Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

“born in Erin, Ireland.” 9 It is as if his name were “Irish Irish.”) Now, what Macpherson did was collect some fragments that belonged to various cycles. But what he needed, what he wanted for his beloved Scottish homeland, was a poem, so he put those fragments together. Naturally, gaps had to be filled in, and he filled them with verses of his own invention—later we’ll see why I call them verses. Also, we must be warned that the concept of translation that dominates now is not the same as that which dominated in the eighteenth century. For example, the
Iliad
ofPope, which is considered consummate, is what we would call today a very free version.
    So, Macpherson publishes his book in Edinburgh, and he could have done a rhymed version, but fortunately he chose a rhythmic form based on the verses of the Bible, especially the Psalms. (There is a Spanish translation of
Fingal
published in Barcelona.) Macpherson attributes
Fingal
to Ossian, son of Fingal. Macpherson presents Ossian as an old blind poet who sings in the crumbling castle of his father. And here we already have the sense of time so typical of the romantics. Because in the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, and even in the
Aeneid
, which is an artificial epic, one feels time but does not feel that those things happened a very long time ago, and this is precisely what is typical of the romantic movement. There is a poem byWordsworth that I would like to mention here. He hears a Scottish girl singing—we’ll come back to these lines later—and he wonders what she is singing about and says, “She is singing about old misfortunes, and battles that took place long ago.” Spengler says that in the eighteenth century, they built artificial ruins, those ruins we can still see along the edges of lakes. 10 And we could say that one of these artificial ruins is
Fingal
, by Macpherson, attributed to Ossian.
    As Macpherson did not want the characters to be Irish, he made Fingal, Ossian’s father, king of Morgen, which would be on the northwestern coast of Scotland. Fingal knows that Ireland has been invaded by the Danes. So he goes to help the Irish, defeats the Danes, and returns. If we read the poem now, we would find many phrases that belong to the poetic dialect of the eighteenth century. But these phrases, of course, would not have been noticed at the time; and what was noticed were what we would today call “romantic phrases.” For example, there is a sentiment for nature, there’s a part of the poem that talks about the blue mists of Scotland, about the mountains, the forests, the afternoons, the dusk. The battles are not described in great detail: grand metaphors are used, in the romantic style. If two armies clash in battle, the poem talks about two great rivers, two great waterfalls whose waters mix. And then we have a scene as follows: the king enters an assembly. He has decided to battle the Danes the following day. Before he says a word, the others understand the decision he has made, and the text says, “They saw the battle in his eyes, the death of thousands in his spear.” And then the king goes from Scotland to Ireland “high in the prow of his boat.” And fire is called “the red thread of the anvil,” perhaps with distant echoes of kennings.
    Now, this poem captured the European imagination. It had hundreds of admirers. But I am going to mention two quite unexpected ones. One wasGoethe. If you do not find a version of
Fingal
by Macpherson, you can find in that exemplary romantic novel called
The Sorrows of YoungWerther
the translation of two or three pages, translated literally from English to German by Goethe. Werther, the protagonist of this novel, says, “Ossian”—of course he wouldn’t say Macpherson—“has displacedHomer in my heart.” (There is a word inTacitus, one word—I don’t remember which, at this moment—that he uses to refer to German military songs, and at that time, the Germans were confused with the Celts, their enemies.) 11 All Europeans felt they were heirs to this poem—all of Europe, not only Scotland. Ossian’s other unexpected admirer was NapoleonBonaparte. An erudite Italian, the
abate
Cesarotti, had rendered into Italian Macpherson’s Ossian. 12 And we know that Napoleon carried a copy of this book with him on all his campaigns from the south of France to Russia. In Napoleon’s harangues to his soldiers, which preceded the victories at Jena and Austerlitz, and the final defeat at Waterloo, echoes