Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

rivers.” There he was buried, on a mountaintop, looking over the Pacific Ocean.
20. The letter is titled “Father Damien: An open letter to the Reverend Dr. Hyde of Honolulu,” written in Sydney on February 25, 1890. A few of the paragraphs are as follows: “You may ask on what authority I speak. It was my inclement destiny to become acquainted, not with Damien, but with Dr. Hyde. When I visited the lazaretto, Damien was already in his resting grave. But such information as I have, I gathered on the spot in conversation with those who knew him well and long: some indeed who revered his memory; but others who had sparred and wrangled with him, who beheld him with no halo, who perhaps regarded him with small respect, and through whose unprepared and scarcely partial communications the plain, human features of the man shone on me convincingly. These gave me what knowledge I possess; ... we will (if you please) go hand-in-hand through the different phrases of your letter, and candidly examine each from the point of view of its truth, its appositeness, and its charity.
Damien was
coarse
.
It is very possible. You make us sorry for the lepers, who had only a coarse old peasant for their friend and father. But you, who were so refined, why were you not there, to cheer them with the lights of culture?...
Damien was
dirty.
He was. Think of the poor lepers annoyed with this dirty comrade! But the clean Dr. Hyde was at his food in a fine house.
Damien was
headstrong.
I believe you are right again; and I thank God for his strong head and heart.”
21. The essay was included in the book
Across the Plains: With Other Memories and Essays
, 1892.
22. The essay Borges remembers is titled, “On some technical elements of style in literature,” and it is the first in Stevenson’s book
Essays in the Art of Writing.
23. This is the first stanza of Sonnet X by Garcilaso de la Vega, a sixteenth-century Spanish soldier and poet.
24. G. K. Chesterton,
Robert Louis Stevenson
, (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1927).
25. Stephen Lucius Gwynn (1864–1950), Irish poet, writer, and critic born in Dublin. Among his principal works are
Masters of English Literature
(1904), and his studies of Tennyson, Thomas Moore, Sir Walter Scott, Horace Walpole, Mary Kingsley, Swift, and Goldsmith. His
Collected Poems
appeared in 1923. His autobiography, titled
Experiences of a Literary Man
, was published in 1926. Stevenson’s biography written by Stephen Gwynn is volume X of this collection.
    CLASS 25

1. Published in 1882. This book of Stevenson’s was published as volume 53 in the collection
Biblioteca personal
, translated by R. Durán, under the title
Las nuevas noches árabes.
2. Published in 1908.
3. See Class 24, note 19.
4. Published first in
The Broken Shaft: Tales of Mid-Ocean
, in Unwin’s Christmas Annual, ed. Sir Henry Norman (London: Fisher-Unwin, 1885). Also included in
The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables
(1887). It is also included in volume 53 of
Biblioteca personal.
5.
The Portrait of Dorian Gray
was published in 1890.
6.
The Ebb-Tide
is by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, 1894. Ricardo Baeza (1890–1956) was born in Cuba but lived most of his life in Spain. He was a highly esteemed journalist and translator.
7. Borges is talking about
Weir of Hermiston
. Stevenson wrote the last sentences of it the day he died. The novel, which takes place in Scotland in the nineteenth century, was published posthumously in 1896.
    EPILOGUE

1. From
Borges para millones
, an interview held at the National Library in 1979.
    AFTERWORD

1. Fernando Sorrentino,
Siete conversaciones con Jorge Luis Borges
[
Seven Conversations with Borges
], (Editorial El Ateneo, 1996) p. 205.
2. Borges taught English literature while his assistant, Jaime Rest, was responsible for North American literature.
3. Jorge Luis Borges,
Autobiografía 1899–1970
, (Buenos Aires, El Ateneo, 1999).
4. Guillermo Gasió,
Borges en Japón, Japón en Borges
, (Buenos Aires, Eudeba, 1988) p. 68.
5. Sorrentino,
Siete conversaciones
, p. 314.
    BORGES IN CLASS

1. From “Una oración” [“One line”], in
Elogio de la Sombra
[
In Praise of Darkness
], OC II, p. 392. Borges expresses a similar thought on pages 204–205 of Enrique Pezzoni,
lector de Borges
[reader of Borges]: “One of the most gratifying moments of my life was a few months ago, when someone I didn’t know at all stopped me in the street and said, ‘I want to thank you, Borges.’ ‘Why?’ I asked