Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

himself, but about a pair of lovers who meet (with themselves) at twilight in a forest, and one of the lovers is Rossetti and the other is his wife. Now, we will never know why Rossetti painted this painting. He might have thought that by painting it, he was dispelling the possibility of it happening, and we can also conjecture—though there is no letter by Rossetti that verifies this—that Rossetti and his wife did meet themselves in Fontainebleau, or in some other place in France. The Hebrews also had this superstition, about meeting one’s double. But for them, the fact that a man meets himself does not mean that death is approaching, but rather than he has arrived at a prophetic state. There is a Talmudic legend about three men who go in search of God. One became insane, the other died, and the third met himself. But let us return to Rossetti.
    Rossetti returns home and finds [his wife] poisoned, and suspects or understands what has happened. When Rossetti discovers that she has died from an overdose of chloral, he assumes she took too much; he accepts this—Rossetti accepts it—but feels deeply guilty. She is buried the next day, and Rossetti takes advantage of a moment of inattention by his friends to place on the dead woman’s chest a notebook manuscript, a notebook of the sonnets that would later be collected under the title
TheHouse of Life
. Surely, Rossetti thought this was a way he could carry out an act of expiation. Rossetti thought that because he was in some way guilty of her death, was his wife’s murderer, he could do nothing better than sacrifice his work to her. Rossetti had already published one book—you will find its contents in the edition of Rossetti’s poems and translations in Everyman’s Library—a translation of
La Vita Nuova
byDante. 16 It is a literal translation, except that it is written in archaic English. Moreover, as you know,
La Vita Nuova
by Dante includes many sonnets, and those sonnets were admirably translated into English by Rossetti together with poems by Cavalcanti and other contemporary poets. Rossetti had published some versions of the poems that would make him famous in the magazine
The Germ
—poems he later corrected heavily—for example,“The Blessed Damozel,” “I Have Been Here Before,” and, I believe, the strange ballad “Troy Town,” and others. 17 When I spoke about Coleridge, I said that in his first version of “The AncientMariner,” he used an English that was deliberately and purely archaic, and that in the versions we now study, he modernized the language, made it more accessible and plain. The same thing happens with the ballad “The Blessed Damozel.”
    Rossetti, after the death of his wife, broke off his
liaison
with “the elephant” and lived alone. He bought a kind of country estate on the outskirts of London and there he devoted himself to poetry, and especially to painting. He saw very few people. He, who had so liked conversation, above all conversations in the pubs of London. And there he lived retired, alone, until the year of his death in 1882. He saw very few people. Among them was an agent of his who took charge of selling his paintings, for which Rossetti asked very high prices, not so much out of greed but rather out of a kind of disdain, as if to say, “If people are interested in my paintings, they should pay well for them, and if they don’t buy them, I don’t care.” Before, he had had an argument with a Scottish critic,Buchanan, who had been scandalized by the frankness, we could call it, of some of Rossetti’s poems. 18
    Three or four years after the death of his wife, Rossetti’s friends gathered to talk to him: they told him that he had made a useless sacrifice, and that his wife herself could not have been pleased by the fact that he had deliberately renounced the fame, perhaps the glory, that the publication of that manuscript would have brought him. So Rossetti, who had kept no copy of these poems, relented. And he took some rather disagreeable steps; he obtained permission to exhume the manuscript that he had placed on his wife’s chest. Naturally, Rossetti was not present at that scene worthy of Poe. Rossetti stayed in a pub and got drunk. In the meantime, his friends exhumed the body and managed—it was not easy because the hands were stiff and crossed—but they managed to rescue the manuscript. And the manuscript had white patches from the putrefaction of the body, from death, and this manuscript