In his memoir With Borges (2006), Alberto Manguel recalls reading books to Borges in a room that held “one of the largest collections of Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic literature in Latin America” – modelled, perhaps, on his father’s library, where his life as a writer began. Borges said he started to learn Old English in 1955 as his eyesight began to fail, but his interest in it went back further: the book he co-wrote in 1951, Ancient Germanic Literatures, was based on lectures he had delivered in the 1940s. In 1958, when he was director of the National Library of Argentina, he held Saturday morning seminars with a small group of students who would go out with him into the streets of Buenos Aires and declaim passages they had just mastered at the top of their voices. The sheer acoustic exhilaration Borges derived from the sound of Old English never left him. Manguel remembers him reciting The Lord’s Prayer in Old English in a derelict Saxon chapel near Lichfield purely “to give God a little surprise”.
In 1958, Borges wrote an essay – unpublished in his lifetime – entitled “Thorkelin and Beowulf”, about the Icelandic scholar, Grimur Jónsson Thorkelin, who discovered the manuscript of Beowulf in the British Library but was crushed by the academic community’s criticism of his unscholarly approach. The essay ends with Borges wondering what might have become of Thorkelin’s passion for the poem in the afterlife: “Thorkelin in a Christian heaven talking with the poet of Beowulf; Thorkelin in a Platonic heaven, gazing at the eternal archetype of Beowulf”; a reincarnated Pythagorean Thorkelin in a bookshop in Buenos Aires, turning the pages of this “chanced-upon book, and feeling, just barely, the beginning of some vague disquiet”.
“A Un Poeta Sajón” was first published in El Otro, el Mismo (The Self and Others), Borges’s own favourite collection, in 1964. It later appeared in the TLS,in this translation by Alastair Reid, in 1968 and then in Reid’s collection Weathering (1978). Perhaps we can see, in Borges’s address to his “ghostly kinsman”, something of Thorkelin’s passion for the Beowulf poet, “buried in oblivion”, “exiled” and living now only in his “iron lays”.
To a Saxon Poet
The snowfalls of Northumbria have known
and have forgotten the imprint of your feet,
and numberless are the suns that now have set
between your time and mine, my ghostly kinsman.
Slow in the growing shadows you would fashion
metaphors of swords on the great seas
and of the horror lurking in the pine trees
and of the loneliness the days brought in.
Where can your features and your name be found?
These are things buried in oblivion.
Now I shall never know how it must have been
for you, as a living man who walked his ground.
Exiled, you wandered through your lonely ways.
Now you live only in your iron lays.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Translated by Alastair Reid (1968)
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