Burning Words

 It is a bit of a day again so we are staying put.  As a filler, let’s talk about George Borrow.



Borrow was born in East Dereham in 1803. His father was a lieutenant in the West Norfolk Militia and an Army recruiting officer.  He followed his father from post to post being educated in Royal High School of Edinburgh and Norwich Grammar School and horse riding, Greek, Latin and a bit of Irish.   



The gift for languages led Borrow into the world of translations.  His first  translation, Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's version of the Faust legend, entitled Faustus, his Life, Death and Descent into Hell, first published in St Petersburg in 1791. In his translation, Borrow altered the name of one city as follows. ‘They found the people of the place modelled after so unsightly a pattern, with such ugly figures and flat features that the devil owned he had never seen them equalled, except by the inhabitants of an English town, called Norwich, when dressed in their Sunday's best.’


For this work the Norwich public subscription library burned his first publication.



Borrow is in the tradition of Brits abroad who fall in love and over romanticise the people he meets.  He went to Russia to translate the Bible into Manchu - as you do.  Once more sent by the Bible Society, he went to Spain in 1835 as an agent.  This ended with the writing of  ‘The Bible in Spain’ in 1843.  Borrow translated the Gospel of Luke into Romani and Basque. Here is a sample of his work.



‘[T]he huge population of Madrid, with the exception of a sprinkling of foreigners... is strictly Spanish, though a considerable portion are not natives of the place. Here are no colonies of Germans, as at Saint Petersburg; no English factories, as at Lisbon; no multitudes of insolent Yankees lounging through the streets, as at the Havannah, with an air which seems to say, the land is our own whenever we choose to take it; but a population which, however strange or wild, and composed of various elements, is Spanish, and will remain so as long as the city itself shall exist.’




Returning to Blighty Borrow married and restricted his travels to the Celtic Fringes.  This resulted in a single book ‘Wild Wales’.  He died in 1881 and is buried in Brompton Cemetery. 


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