Abstract
Borges was first a poet, and his medievalism does seem imbricated with his poetry. Many of his poems make casual references to Old English and Old Norse medieval texts, as analyzed in the opening of the chapter. Other poems are explicitly about medieval matters, including those about an Anglo-Saxon ruler and about learning Old English. Moreover, Borges’ lifelong interest in kennings, a kind of condensed metaphor, reflects in the density and elegance of his metaphors and locutions in his poetry. And, in his last decade Borges returned to translating Old English texts into Spanish, including, with María Kodama as coauthor, an intriguing rendition of the twelfth-century Anglo-Saxon poem known as “The Grave.”
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Notes
Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges, Including a Selection of Poems. Interviews by Roberto Alifano 1981–1983 (Housatonic, MA: Lascaux Publishers, 1984), p. 37. Both quotations come from the opening of the dialogue entitled “Poetry.”
See Emir Rodriguez Monegal, Jorges Luis Borges: A Literary Biography (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1978), pp. 461–462.
The vexed question of Borges’ relationships with women (or lack thereof) takes up a vast amount of critical space. A recent and helpful book which provides all the available evidence, in a somewhat tabloid style but with judicious conclusions about each of Borges’ close friendships and connections, is Mario Paoletti, Las novias de Borges (y otros misterios borgeanos) (The Girlfriends/Fiancées of Borges and other Borgesian mysteries) (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2011).
“The Thing I Am,” quoted from Jorge Luis Borges, Obra Poética1923–1985 (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1989), p. 543. The poem originally appeared in Historia de la Noche (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1977). Translations in this chapter are mine unless otherwise indicated. Note especially that the English title of this poem is Borges’ own.
See M.J. Toswell, “Auden and Anglo-Saxon,” Medieval English Studies Newsletter (Centre for Medieval English Studies, Tokyo) 37 (December 1997): 21–28.
See Joseph Tyler, “Medieval Germanic Elements in the Poetry of Jorge Luis Borges,” Readerly/Writerly Texts 1:1 (Fall/Winter 1993), pp. 97–106.
See Vladimir Brljak, “Borges and the North,” Studies in Medievalism XX (2011): 99–128. The quotation is p. 116, and the poetic references are footnotes 36 and 37 on pp. 127–128. Seventeen poems are listed as specifically medievalist in their focus, and more than 40 on other topics have brief medieval references. Probably for reasons of space, Brljak is only able to discuss this material in two paragraphs.
Jorge Luis Borges, Poems of the Night. Ed. Efrain Kristal (New York: Penguin, 2010), pp. 106–107. The facing-page translation, which I have quoted here, is by Alastair Reid.
“1985” in Jorge Luis Borges, The Sonnets (New York: Penguin Classics, 2010), pp. 300–301. The translation here is by Stephen Kessler; I have used his version for the first line and a half of the poem, but my own for the last line: his reads “something the wind takes that is never gone.”
Martin S. Stabb, Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970), p. 54.
See Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (New York W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), p. 5. His translation ends “No man can tell,/ no wise man in hall or weathered veteran / knows for certain who salvaged that load” (Iines 50–52).
C.A. Jones, trans. Old English Shorter Poems Volume 1: Religious and Didactic. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, vol. 15 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 365.
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Toswell, M.J. (2014). Borges the Poet. In: Borges the Unacknowledged Medievalist: Old English and Old Norse in His Life and Work. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137444479_3
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