knowledge, which to them has neither door nor window.” According to Berdoe, when Browning wrote this poem, he could not have created “a more faithful picture of the spiritual ruin and desolation which await the student of medicine who sets forth on the fatal course of an experimental torturer.” Berdoe goes on to say, “I have good authority for saying that had Mr. Browning seen this interpretation of his poem, he would have cordially accepted it as at least one legitimate explanation.” (104–05). Browning himself always refused to explain the meaning of those lines, merely affirming that the poem was inspired by a dream.
25. G. K. Chesterton, Robert Browning, in the
English Men of letters
(London: Macmillan & Co, 1911).
26. Maisie Ward,
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
(Sheed & Ward: New York, 1943).
27. “On my advice the Macmillans had asked him to do Browning in the ‘English Men of Letters,’ when he was still not quite arrived. Old Mr. Craik, the Senior Partner, sent for me and I found him in white fury, with Chesterton’s proofs corrected in pencil; or rather not corrected; there were still thirteen errors uncorrected on one page; mostly in quotations from Browning. A selection from a Scotch ballad had been quoted from memory and three of the four lines were wrong. I wrote to Chesterton saying that the firm thought the book was going to ‘disgrace’ them. His reply was like the trumpeting of a crushed elephant. But the book was a huge success.” Stephen Gwynn quoted by Cyril Stevens in Ward,
Chesterton
, 145.
    CLASS 20

1. Gabriele Giuseppe Rossetti (1783–1854), Italian poet and scholar.
2. Gabriele Giuseppe Rossetti’s edition of
The Divine Comedy
was published in two volumes, in 1826 and 1827 respectively.
3. See Class 14, note 6.
4. See Class 14, note 5.
5. Rossetti’s mother, Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, was the sister of Dr. John William Polidori (1795–1821), who was Lord Byron’s doctor when he first went into exile in 1816. At the end of the summer of that year, Byron and Polidori became enemies. Three years later, in 1819, there appeared in
New Monthly
magazine a story titled “The Vampyre.” This story was at first attributed to Lord Byron, but the following month Polidori wrote a letter to the magazine in which he confessed his own authorship and asserted that he wrote it based on another story originally written by Lord Byron. Byron, enraged, denied any relationship to the story, asserting, “I have a personal dislike to Vampires, and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to reveal their secrets.” Many critics have pointed out that the main