The lost lessons of Jorge Luis Borges: His English and American literature classes

In one of his last writings, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) imagined a monstrous book without beginning or end, composed of an “exactly infinite” number of pages. As if in a fleeting evocation of the confusion between reality and fiction that he liked to evoke, his texts, which have been continuously published worldwide for decades, seem to mimic The Book of Sand: even today they continue to add new pages.

To the Complete Works that he himself sent to the printing press, there have been added, over time, entire books that the Argentine author had previously disavowed, articles that appeared in newspapers and magazines that he had never compiled, and even some of his valuable manuscripts, among other materials. With the 40th anniversary of his death approaching this coming June, one of the rich veins from which editors and researchers continue to extract treasures is his vast oral work, especially his classes and lectures. The recent publication of Curso de literatura inglesa y norteamericana (Course in English and North American Literature) is part of this series.

The new book compiles the lectures that Borges gave in 1966 at the Catholic University of Mar del Plata. For five months that year, every two weeks between April and September, the writer, who was blind by then, traveled by train the 400 kilometers (around 250 miles) separating Buenos Aires from the Mar del Plata coast. A handful of students waited to hear him speak with erudite devotion about writers, texts, and literary movements recurrent in his work. And also about other, more unusual topics, with little or no record of it until now.

Those lectures were lost to the public, and their recovery is the result of almost detective-like work by the book’s editor, Mariela Blanco, a professor and researcher at the National University of Mar del Plata and National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET). It all began with a suggestion from Germán Álvarez, another expert on Borges’ work, who would later compile the detailed set of notes for the new book. He proposed that Blanco trace Borges’ time in Mar del Plata. “It was like in the story The Purloined Letter [by Edgar Allan Poe]. It was something that had been right in front of me my whole life, and I didn’t see it,” says Blanco. “My mother,” she explains, “was one of Borges’ students in 1966. Ever since I was little, for as long as I can remember, I had heard: ‘I took classes with Borges.’”

Recovering those lectures was no easy task. By the time Blanco embarked on the project, her mother had passed away. The university archives contained nothing. Interviews with other former students — most of them women — revealed that they had recorded the lectures on audio tapes. But the tapes had been reused; no one had preserved them. Finally, she found the treasure: in the southernmost part of the country, in Tierra del Fuego, one of those students, now a librarian, had kept the transcripts. This collection of verbatim transcripts of Borges’s lectures was missing only the first one, which is still lost.

From then on, a meticulous restoration process began that took five years. “The transcriptions were done very carefully, preserving Borges’ orality and syntax,” Blanco explains, “but the editing work was long and complicated,” a work of art to restore “Borges’ words,” “the cadence of his voice.”

The book includes 10 lessons taught by the author of The Aleph. He was scheduled to give 14 lectures in Mar del Plata, but for unknown reasons, after the 11th class, Borges stopped traveling, and the course came to an abrupt end. The book comprises 475 pages and ranges from the Battle of Maldon, written in the 10th century, to works and authors of the early 20th century. The journey offers a glimpse into Borges’ unique way of reading and his veneration for books to which he claims to owe “the best moments” of his life, and not just his literary life: “Aesthetic pleasures,” he told his students, “can be as memorable and as intense as any other.”

After discussing early Anglo-Saxon works, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, Borges told his students about Jonathan Swift, “one of the most singular and unfortunate writers in English literature.” He also examined Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon, “grandiose writers” brimming with thought and irony. When he reached the 18th century, he elaborated on Romanticism. Unusually for the rest of his work, he focused on James Macpherson, the creator of “the first Romantic poem,” who “did not want to be considered a poet but merely a translator.” He also discussed William Wordsworth, “author of both the best and worst verses in the English language.”

Of his beloved Robert Louis Stevenson, Borges said that he believed “the art of verse consists in arousing expectation and satisfying it” (rhyme requires a related word), while “the art of prose is perhaps more difficult, because it consists in arousing an expectation and then disappointing it.” He portrayed Gilbert K. Chesterton as an ingenious believer besieged by nightmares, creator of beautiful and unsettling metaphors: the night, “a cloud that is larger than the world,” and “a monster made of eyes” (referring to the stars and, perhaps, to the primal fear of one who, without seeing, feels observed).

Among the books and writers he analyzed, Borges sketched relationships and analogies, some already present in his own texts, others previously unpublished, almost all dazzling. Of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he said that it inspired the novel by Robert Bloch that led to the film Psycho. Borges also proposed a series of affinities between Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Ricardo Güiraldes’ Don Segundo Sombra. He suggested similarities between the poetry of William Morris and that of Federico García Lorca; between the philosophy of Bernard Shaw and that of John Scotus Eriugena.

The new book on Borges’ lessons in Mar de Plata bears a close resemblance to other books by the author, including Medieval Germanic Literatures (1965, a rewriting of a text published under a different title in 1951 and co-authored with Delia Ingenieros) and Introduction to English Literature (1966), both collaborations with María Esther Vázquez. It also resembles Borges the Professor (2000), a reconstruction of the lectures that the writer gave in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires, where he taught for a decade.

But, unlike those other texts, in the Mar del Plata lecture series, “there’s a more intimate tone,” Blanco points out, “there are many references to personal experience,” anecdotes, mentions of travels, and memories. While summarizing the plot of a work or the details of a life, Borges improvises, translates from memory, and, with or without deliberation, “intervenes creatively.” He even engages in dialogue with the students in some classes, answers their questions, or offers comments to highlight an author’s discovery or dissect a story. “You can see how Borges makes a didactic effort to be understood and to make his classes engaging,” the editor observes. “He’s not a professor on a pedestal, but rather someone trying to bring culturally distant objects closer to an Argentine student.”

Written and spoken words

The Borges who taught in the late 1960s already had 20 years of experience as a speaker; his almost pathological shyness and phobia of public speaking were long gone. Needing the income to support himself — which his own work would only provide toward the end of his life — he had begun giving courses and lectures in the mid-1940s, after resigning from a position as municipal librarian, forced out by the emerging Peronist movement.

“Between 1949 and 1955, we have already confirmed more than 400 lectures by Borges,” Blanco explains. Preparing those talks and classes was, from then on and for years, one of Borges’ main activities: he took notes, studied, read and re-read, outlined his presentations, traveled, spoke… The academic research team that Blanco leads is investigating his oral production as a central part of his work, inseparable from his writing. The topics he discussed could lead to an essay. Or vice versa.

The recently published book El habla de Borges (Borges’s Speech) brings together several articles written as part of this research. In it, Blanco, the editor, argues that behind Borges’ written and spoken expression there lies another central activity: reading. “Ultimately,” she notes, “all his tasks seem to boil down to this: sharing with an audience — more or less distant, more or less direct or mediated — the readings that attracted him and sparked those infinite networks of relationships that intertwine his narratives.” Borges often said that when he managed to convey his love for a book or an author, he felt “justified and happy.”

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