Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Borges teaching Anglo-Saxon literature

I have subscribed to The Hudson Review since 1999, I think, when I stumbled upon it in the library while determinedly avoiding my dissertation.  In it, I discovered Joseph Epstein and William Pritchard and a number of other critics who, for whatever reason, had decided to spend part of their time writing about literature for a non-professional audience.  Depth, clarity, seriousness of purpose, lightness of touch – these are the virtues of The Hudson Review.

The magazine always includes a number of poems and a piece of fiction, but I value it most for its literary essays – surveys, histories, interpretations.  I suppose this is unsurprising, given what one finds at Wuthering Expectations.  The new issue, “The Spanish Issue,” has three especially good ones.  I want to save Roberto Bolaño and César Aira for tomorrow and spend today with Jorge Luis Borges, with “A Course in English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires: The Seventh Class,” translated by Esther Allen.

The piece is a transcription of one of Borges’s classroom lectures, stitched together by his students, from the fall of 1966.  It seems that a book is forthcoming next year, Professor Borges, that will contain twenty-five lectures, the complete course.  Excuse me, I need to make a little note: Read. That. Book.

In the seventh class, Borges has reached, more or less, the Norman Conquest.  The texts at issue are Old English: the Physiologus, an Anglo-Saxon bestiary (readers of The Book of Imaginary Beings will find this section most interesting); Anglo-Saxon poems; the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson; that sort of thing.  A long, casually and amusingly told history of the Battle of Hastings fills a good part of the lecture.  Beowulf seems to have been covered in the sixth class.  Perhaps Chaucer will be found in the eighth.

In this case, the class is as much linguistic as literary.  The perspective, for an English reader, is unusual and refreshing, since Borges compares Old English grammar and vocabulary not to contemporary English, but to his students’ own Spanish.  Borges is discussing the fading of grammatical gender in Anglo-Saxon English:

And this must have been a very sad thing for educated Saxons.  Imagine, all of you, if we were suddenly to notice people saying “el cuchara,” “lo mesa,” “lo casa,” “la tenedor,” etc.  We’d think: “Caramba, the language is degenerating, we’re all going the way of cocoliche.”  But the Saxons, who must have thought the same way, could not foresee that this is going to make English an easier language.

I needed the footnote informing me that cocoliche is an Italian-Spanish creole once spoken by Italian immigrants in Buenos Aires.  What a jolly and enthusiastic literary history.  What fun that class must have been.  I don’t know how Borges graded, though – perhaps he was a tyrant.

I would love to refer interested readers to this Borges lecture or to some of my favorite essays from The Hudson Review but the magazine’s editors have decided to minimize their web presence, a decision this long-time subscriber suggests they revisit.  What they have online begins here - be sure to click on the tiny "next" button.  “The Spanish Issue” is not even mentioned on the website yet!  The curious will have to poke around in their libraries and newsstands, assuming one or the other is unusually well stocked.

15 comments:

  1. Thanks for the tip--I hadn't heard about this and am so excited. Now to track down the magazine.

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  2. 57th Street Books used to sell actual physical copies of The Hudson Review. "Used to" = 12 years ago. It'll be in the Regenstein, at least.

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  3. Hi A. R.

    I think there is a natural entropy to language in that it always strives to become easier. I don’t think the native speakers have much say in the matter. Even actresses at the Academy Awards want to be called ‘actors’.

    Who would want to have declensions again like they have in Latin? We still use the genitive, as in Jorge’s book, but even it is super simplified. Of course, poets would like the ability to place any word any where in a sentence and still have it make sense. Great for rhyming.

    I'll take word order.

    Vince

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  4. I'll warn you that I am hard to convince when it comes to theories of language, perhaps because of my ignorance about linguistics.

    Borges follows the discussion of the simplification of grammar with the corollary, the increase in the complexity of pronunciation and spelling, which compared to the elegant clarity of Spanish is a complete nightmare.

    I suspect languages can move in many directions simultaneously.

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  5. Hi A. R.

    I can’t think of a language which is becoming harder to pronounce or spell. It’s seems with the global village and mass communication, language is becoming homogenized and universalized.

    When I was in Yugoslavia years ago I asked my girlfriend if they had spelling bees in her country. She wanted to know what they were. I explained and she asked me to explain again. When I did, she just laughed. She said, “Everyone who can pronounce a word in our language (Serbo-Croat) can spell that word. Everything is spelled exactly as it is pronounced. It wouldn’t make sense to have a spelling bee.”

    Indeed, I noticed that the word for Phone was ‘Fon’. They have 30 letters and there is a letter for every sound. I had no trouble reading an entire article in the local newspaper to an illiterate native who knew the story was about his hometown.

    I read the article without understanding it and the native understood it without knowing how to read a word of it. Somehow I think this reflects the modern condition.

    I wish we would do this to our spelling. And yes, I agree that languages can evolve in any direction opportunity affords.

    Vince

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  6. (Test. Test. What's wrong with blogger. My comment is not coming through!)

    What a meaty issue. But fat chance if it will reach this part of the world. I would love to matriculate in next year's master class. Twenty-Five Nights!

    And I look forward to your thoughts on Bolano's vagaries. And Aira!

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  7. I picked up a copy of this Hudson Review last night, Amateur Reader. Thanks for plugging it--the Bolaño essay alone (the only one I've read so far) was well worth the $10 I shelled out for it. Borges and Anglo-Saxon literature is/was a weird enough partnership as a subject that I was once able to pass off a short paper on three of Borges' so-called Anglo-Saxon poems read in the light of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. It was pretty fun to research (leading me to read Borges' presumably little known Literaturas germánicas medievales, not exactly his most famous work ever (!), and some of his chatty lectures on the topic) and interesting to learn how Borges associated his worsening blindness with his study of Old English and other Anglo-Saxon lit as arriving in a particular time of his life. I remember him talking about how new words in a foreign language are often striking to the language student, as if they carry a talisman-like power. I think he must have been a great professor...

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  8. I'm always looking for "writing about literature for a non-professional audience"--thanks for this.

    They sure do need your help with their website, though....

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  9. Comment repair commences.

    From Vince, proprietor of Philosophy of Romance:

    Hi A. R.

    I can’t think of a language which is becoming harder to pronounce or spell. It’s seems with the global village and mass communication, language is becoming homogenized and universalized.

    When I was in Yugoslavia years ago I asked my girlfriend if they had spelling bees in her country. She wanted to know what they were. I explained and she asked me to explain again. When I did, she just laughed. She said, “Everyone who can pronounce a word in our language (Serbo-Croat) can spell that word. Everything is spelled exactly as it is pronounced. It wouldn’t make sense to have a spelling bee.”

    Indeed, I noticed that the word for Phone was ‘Fon’. They have 30 letters and there is a letter for every sound. I had no trouble reading an entire article in the local newspaper to an illiterate native who knew the story was about his hometown.

    I read the article without understanding it and the native understood it without knowing how to read a word of it. Somehow I think this reflects the modern condition.

    I wish we would do this to our spelling. And yes, I agree that languages can evolve in any direction opportunity affords.

    Vince

    ReplyDelete
  10. Rise is next - apparently he got an early taste of the Blogger-quake. I'll link to his recent first-rate see-where-it-leads on Don Quixote.

    Rise:


    (Test. Test. What's wrong with blogger. My comment is not coming through!)

    What a meaty issue. But fat chance if it will reach this part of the world. I would love to matriculate in next year's master class. Twenty-Five Nights!

    And I look forward to your thoughts on Bolano's vagaries. And Aira!

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  11. I doubt hardly anoyone here bothers to read Anglo-Saxon anymore; it's all about 'theory'— ha ! You can have that in physics but not in anything as intellectually shallow as literary criticism.

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  12. I thought theory was dead. I read that somewhere.

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  13. Intellectually shallow? Like leaving an anonymous comment on a lit blog, physics geek? Thanks for the laugh!

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  14. Many laughs are available here. Someone more knowledgeable than I might want to ask the friend of physics how string theory has been doing lately.

    But I do not want to pick on physicists, especially the theorists. Their job market is as bad the Humanities - as bad as literary theory. They have it tough.

    Still, the ignorant slur is a bizarre touch. Here's the way to turn this into an argument.

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  15. Borges was no tyrant. In fact he often stated that he never ever failed a student´s exam in his whole life, with the single exception of one student who actually vehemently *demanded* that he be failed. Borges´ academic anecdotes are actually hilarious, one of his university lectures was interrupted by thugs who demanded all his students leave the class to protest the execution of the Che Guevara. When Borges refused, the thugs stated that they would turn off the lights to compel everyone to leave. "See, young man" - Borges responded - "I have been anticipating this moment for decades, and I have taken the precaution of going blind many years ago to prevent your threats from having any effect. So you can go ahead and turn off the lights, I promise I shall do my best not to notice." The thugs were intimidated, and left bumbling. Borges´ lecture went on.

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