Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

their authors. And then we have others that take up themes of common German mythology or legend, and we have looked at the most important of these, I believe, the epic texts:
Beowulf
, the Finnsburh Fragment, and“The Battle of Brunanburh,” splendidly translated byTennyson—you will find that exemplary translation of “The Battle of Brunanburh” in any edition of Tennyson’s works—and the“Battle of Maldon,” of which I have yet to find an exemplary translation, but you will find it translated literally in [Robert K.]Gordon’s
Anglo-Saxon Poetry
. 11
    And then there is a very sad poem, a poem written after the Norman Conquest and admirably translated by the American poetLongfellow, who also translated Manrique’s
Coplas
from Spanish,
The Divine Comedy
from Italian, and then translated many cantos of the Norsemen and the Provençal troubadours. 12 He translated the German romantic poets, as well as German ballads. He was a man of vast learning, and during the years of the American Civil War, in order to distract himself from the war—the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century—he translated in its entirety
The Divine Comedy
, as I said, into hendecasyllables, blank verse, without rhymes. Now, the poem“The Grave” is a very strange poem. 13 It is thought to have been written during the eleventh or at the beginning of the twelfth century, that is, in the middle of the Middle Ages, in a Christian era. However, in this poem, “The Grave,” there is no mention of the hope for heaven or the fear of hell. It is as if the poet believed only in physical death, in the decay of the body, and imagined, moreover—like in the story by ourEduardo Wilde, “
La primera noche de cementerio
” [“The First Night in the Graveyard”]—that the dead are conscious of this decay. 14 And the poem begins: “For you a house was built before you were born”—that is, for each of us there is already a place in the earth for us to be buried—“To you dust was given before you came out of your mother.” “
–e wes molde imynt, er ðu of moder come.
” You can see that at the end there, it is very similar to English, the English shines through. Then it says, “Dark is that house” … Forgive me, “Doorless is that house, and dark it is within,” and in that late Old English, which is already foreshadowing, prefiguring English, it says “
Dureleas is þet hus and dearc hit is wiðinnen
.” Already with this Anglo-Saxon, we are approaching English, even though there are no words of Latin origin. Then the house is described. It says that house does not have a very high roof, that the roof is built touching the chest, that it is very low, “that there you will be very alone,” it says, “you will leave behind your friends, no friend will come down and ask you if you like that house.” Then it says, “the house is locked and death has the key.” Then there are more verses—four additional verses written by a different hand than the one that wrote the others, for the tone is different. Because it says: “No hand will stroke your hair,” and that expresses a tenderness that seems to be an afterthought, because the whole poem is very sad, very harsh. The whole poem becomes a single metaphor: the metaphor of the grave as man’s last abode. But this poem was written with so much intensity that it is one of the great poems of English poetry. And Longfellow’s translation, which is usually included after it, is not only literal, but sometimes the poet follows the precise order, the same order as the Anglo-Saxon lines.Of all Anglo-Saxon literature, its language is the easiest, because it is closest to contemporary English.
    There are many anthologies of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and there is one published in Switzerland—I don’t remember the name of the author—that adheres to a very intelligent criterion, as follows: rather than begin with
Beowulf
or the Finnsburh Fragment, which are from the seventh or eighth century, it starts with the most recent, that is, what is closest to contemporary English. And then the anthology is retrospective, it goes backward to the Anglo-Saxon of the eighth century, after beginning with the Anglo-Saxon of the twelfth century; that is, as we proceed through the texts, they become more and more difficult, but the first ones, the ones at the beginning, help us.
    We are now going to finish up this second unit, but we should also say a few words about history. To begin, I will talk