At some point in my early years of studying Old English, I ran across Jorge Luis Borges’s “Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf”. The sonnet begins with the speaker asking himself why he was moved to study “the language of the harsh Saxons”, despite having little hope of precision or success. Now, he reflects, even the words which he once arduously repeated are escaping his memory. As I struggled to memorize Germanic words that simply would not stick in my head, my fingers dirtying the edges of J. R. Clark Hall’s Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary with repeated flipping, I was relieved to see that someone as great as Borges had faced the same frustrations.

I was nineteen. The rest of the poem, in which the speaker reflects on the weaving and unweaving of his own life’s history, meant less to me. Why learn a difficult, perhaps a doomed, language? Borges’s answer is to tell himself that the soul might know that it can encompass everything, do everything. “Beyond my anxiety and beyond this writing”, ends the poem in Alastair Reid’s translation, “the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.” Now forty-three, I distinguish between languages I will not be able to learn in this lifetime and those I might still have a chance at. I’m comforted by the idea that my intellectual limitations might be outpaced by the infinity of my soul.

In his memoir With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires (1993), the American poet Willis Barnstone describes sitting in on Borges’s private Old English lessons. The year is 1975, and on Sunday afternoons Borges takes a walk and then settles on his couch to lead an impromptu class that covers texts in Old English and Old Norse, as well as readings of modern authors such as Poe or Hawthorne. A former student, Pablo, assists the blind author by holding the book and pointing to the lines being translated, “as if Borges can see and decipher the words”. Barnstone assumes Borges has memorized most of the material. The mood is electric and full of laughter.

“Why did you take up the language of these barbaric crude northeners?”, Borges’s mother would ask him, according to Barnstone, “Why not Greek, the tongue of a civilized people?” The answer was that Borges was fond of barbarians, outlaws and gauchos and the rough lands they inhabit. My own mother, when she learnt...