Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

character in the story, the vampire Lord Ruthven, seems to be inspired by Lord Byron himself, and may be the result of Polidori’s antipathy to the person who had been his friend and patient.
6. William Holman Hung (1827–1910), British painter.
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833–98), painter and designer born in Birmingham, England.
7. Borges uses the term “
Rey Artús
” in Spanish, a variant of the name of King Arthur.
8.
La morte d’Arthur
, whose original title was
The Book of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table
, was written by Sir Thomas Malory between 1469 and 1470, and published by William Caxton in 1485.
9.
Lunfardo
is the dialect originating in the late nineteenth century and spoken by the lower classes of Buenos Aires.
10. Rossetti wrote a poem about insomnia titled “Insomnia.” The line Borges quotes belongs to the last line of a poem called “A Superscription.”
11. Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (1829–62). Rossetti met Elizabeth in 1850, but they did not marry until 1860. Elizabeth was a model for many of Rossetti’s paintings and for many other pre-Raphaelite painters.
12. Chloral is the oldest sleeping draught known to man. Because of its unpleasant taste it was often diluted in orange juice or with ginger. All other sources we consulted agree that the substance taken by Elizabeth Siddal was not chloral but laudanum, a pharmaceutical substance derived from opium.
13. There is a famous poem by Heinrich Heine, “Der Doppelgänger,” put to music by Franz Schubert in 1828 as part of the posthumous
Lieder, Schwanengesang D.957
.
14. Borges mentions the “fetch” in his analysis of the “double” in his
Book of Imaginary Beings
, OCC, 616.
15. A long poem found in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Ballads (1890). Borges does not mention this poem again in any of the classes he dedicates to Stevenson.
16. Rossetti’s
Poems and Translations
, with an introduction by E. G. Gardner, volume 626 of Everyman’s Library.
17. The title of the poem is not “I Have Been Here Before,” but “Sudden Light.” Borges is quoting the first line.
18. Buchanan’s article appeared in
The Contemporary Review
in October 1871.
19. The text of the sonnet is as follows:
“At length their long kiss severed, with sweet smart:
And as the last slow sudden drops are shed
From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,
So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.
Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start
Of married flowers to either side outspread
From the knit stem; yet still their mouths, burnt red,
Fawned on each other where they lay apart.
Sleep sank them lower than the tide of dreams,
And their dreams watched them sink, and slid away.
Slowly their souls swam up again, through gleams Of watered light and dull drowned waifs of day;
Till from some wonder of new woods and streams
He woke, and wondered more: for there she lay.”
20. The poem is titled “Inclusiveness” and reads slightly differently than Borges quotes:
“The changing guests, each in a different mood,
Sit at the roadside table and arise:
And every life among them in likewise
Is a soul’s board set daily with new food.
What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?—
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
May not this ancient room thou sitt’st in dwell
In separate living souls for joy or pain?
Nay, all its corners may be painted plain
Where Heaven shows pictures of some life spent well,
And may be stamped, a memory all in vain,
Upon the sight of lidless eyes in Hell.”
21. John Boynton Priestley (1894–1984). The works Borges mentions are
I Have Been Here Before
(1937),
Time and the Conways
(1937), and
An Inspector Calls
(1946).
22. The title is “Sudden Light.”
    CLASS 21

1. Borges recounts this legend in detail in his
Book of Imaginary Beings
, OCC, 599.
2. Max Simon Nordau, Hungarian writer and doctor of Jewish origin, born in Pest, Hungary, in 1849 and died in Paris in 1923. His most famous work is
Die Konventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit
, [
The Conventional Lies of our Civilization
] (1883).
The German title of
Degeneration
is
Entartung.
3. From here, a student reads the poem and Borges comments on it stanza by stanza. The readings in English were omitted from the original transcript, but have been reinserted here to allow for a better appreciation of Borges’s comments and translations.
4. Lord