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the great Borrow

 

the great Borrow

07/07/09 10:11

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Federer's triumph on Sunday nearly eclipsed the birthday of the great linguist and travel writer George Borrow. But in the afternoon I took my copy of Wild Wales down from the shelf and carried it out to the pool (where a man sitting under an umbrella talked hospitals with a woman standing in the shallow end the way other people talk restaurants: "You can't beat Holy Cross." "Oh, I love the Cleveland Clinic.").

Borrow is best known for The Bible in Spain, an account of his five years in Iberia - "the most happy of my existence" he wrote in the book's preface - working for the Bible Society. He spoke not only Spanish - he picked up languages the way other people pick up change - but the language of the Gypsies in Andalusia, whose company he enjoyed and whose culture he penetrated as few English speakers had.

Wild Wales is the account of a trip he took in the summer of 1854 with his wife and stepdaughter. He of course had learned Welsh, and read the national poets in the original, and rambling around the place (often after getting the women comfortably settled in an inn) he talked to everybody, an antecedent of Paul Theroux who once used the verb "buttonhole" to describe the travel writer's modus operandi.

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9 comments

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Thanks for this short but oh-so-useful piece, which we referenced in the August 27 Blog of Kevin Dolgin.
My personal input here is that I read Lavengro and Romany Rye as a teenager, and never got over it!
Best of all possible regards,
Pat Hartman
News Editor, The Blog of Kevin Dolgin

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