Professor Borges, a new translation of an English literature course the author taught in 1966, reveals a writer who brushed off Beowulf and Shakespeare but was “unexpectedly stirred by the Saxon elegies of the ninth and tenth centuries”:
These are not poems of battle but personal poems of solitude and sadness. “The Seafarer,” for instance, has a startling opening that anticipates centuries of literature to
come, including, most obviously, Walt Whitman: “I will sing a true song of me myself and tell of my travels.” Borges delights in the unselfconscious, colloquial way that, later in the poem, the poet describes a snowstorm from the north: “Hail fell on the earth, coldest of seeds.” This metaphorical pairing of opposites is new—hail summons death, seeds summon life—yet one doesn’t feel the poet straining for effect; it just seems to be the way he saw it.
The most remarkable of the elegies is the second part of “The Dream of the Rood,” when the tree from which the cross was made to crucify Christ speaks to us directly. The wood of the felled tree is sentient and alive. It tells us its story, it asks for forgiveness, and we feel the extraordinary imaginative newness of the poet becoming the voice of a tree. There is nothing pious or dutifully Christian about this part of the poem. It is the voice of the earth itself, expressing a torn sorrow. “The cross trembles when it feels Christ’s embrace,” remarks Borges. “It is as if the cross were Christ’s woman, his wife; the cross shares the pain of the crucified God.” What captivates Borges is the apparent purity of feeling in these verses, the sense that the writers are unaware of the originality of their poems. “They were forcing an iron language, an epic language, to say something for which that language had not been forged—to express sadness and personal loneliness. But they managed to do it.”
(Image of The Ruthwell Cross, an 18-foot-tall, free standing 8th-century Anglo-Saxon cross, on which part of “The Dream of the Rood” is inscribed, via Wikimedia Commons)
The Dish 
