George Borrow: The Man and His Books

by Edward Thomas

Sir Richard Phillips was particularly flattering: he used Borrow’s article on “Danish Poetry and Ballad Writing” and about six hundred lines of translation from German, Danish, Swedish and Dutch poetry in the first year of the connection, usually with the signature, “George Olaus

Borrow.” I will quote only one specimen, his version of Goethe’s “Erl King” (“Monthly Magazine,” December, 1823):

Who is it that gallops so late on the wild!
O it is the father that carries his child!
He presses him close in his circling arm,
To save him from cold, and to shield him from harm.

“Dear baby, what makes ye your countenance hide?”
“Spur, father, your courser and rowel his side;
The Erl-King is chasing us over the heath;”
“Peace, baby, thou seest a vapoury wreath?”

“Dear boy, come with me, and I’ll join in your sport,
And show ye the place where the fairies resort;
My mother, who dwells in the cool pleasant mine
Shall clothe thee in garments so fair and so fine.”

“My father, my father, in mercy attend,
And hear what is said by the whispering fiend.”
“Be quiet, be quiet, my dearly-loved child;
’Tis naught but the wind as it stirs in the wild.”

“Dear baby, if thou wilt but venture with me,
My daughter shall dandle thy form on her knee;
My daughter, who dwells where the moon-shadows play,
Shall lull ye to sleep with the song of the fay.”

“My father, my father, and seest thou not
His sorceress daughter in yonder dark spot?”
“I see something truly, thou dear little fool,—
I see the great alders that hang by the pool.”

“Sweet baby, I doat on that beautiful form,
And thou shalt ride with me the wings of the storm.”
“O father, my father, he grapples me now,
And already has done me a mischief, I vow.”

The father was terrified, onward he press’d,
And closer he cradled the child to his breast,
And reach’d the far cottage, and, wild with alarm,
He found that the baby hung dead on his arm!

The only criticism that need be passed on this is that any man of some intelligence and patience can hope to do as well: he seldom wrote any verse that was either much better or much worse. At the same time it must not be

forgotten that the success of the translation is no measure of the impression made on the young Borrow by the legend.

His translations from Ab Gwilym are not interesting either to lovers of that poet or to lovers of Borrow: some are preserved in a sort of life in death in the pages of “Wild Wales.”

From the German he had also translated F. M. Von Klinger’s “Faustus: his life, death and descent into hell.” [{75a}] The preface announces that “although scenes of vice and crime are here exhibited, it is merely in the hope that they may serve as beacons, to guide the ignorant and unwary from the shoals on which they might otherwise be wrecked.” He insisted, furthermore, that the book contained “the highly useful advice,” that everyone should bear their lot in patience and not seek “at the expense of his repose to penetrate into those secrets which the spirit of man, while dressed in the garb of mortality cannot and must not unveil. . . . To the mind of man all is dark; he is an enigma to himself; let him live, therefore, in the hope of once seeing clearly; and happy indeed is he who in that manner passeth his days.”

From the Danish of Johannes Evald, he translated “The Death of Balder,” a play, into blank verse with consistently feminine endings, as in this speech of Thor to Balder: [{75b}]

How long dost think, degenerate son of Odin,
Unmanly pining for a foolish maiden,
And all the weary train of love-sick follies,
Will move a bosom that is steel’d by virtue?
Thou dotest! Dote and weep, in tears swim ever;
But by thy father’s arm, by Odin’s honour,
Haste, hide thy tears and thee in shades of alder!
Haste to the still, the peace-accustom’d valley,
Where lazy herdsmen dance amid the clover.
There wet each leaf which soft the west wind kisses,
Each plant which breathes around voluptuous odours,
With tears! There sigh and moan, and the tired peasant
Shall hear thee, and, behind his ploughshare resting,
Shall wonder at thy grief, and pity Balder!

There are lyrics interspersed. The following is sung by three Valkyries marching round the cauldron before Rota dips the fatal spear that she is to present to Hother: