Borges and Longfellow: Fellow Amateur Anglo-Saxonists?

 

Jorge Luis Borges was well aware of the negative twentieth-century assessment of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's role in American literary history and his poetry more generally. For example, he compares Longfellow and Walt Whitman:

Two memorable books appeared in New York in the year 1855, both of an experimental nature, though very different from one another. The first, instantly famous and today relegated to textbook anthologies or the curiosity of scholars and children, was Longfellow's Hiawatha. Longfellow wanted to give the Indians who once lived in New England a prophetic and mythical epic poem in English. In quest of a meter that would not bring the ordinary ones to mind and that might seem native, he turned to the Finnish Kalevala that had been forged—or reconstructed—by Elias Lönnrott. The other book, ignored at the time and now immortal, was Leaves of Grass.
   I have written that the two were different. Their difference is undeniable. Hiawatha is the carefully thought-out work of a good poet who has explored libraries and is not devoid of imagination or ear; Leaves of Grass, the unprecedented revelation of a man of genius. The differences are so obvious that it seems incredible that the two volumes were contemporary. Yet one fact unites them: both are American epics.1

His analysis is judicious and intelligent. Where Whitman changed the face of American poetry, Longfellow was a good poet who did a lot of research.2 Elsewhere Borges implies that Longfellow used his intelligence to stretch his poetic abilities.3 These are fair conclusions. He is careful, in the intellectual surroundings of a prologue to a translation of Whitman, not to praise Longfellow overmuch. Nonetheless, it is striking that he chooses to introduce Whitman by way of the comparison to Longfellow, even given the coincidence of Hiawatha and Leaves of Grass both being published in the same year. Some affection for Longfellow and his accomplishments seems to be there, as many other writers and thinkers would not even remember the coincidence of the dates of publication.

Borges and Longfellow

Borges (1899-1986) and Longfellow did not overlap in life. However, Borges read Longfellow as a child and young man. He speaks of Longfellow freely and easily. A first example is his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, Longfellow's university (and intriguingly Charles Eliot Norton himself wrote a biographical appreciation of Longfellow with a selection of his verse). Borges casually refers to a copla by Jorge Manrique, and carelessly wonders how Longfellow translated it.4 The reference occurs in his first talk, on "The Metaphor," and comes as he is discussing metaphors of rivers:

We also have those lines by Manrique:
  Nuestras vidas son los ríos
  que van a dar en la mar
  qu'es el morir.
  [Our lives are the rivers
  that flow into that sea
  which is death.]
  This statement is not too impressive in English; I wish I could remember how Longfellow translated it in his "Coplas de Manrique."5

The careless recollection seems a bit disingenuous, as Borges rarely spoke extemporaneously without reason. In this case, given that he was delivering the second of an important series of six lectures at Harvard, so it seems even less likely that he would be extemporaneous. He would certainly have known that Longfellow was professor of languages and belles lettres there from 1836-1854. He obviously was well acquainted with Longfellow's translations, given this casual reference to how Longfellow would have translated the fifteenth-century Castilian poet Jorge Manrique, which was part of Longfellow's very first creative publication. Longfellow's translation is more elaborate than the one Borges provides:

Our lives are rivers, gliding free
To that unfathomed, boundless sea,
The silent grave!
Thither all earthly pomp and boast
Roll, to be swallowed up and lost
In one dark wave6

Longfellow had a profound engagement with medieval Spanish literature, and these were his first published translations in 1833, and texts he republished many times during his life. Borges clearly valued them highly, and knew them well. Their didactic but poetic pedagogy appealed to both men, perhaps.

Longfellow was a writer Borges had clearly known since his youth. As he notes in one interview, his father had a very fine library of English literature, and after he finished reading Huckleberry Finn and other novels by Twain, and some Edgar Allan Poe, he came to Longfellow. Specifically, he says, in English, "and also —I wonder how you'll take this— to Longfellow."7 Borges' references to Longfellow always seem slightly impish; he wants you to know that he knows that Longfellow is not highly regarded, but that he also does not care and wishes to acknowledge his indebtedness. In this passage, he goes on to mention other American writers, and to point out that he lectured on North American writers in Buenos Aires, speaking on Longfellow, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Henry James. As far as Borges was concerned, American literature consisted of nineteenth-century writers, finishing with Henry James. Among these, Longfellow was very prominent and beloved. One of his biographers also points out Borges' penchant for making pilgrimages to search out signs of his favourite writers, and explicitly cites "Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Emily Dickinson, Longfellow."8 All nineteenth-century, all American, all visited.

Borges notes more specifically that his first encounter with Dante's Divina Commedia, about which he wrote a book and to which he referred constantly, was through Longfellow's translation.9 One interviewer questions him about the fact that his reading as a child and young man had been in English and asks about his love of English, commenting that Borges had first read Don Quijote in English rather than Spanish. Borges denies this during this interview (he confirms it elsewhere, several times), but goes on to say:

No, I think I was speaking of Dante's Divine Comedy, as done into English by Longfellow. I began reading the Divine Comedy in English.10

Borges is a little unclear as to which English text he read. Most commonly he cites Longfellow, but once he states that he worked from Carlyle.11 He is very clear, however, that he learned Italian by learning Dante, through English translations. In another interview, Borges himself offers a more detailed analysis of his engagement with Dante as a result of a question from the audience. He suggests that "the Divine Comedy is perhaps the peak of all literature," and that it "is Dante's idea that in a lifetime there is only a single moment."12 Later in the answer he states:

As I have never studied Italian, I began by reading Longfellow's translation. And reading the notes. Then I had a bilingual edition, and I read, firstly, the English text, a canto, then the Italian text. I went on, and when I refound myself in purgatory, I could do without the English text and go on reading in Italian.13

He suggests that he has read the Divine Comedy about a dozen times. But his engagement with the text began with, and presumably was greatly inflected by, the fact that his first encounter with it was in Longfellow's translation and commentary. When Borges says that he read it through, he means that he read all three volumes of Longfellow's version, in each of which there are more pages devoted to commentary and ancillary materials than there are to the translation. The total is over 1300 pages, about half of that commentary and annotation in very small type. For example, Longfellow provides four medieval English visions of heaven and hell —Drihthelm, St. Patrick, the Monk of Evesham, and Turkhill— at the end of the commentary on the Purgatorio. At the end of the Inferno commentary, Longfellow offers (using his own terminology but lightly edited for accuracy) extended quotations from Homer and Virgil, Cicero's Vision of Scipio, the "Vision of Frater Alberico" quoted from St Patrick's Purgatory, the "Vision of Walkelin" from Odericus Vitalis' Ecclesiastical History, a section from the life of St. Brandon, a piece from the Poetic Edda that for Longfellow is an Icelandic vision of hell, and a passage of description of Paradise from the Old English The Phoenix in Thorpe's translation. In other words, Longfellow's interests were as broad and catholic as those of Borges. Moreover, Longfellow's interest in visions of heaven and hell other than Dante would have interested a man who would later publish his own set of translations of such visions.14

In his detailed analysis of Borges' encounters with the Kabbalah, Jaime Alazraki cleverly and carefully disentangles Borges from Longfellow in a way that foreshadows the entangling that Borges had with Longfellow over Old English. Alazraki notes that Borges in an interview with him stated that his first encounter with the Kabbalah was in a footnote to Longfellow's translation of the Divine Comedy. Borges points out a three-page footnote in the translation which draws extensively from yet another book, which Borges followed Longfellow in attributing to J.P. Stehelin, but which was actually written by Johannes Andreas Eisenmenger. The misattribution is telling, since Longfellow's original error provides Borges with an entire mode of thinking which he found deeply conducive to his own spiritual approach, and he also propagates the error himself. It's a delightfully circular reference chain, and yet one that, as Alazraki argues, offers a way of thinking about Borges' attraction to this kind of hermeneutic, choosing one's ancestors and layering approaches and ideas.15 It also demonstrates how highly Borges regarded Longfellow as both a scholar of Dante and a translator.

Borges, Old English, and Longfellow

Running against the current of Borges' own statements in many interviews about his independent engagement with Old English, I want to suggest here that Longfellow significantly influenced Borges' approach to and engagement with Old English.16 Again and again, Borges states in interviews and in his writings that he had learned Old English and had many verses by memory. He clearly did. For example, here is another exchange with Willis Barnstone:

We talked about Old English. Borges delighted in every word, and each etymology he treated as a friend. "What do you think the word bonfire comes from?"
"From the French bon plus feu," I guessed, falling into his trap.
"No, it's from Anglo-Saxon bãn fyr. A bonefire. I suppose they got some big horse bones and burned them outdoors to keep warm."
"When did you learn Anglo-Saxon?"
"In 1955 when I was fifty-six. I couldn't read by then. My eyes had gone. But a priest here in Buenos Aires helped me..."17

This is Borges' recollection of how he learned Old English, a recollection he consistently stated, sometimes emphasizing more the way that he taught Old English and Old Norse at the university in Buenos Aires, learning along with the group of students.18 He quoted from Old English, etymologized it (as here), although it should perhaps be noted that while a number of compounds on ban- "bone" do occur in Old English, ban-fyr does not.19 He wrote poems about learning Old English and about Beowulf, reworking ideas and offering his thoughts about the language and the literature on many occasions.

He also translated from Old English, perhaps most notably with his amanuensis and friend (and later his wife) María Kodama, publishing in 1978 a Breve Antología Anglosajona, and reprinting the forty-eight page pamphlet (in Spanish a bolletín) in his Obras completas at nearly the same moment.20 This "Brief Anthology of Old English" has a short prologue and seven texts in translation: Scyld's funeral from Beowulf, the "Fight at Finnsburh," "Deor," the opening of "The Seafarer," "The Grave," part of the tale of Ohthere from the Old English Orosius, and part of the prose "Solomon and Saturn." The order of the entries is strangely reminiscent not of Longfellow's material in The Poets and Poetry of Europe in the translations included there, but of the order of material in his 1838 article, in which he discusses Beowulf, then the Finnsburh fragment, "The Grave," offers a long commentary on Alfred though not providing any passage from the Orosius, and has a quotation from the prose "Solomon and Saturn" which overlaps with the Borges/Kodama translation.21 "Deor" and "The Seafarer" are not present in Longfellow.22 "Deor" does appear in Conybeare's Illustrations (interestingly, also in exactly the order found in Borges/Kodama), but without title. That is, the order of materials in Conybeare, then in Longfellow, and then in Borges/Kodama is the same, although the first two have many more texts than do Borges/Kodama. But the order is striking, given the unusual choice of texts. To consider the matter in more detail, it is worth focusing on "The Grave," published by Conybeare as "Norman-Saxon Fragment on Death," but described by Longfellow as a poem on the grave and published by him under that title.

"The Grave," a twelfth-century addition (with a further three lines added later) to an Old English manuscript, to the modern eye seems an unusual choice of text. The poem was first published in 1826 in the Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry prepared by John Josias Conybeare and completed after his death by his widow and his brother.23 It appears early in Longfellow's collected poetry, which may suggest that it was an early work. It is not mentioned in the introductory material to the Old English section of The Poets and Poetry of Europe, but appears in a group entitled "Miscellaneous Poems" at the end of the selection.24 The beginning of the poem is often quoted; here is the second section, first in the original transitional Old/Middle English from MS Bodley 343:

Ne bið no þin hus healice itinbred:
hit bið unheh and lah, þonne þu list þerinne.
Ðe hele-wages beoð lage, sid-wages unhege;
þe rof bið ibyld þire broste ful neh.
Swa ðu scealt on molde wunien ful calde,
dimme and deorcæ.25

Longfellow has as his second stanza:

Thy house is not
Highly timbered;
It is unhigh and low,
When thou art therein,
The heel-ways are low,
The side-ways unhigh;
Thy roof is built
Thy breast full nigh.
So thou shalt in mould
Dwell full cold,
Dimly and dark.26

Conybeare for this stanza has:

Thy house is not
Highly built (timbered),
It is unhigh and low;
When you art in it
The heel-ways are low,
The side-ways unhigh.
The roof is built
Thy breast full nigh;
So thou shalt in earth
Dwell full cold,
Dim, and dark.27

Both translations are careful and literal versions of the late Old English text, but Longfellow clearly bases his work on Conybeare. Borges and Kodama have:

Tu casa no es muy alta. Es humilde y baja.
Cuando yazgas ahí, las vallas serán bajas, humildes las paredes.
La techumbre está cerca de tu pecho. Habitarás entonces en el polvo y sentirás frío.
Toda tiniebla y toda sombra, se pudrirá la cueva.
[Your house is not very tall. It is modest and low.
When you live in it, the fences will be low, the walls modest.
The roof is close to your chest. You will therefore live in the dust and you will feel cold.
All dark and all shadow, the cave itself will rot.]

"The Grave" is not a difficult poem to translate, using simple vocabulary in Old or early Middle English, and very simple syntax. Nonetheless, Conybeare and Longfellow are wellnigh identical, and the Borges/Kodama version is very close to them both. The footnote to this text in the Borges/Kodama translation refers to Ecclesiastes and its construction of the sepulchre as the last dwelling of every human, and states rather movingly that "La imagen ha sido sentida con tal intensidad que ese último poema de los sajones nos conmueve y aterra personalmente" (the image has been felt (here) with such depth of intensity that this the last poem of the Anglo-Saxons moves us deeply and terrifies us on a personal level). Elsewhere, in his lectures at Buenos Aires on English literature, Borges comments that the whole poem becomes a single metaphor, and that "this poem was written with so much intensity that it is one of the great poems of English poetry."28

Borges does not refer to Longfellow's "The Grave" in the Breve Antología as a source for this version. However, the evidence that Borges knew Longfellow's poem is incontrovertible. Selden Rodman did a sequence of interviews with Borges, and found him unable to stop talking about literature. At one point, they were at the National Library with an appointment for drawings and photos, but no one answered the bell and Borges had no key. They waited so long that someone came across the street, concerned to see such an old man without a hat in the sun. Borges, however, paid little attention to the problem. As Rodman puts it:

Borges, by now engaged in quoting Longfellow's translation of an Old English poem, "The Grave," showed very little interest when the watchman, who should have been on duty, finally arrived with the key.29

That is, in the kind of situation that most people find deeply inconvenient, waiting in this case to get into a building of which he had been the Director, Borges simply carried right on speaking about texts he loved, and quoting them from memory. And what his memory cast up was Longfellow's version of "The Grave." In a later interview, just before the discussion of Dante quoted above, Willis Barnstone asks Borges about his love of Old English. Towards the end of his answer, Borges notes:

But there is also a poem written after the Battle of Hastings, and done into English by Longfellow. The poem "The Grave." Longfellow translates: "Doorless is that house,/And dark it is within." But if you go back to the original you find still better: Durelass is ðæt hus / And deerc hit is wiðinnen.30

In 1980, Borges had not only Longfellow's version, but the original poem clear in his head. His indebtedness to Longfellow is mediated, as he clearly wants to reach back farther and into the original text—but the indebtedness remains. Moreover, Longfellow's own indebtedness is to Conybeare, whose translation clearly inspired Longfellow both to include the poem, and to work with the poem in ways redolent of the earlier antiquarian.31

Coming Full Circle

The circularity of reference involved in this rather convoluted tale is intriguing. Longfellow used Conybeare, sometimes with and sometimes without reference. Borges used Longfellow, sometimes with and sometimes without reference. Longfellow faced a number of charges of plagiarism during his career. Borges makes something of a mockery of the notion of plagiarism in a number of his most famous stories, and he clearly believed in the rather medieval notion that copying an authority was a sign of acknowledgment of the spiritual excellence of the predecessor, not a failure of originality. Both writers were comfortable using the work of others, and giving it credit where it seemed right to them. They did not really want—I hope—to appropriate their sources, but to circle round them, to offer a different kind of thinking about this fascinating material. Longfellow wrote an appreciation of Old English for the North American Review in 1838, and slightly revised it for republication in 1845, and later for publication in his Collected Works. Borges wrote a book on Old English and Old Norse in 1951 and reworked it for republication in 1965, and used elements from it in his lectures for twenty years at Buenos Aires until his retirement in 1975. Both were expedient and savvy writers, both were lovers of language and polymaths, and both engaged with Old English. Borges' love of Old English, despite his constant references to it, remains largely unknown. Longfellow's interest in the field, while almost certainly influential in the way that America engaged with comparative literature and with medieval literature, also remains relatively unknown. It seems remarkable that two such commonly known figures as Borges and Longfellow could also be two figures largely unknown as amateur readers of Old English.

Unlike Longfellow scholars, Whitman scholars have picked up on his interest in matters Anglo-Saxon and are publishing occasionally both about his excitement concerning the language (but not the literature), and about the Zeitgeist in nineteenth-century America pertaining to these issues. Heidi Kim refers to Whitman's "dynamic Anglo-Saxonism," arguing that his interest was deeply in the language as the fundamental stock (his word) from which American language was developing, but his convictions about race and racial equality changed, wavered, and developed over the course of his life—and intersected with his interest in Old English.32 Carla Billitteri similarly refers to "Whitman's genealogical appeal to Anglo-Saxon" as part of his pragmatic notion about grafting an American language onto the stock they had, and thereby using language to build a sense of nationhood.33 Whitman's fascinating mix of nationhood, freedom, transcendentalism, humanism, and free verse is, however, matter for another study.

University of Western Ontario