by Tom Birkett
(Москва, 1982), p. 193. [‘Anglo-Saxon Poetic Art’, in Old English Poetry, ed. and trans. O. A.
Smirnitskaya and Vladimir G. Tikhomirov (Moscow, 1982), p. 193.]
51 Hamer, Old English Verse, p. 177.
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Inna Matyushina
In Tikhomirov’s translations the Russian language emerges as a perfect means
of recreating the poetic style and alliterative verse technique of Old English poetry.
Rather than attempting to imitate the sound, lexical or syntactical peculiarities of
the original, he successful y creates functional substitutes for the original, using the resources available to a translator into a modern language.
In the case of translations into Modern English the need to give up on the mechan-
ical imitation of the lexical or phonetic organisation of alliterative verse is magni-
fied by the break in the poetic tradition occurring at the beginning of the Middle
English period. Abandoning hope of transplanting alliterative verse into modern
soil, it might be more fruitful to try to recreate an old poetic text by cultivating
those features of the original which might find support in the modern language.
It might be acceptable to use in the translations the kind of formal devices that are
functional y equivalent to those employed in the original Old English text, even
though they may sometimes be different from those that were canonised in allitera-
tive verse. It seems appropriate to make use of deeper sound devices than those in
the original, such as internal consonances, assonances and even full internal rhymes
of root morphemes. It is likely that only these sound devices added to alliteration are able to endow the translation with the high phonetic regularity characteristic of the
sound organisation of alliterative verse.
In rendering the vocabulary of the original it is less rewarding to follow the prin-
ciples of etymological translation than to make use of all the riches of a modern
language, introducing into translations not only archaic or dialectal vocabulary, but
also ‘potential’ words created according to models similar to compounds used in
Old English alliterative verse and productive in the modern language. It might then
be possible to create a translation which would give modern readers impressions
close to those produced by the original on scholars who know the language well
enough to experience it as a literary work of art.52 In order to achieve this, a translator might have to renounce the apparent temptations of diachronic translation
and attempt to recreate, in ways admissible in the target language, the interrelation
between sound and meaning that was so crucial for the original text.
52 М. Е. Грабарь-Пассек, ‘Рецензия на издание Записок Юлия Цезаря в переводе
М.М.Покровского’, Вестник древней истории, № 2 (1949), 157. [M. E. Grabar-Passek,
‘Review of the Edition of Caesar’s Commentaries, trans. M.M.Pokrovskii’, Vestnik drevney istori 2 (1949), 157.]
4
Borges, Old English Poetry and Translation Studies
M. J. Toswel
Borges and Medieval Germanic Literatures
Throughout his life, Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) referred to Old English
and Old Norse as his hobby, his delight, even his passion. In interviews about
the inspiration for his poetry and short stories he invariably brought up this
interest, gave specific examples of etymologies or intriguing details, and offered
some comments on the importance of understanding and loving this material. In
talks he quoted from Old English texts in the original language, and offered his
own comments about the sound of the language; intriguingly, he found it replete
with vowels and vocalic sounds, and a language with a rich sonority to it.1 He
even included direct references to Old English in the metafictional short stories he
wrote, describing himself in ‘El Otro’ (‘The Other’) as someone who studies Old
English and is not at the bottom of the class.2 Borges also wrote about the major
literary texts of northern Europe, paraphrasing and at times translating sections of
Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied and Vǫlsunga saga into Spanish.3 This work was at the heart of his own thinking, reflected in both content and approach in his own texts.
Moreover, Borges was a translator himself, at various points in his life offering his
own versions of Old English poems, and near the end of his life working with his
last assistant and later wife, María Kodama, on a more ambitious project to translate
1 For example, see Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse, ed. Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu (Cambridge, MA, 2000), p. 16; Borges states ‘my hobby is Old English’ and refers to the ‘stark and voweled’ language.
2 ‘El Otro’ is the first story in Libro de Arena (Buenos Aires, 1975), Borges’ last full collection of stories.
3 The first of these texts was Ancianas literaturas germánicas, translated with the col aboration of Delia Ingenieros (Mexico City, 1951); in 1965, a revised version of this text was published, with the col aboration of María Esther Vásquez, as Literaturas germánicas medievales (Buenos Aires, 1966). Passages from each of these texts are paraphrased and translated in these monographs. For a translation of the first of these works see Jorge Luis Borges in col aboration with Delia Ingenieros, trans. M. J. Toswel , Ancient Germanic Literatures, Old English Publications 1 (Tempe, AZ, 2014).
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M. J. Toswel
the Old Norse Gylfaginning into that language.4 That translation, published with Alianza Editorial (a prestigious Spanish press in Madrid) and entitled La alucinación de Gylfi ( The Dream of Gylfi) came out in 1984 and real y was the last major project he accomplished before his death in June 1986.5 Also in col aboration with
María Kodama was a small anthology entitled Breve antología anglosajona ( Short Old English Anthology) dated 1978 and appearing as a pamphlet in Buenos Aires and in Borges’ Obras Completas at more or less the same time. This was also among the writer’s last projects, for Borges slowed down considerably in his eighties.6 Borges,
then, this subtle and highly intellectual thinker, this citizen of the world, was also an enthusiast for Old English, but an enthusiast with a scholarly bent.
Strangely enough, Borges’ delight in Old English and Old Norse has largely
escaped the notice of his biographers. Emir Rodriguez Monegal makes occasional
reference to the way Borges remembered and commented on his British ancestors,
although not extending that ancestry back to the Middle Ages, and describes the way
in which Borges established a study group on Old English in the early 1960s – all
in the last handful of pages in his magisterial biography.7 He does not, however,
pursue what this might mean for Borges’ original work. Similarly, Edwin Williamson
describes the Anglo-Saxon classes that Borges organised and taught as ‘an exercise
in amateur scholarship’ and refers to the classes later only as a way of addressing
Borges’ relationship with the young student María Kodama in the 1960s.8 In neither
of these texts, the standard references in the field, is there a relevant entry in the index on Borges’ lifelong interest in Old English, Old Norse or indeed anything medieval.
In the last twenty years of his life, Borges gave many interviews, sometimes to
academics, sometimes to intellectuals in a more public sphere. He frequently raised
his interest in Old English, but here as with the biograph
ers, the interviewers rarely engaged with this concern. To take one example, and perhaps the most sympathetic,
at the age of eighty, Borges gave a series of interviews.9 The first interview, titled
‘The Secret Islands’ and taking place in March 1980 at Indiana University with Jorge
Oclander and Willis Barnstone, has the discussion of Old English and Old Icelandic
4 Borges’ interest in matters medieval and Germanic was lifelong but rarely considered by his critics. For the whole trajectory, with particular emphasis on the poetry, see Vladimir Brljak, ‘Borges and the North’, Studies in Medievalism 20 (2011), 99–128, and see the longer version to be found at http://www.academia.edu/5252683/Borges_and_the_North See also M.
J. Toswel , Borges the Unacknowledged Medievalist : Old English and Old Norse in His Life and Work (New York, 2014) and Martín Hadis, Siete Guerreros Nortumbrios: Enigmas y secretos en la lápida de Jorge Luis Borges (Buenos Aires, 2011).
5 Jorge Luis Borges and María Kodama, trans., Snorri Sturluson, La alucinación de Gylfi (Madrid, 1984). For an assessment of this work, assuming that it is largely the work of Borges himself, see Philip Lavender, ‘The Snorra Edda of Jorge Luis Borges’, Variaciones Borges 37
(2014), 1–18.
6 Breve Antología Anglosajona (1978), quoted from the reprinted version in Jorge Luis Borges–Obras Completas en Colaboración, pp. 787–801.
7 Emir Rodriguez Monegal, Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography (New York, 1978) pp. 448, 450, 474-5.
8 Edwin Williamson, Borges: A Life (New York, 2004), p. 343 for the quotation, and pp. 369–71 for the developing relationship with Kodama.
9 Willis Barnstone, ed., Borges at 80: Conversations (Bloomington, IN, 1982). Subsequent page numbers refer to this edition of the interviews.
Borges and Old English Poetry
63
(pp. 3–4) in response to Oclander’s first question asking Borges to take the audience
on a voyage through his own library. Borges returns to his love of Old English just a
few questions later (p. 6). The third interview, recorded for the Dick Cavett Show in New York in May 1980 and titled ‘It Came Like a Slow Summer Twilight’ (pp. 33–9)
mentions Old English on p. 36. At Indiana University in March 1980 for the fourth
of the interviews edited by Barnstone, real y a poetry reading, Borges discusses the
sea in Beowulf (p. 45), and in his discussion of two poems making references to Old English he refers to it as ‘one of my passions, the passions of things Old English
and Old Norse’ (p. 54); he ends that discussion of his poetry with a brief analysis
of the etymology of weird as connected with the Saxon wyrd (‘fate’) (p. 68). Borges continues the Old English theme on pages 71, 84, 106–7, 110, 133 and 150–1. Barnstone’s ‘Afterword’, written in October 2013, describes Borges in its first paragraph as
‘an Anglophile professor of Old English’ (p. 171). Barnstone clearly recognises how
Borges perceived his academic position, or wanted to perceive it. In these interviews
recorded near the end of his life, Borges discusses Old English with facility and with love, and although he tends to emphasise his passion for the language as a newish
one, inspired by the classes in Buenos Aires with students such as Kodama, his love
of medieval Germanic literatures was a longstanding adoration.
At the opposite end of his life as a public intellectual and thinker, Borges
published a number of short articles on a broad range of topics in various peri-
odicals in Buenos Aires. Already his interests included medieval Germanic litera-
ture, and he clearly felt very comfortable opining even on its stylistic nuances. On
kennings Borges published articles and even a pamphlet or bolletín in 1933. He describes kennings in this early work as: el primer deliberado goce verbal de una
literatura instintiva (‘the first deliberate verbal delight of a literature “governed by instinct”’).10 Few would agree that Old English and Old Norse are literatures best
described as being governed by instinct, since both involve highly sophisticated
poetry following a profoundly traditional and formalised structure. Moreover,
describing kennings as the ‘first’ innovation of the poetry of the North, the new
development perhaps of greatest significance will also strike some as unlikely, even
improbable. But my concern here is with the choice of goce, a Spanish word with a multitude of meanings and connotations. Goce can be ‘choice’ or ‘preference’ or
‘taste’ as well as ‘delight’, which may perhaps stray farther than one might like from the literal interpretation of the term. And yet Borges is clearly indicating that for
Northern poets this goce, this ‘choice’, was a deliberate and considered one. And it must have been a ‘delight’ or something of a ‘joy’. These are both possible meanings
of goce; Borges here, then, has chosen for his characterisation of the kenning as a central feature of northern prosodic usage a term which itself is a goce, a choice, a delight, a somewhat uncertain signifier.
Borges continued this concern with Old English and Old Norse throughout his
career. On a very much larger scale than the short pamphlet about kennings are the
two versions that Borges produced of a medieval bestiary. With Margarita Guer-
rero, one of many helpers after Borges went blind, he prepared and published a
Manual de Zoología Fantástica (‘A Manual of Fantastic Zoology’) in 1957, and ten 10 Jorge Luis Borges, Las Kenningar (Buenos Aires, 1933), p. 7.
64
M. J. Toswel
years later he published another version with thirty-four extra items in it: El Libro de los Seres Imaginarios (‘The Book of Imaginary Beings’).11 Among the entries are several that refer to physiologus material in the Exeter Book and elsewhere: El ave fénix (‘The Phoenix Bird’), La Pantera (‘The Panther’), Fastitocalon (the name given in the Exeter Book bestiary for the whale), and El dragón (‘The dragon’). As Borges explains regarding the dragon:
En las leyendas germánicas, el dragón custodia objetos preciosos. Así, en la gesta de
Beowulf, compuesta en Inglaterra hacia el siglo VIII, hay un dragón que durante tres-cientos años es guardián de un tesoro.
(In Germanic legend, the dragon guards precious objects. Thus, in the geste of Beowulf, composed in England around the eighth century, there is a dragon who is guardian of
a treasure for 300 years.)12
Borges weaves the story of Beowulf into the analysis of the dragon as a bestiary figure, beginning with Pliny and Ethiopian materials, quoting from the Iliad at some length, passing by the Anglo-Saxon dragon, pausing on how people believed
in dragons as somehow real, and concluding with the prestige of the dragon, Chris-
tian references to it (in the Book of Revelation, in Augustine), and Jung’s placement
of it between the serpent and the bird, partaking of the elements of earth and air.
There is a kind of insouciant intellectualism in Borges’ passing references to ideas
and materials that would not be known to his audience; on the one hand he seeks
to impress, and on the other to enjoy the joke and the possibilities of the options
he delicately proposes. However, all of Borges’ references to Anglo-Saxon materials
appear as uncomplicated facts, with little acknowledgment of the serious interpre-
tive problems of connecting up the dragon in Beowulf with Satan, and with the Iliad, and with the suggestion that the Saxon kings had dragons on their standards in
order to strike fear into their enemies. In other words, for Borges, the Old English
material he read and studied offered him incontrovertible and connected facts, as
did the works he read about this m
aterial. It was part of his everyday mythology, his
understanding of the world.
Borges and Old English in 1960
The collection of very short stories, meditations and poems that real y set Borges
on the road to international success was published in Spanish in 1960, and entitled
11 Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, Manual de Zoología fantástica (México City, 1957); Jorge Luis Borges con la colaboración de Margarita Guerrero, ilustraciones de Baldessari, El Libro de los seres imaginarios (Buenos Aires, 1967). For a translation of the latter volume see Jorge Luis Borges with Margarita Guerrero, revised, enlarged, and translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in col aboration with the author, The Book of Imaginary Beings (New York, 1969). This version revises many entries and adds a few, and references the publication of some of these entries in The New Yorker and elsewhere. The complicated history of this bestiary material, some highly medieval, some Latinate, some metafictional, and some just fantastic, would repay attention.
12 Borges and Guerrero, Manual de zoología fantástica, p. 65.
Borges and Old English Poetry
65
El Hacedor.13 During the next year he won the Prix Formentor jointly with Samuel Beckett, the most prestigious intellectual prize in France, and he engaged in his first writer-in-residence visit at the University of Texas at Austin. While he was there, El Hacedor was translated into English and published by friends in Austin as Dreamtigers.14 The introduction explicitly points out that a correct literal translation of El Hacedor would be ‘The Maker’ or ‘The Creator’. The verb hacer in Spanish is the most common verb for ‘to make, to create, to make happen’. It is a very common auxiliary
as well as one of the most common, and irregular, verbs in the language. The -dor
suffix is an agentive suffix in Spanish, so that comprar (‘to buy’) becomes comprador (‘the buyer’), vender/ vendedor (‘the seller’), vendedora for a female retailer, and a hacedor is a ‘maker’. On the face of it, a translation into English as The Maker would seem perhaps a bit simple; it might not carry the semantic weight that the translators wanted to freight onto this slim book. The translators wanted to imply some
of the complexity of the thinking of Borges’ collection, so they chose the title that