Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

feather—and he has forgotten everything else. This is what happens in life. He has forgotten, but he does remember his encounter with Shelley. 7
    This year, I met AlfonsoReyes. 8 He spoke to me about the great Mexican poetOthón, and he said to me, “What? You know Othón?” 9 And then Reyes immediately remembered Browning’s poem and repeated the first stanza:
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!
    And then, at the end:
A moulted feather, an eagle-feather—
Well, I forget the rest.
    And there is another poem about a man who is dying, and a minister comes, a Protestant minister, who tells him that the world is a vale of tears. 10 And the man says to him: “Do I see the world as a valley of tears? No, reverend Sir, not I,” “
¿Veo yo acaso el mundo como un valle de lágrimas? No, reverendo señor, no yo
.” And then he, who is disfigured and dying, tells the minister that what he remembers of the world has nothing to do with a vale of tears. That what he remembers is a house, a country house where there lived a woman, probably a servant with whom he had a love affair. And to describe the topography of the house, he makes use of the medicine bottles on his bedside table. And he says, “That curtain there is green or blue for a healthy person, but it reminds
me
of the blinds of the house, how they were, and the lane along the side, because I, scurrying along it, could reach a door, and there she would be, waiting for me.” “I know,” he says, “that all this is improper,” “that it is all indecent, but I am dying.” 11 And then he says that he remembers these illicit loves with the servant. That is the only thing he remembers, the only thing life has left him at those final moments, and what he remembers at the end, without any remorse.
    There’s another poem whose protagonist is Caliban. 12 Browning had read a book about the sources Shakespeare used, about the Patagonian gods—a god named Setebos. And Browning uses this information about the religion of the Patagonian Indians as the basis for his poem titled“Caliban upon Setebos.”
    There’s another poem,“Love Among the Ruins,” and this takes place in the countryside of Rome. 13 There is a man—we can assume a shepherd—who speaks about the ruins and describes the splendor of a city that once existed there. He speaks of the kings, of the thousands of horsemen, the palaces, the banquets, a subject similar to the Anglo-Saxon elegy called “TheRuin.” And then he says that he often met a girl there, and that this girl would wait for him, and that he would see the love in her eye before he approached and embraced her. He ends by saying that of everything in the world, love is best, love is enough for him, what does he care about kings and empires that have disappeared? Because Browning has—and I have not spoken enough about this—many poems about love, physical love as well. And it is this theme of love that is the subject of the book we will discuss today, before we speak about Dante Gabriel Rossetti—who founded the group the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and that comes after Browning’s time. But Browning’s major work, a book written with a very strange technique, is
The Ring and the Book
.
    I don’t know if any of you have seen the admirable Japanese film that came out many years ago called
Rashomon
. 14 Akutagawa, who wrote the story on which the film was based, was Browning’s first Japanese translator. 15 The technique used in the story (and in the film) is taken from Browning’s
The Ring and the Book
.
The Ring and the Book
is much more complex than the film. Which is understandable, because a book can be much more complex than a film. In the film, we have the story of a samurai who goes through the jungle with his wife. They are attacked by a bandit. The bandit kills the woman, and then we have three different versions of the same event. One is told by the samurai, the other by the bandit, and the other by the spirit of the woman through the mouth of a witch. And the three stories are different. They do, however, all refer to the same event. Now, Browning attempted something similar, but much more difficult, because Browning was interested in seeking the truth. Let’s begin with the title of the book:
The Ring and the Book
. This can be explained in the following way: Browning begins by saying that to make a ring—and the