Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

has passed, another vast empire has fallen and we have been left alone to fight the enemy.” And then the sonnet says that this circumstance must fill them with joy. “The fact that we are alone, the fact that we have nobody to depend on, that our salvation is in ourselves.” And then he wonders if the men that rule England are up to their mission, to their high destiny. He asks “if they are really deserving of this earth and its traditions,” and if they are not, he says, they are “a servile band”—at that moment he insults the government. If they are not a servile band, they are obliged to deal with “danger, which they fear,” “and with honor, which they do not understand.” . . . Then Wordsworth also wrote a play, and poems about different places in England. 10
    Now, Wordsworth always said that the language had to be simple, yet in these poems he achieves a splendor of language that he would have rejected in his youth, when he was still a fanatic for his own theory. He later writes, for example, about an antechamber in a chapel in Cambridge, where there is a bust of Newton, and he speaks of Newton, “with his prism and silent face,” with his prism that he used to develop his theory of light. Then he says: “The marble index of a mind for ever traveling through strange seas of thought.” 11 This has nothing to do with Wordsworth’s initial theories. At the beginning, Wordsworth was a kind of scandal, he wrote a poem dangerously titled “The Idiot Boy” andByron could not resist an easy quip, saying that it was an autobiographical poem.
    People began to refute his theory. Even Coleridge told him that no poetry should be presented with an accompanying theory because it puts the reader on his guard. If the reader, he says, reads a polemical preface before reading a book of poems, he might suspect that the arguments in that preface have been formulated to persuade him to like the poems, hence he will reject it. Moreover, Coleridge said, poetry should prevail on its own, the poet should not give any justification for his work. This now seems very strange because we live in an era of coteries, manifestos, publicity for the arts. However, Coleridge lived at the end of the eighteenth century, and the beginning of the nineteenth. Wordsworth had to explain to him, explain to his readers, so that they would not look for something in his poetry that wasn’t there but rather see that he had deliberately chosen simple themes, humble characters, plain language, an absence of professional poetic metaphors, etcetera. Wordsworth is now considered one of the great poets of England. I talked aboutUnamuno. 12 I know that he was one of Unamuno’s favorite poets. But then, it is very easy to find lazy pages in his work. EzraPound has done so, saying that Wordsworth was a silly old sheep. But I think a poet should be judged by his best pages.
    I don’t know if I have ever mentioned that Chesterton agreed to compile an anthology of the worst poems in the world as long as he was allowed to choose them from among the best poets. Because, Chesterton says, writing bad pages is typical of the great poets. When Shakespeare wanted to write a ridiculous page, Chesterton says, he sat down and did it without further ado, he enjoyed it. On the other hand, a mediocre poet might not have any very bad poems. He might not have them because he is conscious of his mediocrity, because he is constantly keeping watch on himself. Wordsworth, on the other hand, is conscious of his strength, and that is why there is so much ballast, so many dead zones in his work. But apart from this dream of Wordsworth’s (I don’t know why it has been excluded from the anthologies), Wordsworth’s most important works—except maybe the one in which he speaks of the tall sailboat he falls in love with—are included in anthologies of English poetry.
    The works have been translated many times, but the translation of English poetry into Spanish is, as I have discovered, difficult, very difficult. Because the English language, like Chinese, is essentially monosyllabic. So, in a verse, more verses fit in an English line than in a Spanish line. How to translate, for example, “With ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh like stars in Heaven”: “
con barcos, el mar estaba salpicado aquí y allá como las estrellas en el cielo
.” Nothing is left in the translation, and yet the line is memorable. 13
    Today I have spoken about Wordsworth. In the