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“The original is incorrect with
respect to translation”
Jorge Luis Borges
An Investigation of the word
Borges’s enthusiasm in translation is obvious as is his theory of the essential role that the
reader plays in the production of literary meaning. This essay aims to summarize the way he
approaches translation via analyzing some articles contributing to that topic. In his article
Bourges brings insights into the psychological process by which we understand a sentence.
He asserts that the reality represented in the words is not visual but sentimental, by giving an
example from the famous work of Cervantes “ Don Quixote”. Being one of the most
influential scholars of the twentieth century, Borges casts doubt on the common practice of
reading a translation as if it were originally written in the translated language. Borges’s states
that every aspect of an original text can differ from the original and may introduce translation
shifts that radically alter the original. He puts the emphasis on representation and the way how
words affect people and indicates that representation does not have syntax. Calling a
translation’s source text a moveable event, Borges tactfully highlights the supremacy of the
readers’ perception in his article.
Jorge Luis Borges
The Argentine author, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), was one of Latin America's most
original and prominent prose writers and poets. Borges’s father had a vast library, which
inspired Jorge Luis Borges throughout his entire life. Jorge Luis Borges read in both Spanish
and English before he was a teenager. His family moved to Switzerland in 1914. In part, the
family moved to seek treatment for Borges’s father who had a degenerative eye condition.
This degenerative condition would also afflict Jorge Luis Borges in his later life. Jorge Luis
Borges continued his education in Switzerland. Borges added French and German to his
linguistic repetoire. In 1918. Borges was awarded a baccalauréat from the College de Geneve.
This diploma indicated that Borges was prepared for university studies. Due to the political
instability in Argentina, the family remained in Europe in 1921. They traveled throughout
both Switzerland and Spain. During this period, Jorge Luis Borges studied the works
of Arthur Schopenhauer, Gustav Meyrink Guillaume Apollinaire, and Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti. Borges became a member of the Ultraist movement in addition to making the
acquaintance of Ramon Gomez de la Serna and Rafael Cansinos Assens. Jorge Luis Borges
died in Geneva in 1986. He was suffering from liver cancer. Jorge Luis Borges translated the
works of Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka,Hermann Hesse, Joseph Rudyard Kipling, William
Faulkner, Andre Gide, Walt Whitman and Virginia Woolf. Borges was also known for literary
hoaxes. Writings in the style of authors such as Emanuel Swedenborg published under the
names of another author. Even Borges legitimate translations have been accused of having
extensive manipulation and liberties taken with them. His literary enterprises included
imagining and reviewing works that do not exist. The most noted piece is Borges “Pierre
Menard, Author of the Quixote.” In this work, Borges imagines an author who creates/re-
creates the work of Miguel de Cervantes. The mercurial nature of the work of Jorge Luis
Borges impacted the production of literature worldwide. Borges’s ability to make the text
aware of itself marked him as one of the preeminent writers of the twentieth century,
especially in developing a new post-modern sensibility
ARTICLES ANALYZING BORGES’S TRANSLATIONS
FAULKNER, BORGES, AND THE TRANSLATION OF THE WILD PALMS:
THE EVOLUTION OF BORGES'S THEORY CONCERNING THE ROLE OF
THE READER IN THE GAME OF LITERATURE
by
Earl E. Fitz and Ezra E. Fitz
Earl E. Fitz and Ezra E. Fitz, have analyzed the theory of the importance of the reader's role
in the creation of a text's meaning and significance in their article printed in Faulkner Journal
in 2008. In Borges's view, "To translate is to produce literature, just as the writing of one's
own work is—and it is more difficult, more rare. In the end all literature is translation" (qtd. in
Kristal, Lnvisible Work 32). According to the writers after scrutinizing both texts carefully
and comparatively, it is evident that his version of The Wild Palms, Las palmeras salvajes,
reflects not a series of isolated translation decisions but a coherent creative vision, one that
must have verified for Borges his growing belief that the discerning reader's mind is the true
site of a text's flowering, both in the original language and, as we will demonstrate in the
course of this study, in its translation as well. In their article they state that Efrain Kristal, and
Gregory Rabassa, and by comparing the original Faulkner text with Borges's transformation
of it, we will argue in this essay that Las palmeras salvajes should be read not merely as an
example of a particularly successful translation by a modern master, but also as the final proof
Borges needed to crystalize in his own mind the most radical feature of his new poetics:
that it is the reading of a text, and not its writing, that truly "creates the
work" and allows it to blossom (Monegal 77). They also believe that, at this
critical juncture in his professional life, Borges used his translation of The Wild
Palms as a model for the development of a new kind of narrative fiction, one
emphasizing the ironically self-referential quality of the two intertwined stories
that comprise the novel, their hallucinatory, or "magical," allure as verbal
artifice, and their disruptions of narrative time and place to concretize his as
yet inchoate ideas about what his own "nueva narrativa," or "new narrative,"
would be like (Monegal 4n4, 247-49; Fitz 1-4,21-22). Las palmeras salvajes, they
contend, should be read in conjunction with "Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quixote" as a crucial part of Borges's narrative revolution, one that depends on
the reader's role in the creative process and on the innumerable ways the act of
translation makes manifest this then daring theory.
They add that Borges's new sense of the reader's importance found its
most concrete realization in the form of the translation he was making. As
the work of the renowned translator and literary scholar Gregory Rabassa has
long demonstrated, a successful translation is really the result of a meticulous
and sensitive reading coupled with a careful, yet never slavish, rewriting of the
original, a point with which Borges, already in 1939, would almost certainly
have agreed {Treason 1-50). The most salient aspect of "Pierre Menard, Author
of the Quixote" is precisely this: that reading is more central to a text's intellectual
"life" than its writing and that, consequently, a reader is more important
to a text than its writer. Of this same creative fusion of reading and writing,
Gabriel Garcia Márquez has written that he regards translation as "the deepest
kind of reading," the kind that an imaginative artist like Borges would have
understood intuitively (25). In transforming The Wild Palms into Las palmeras
salvajes, and in publishing "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" in the same
year, Borges must have felt that his translation of the Faulkner novel amounted
to a validation of his new theory about reading, which, as many critics have
noted, was adroitly scripted into this famous ficción.
They believe that the best way to see the connection between Borges's crafty
translation of The Wild Palms and the refinement of his theory of the importance
of the act of reading is to examine textual examples of the kinds of decisions
that Borges makes as he reads the Faulkner text and seeks to recast it in
twentieth-century Spanish. By concentrating not so much on the specific, isolated
instances where Borges adds to or takes from the original text but on the
kinds, or types, of decisions he makes as he reads and translates it,
Ear Fitz and Ezra Fits focusing not on the traditional
question of whether or not Borges ever makes a "mistake" in his translation
but on the particular reading strategies and lines of interpretation that he
employs in bringing the Faulkner novel to life in Spanish, first in his mind and
then in his translation, they have selected categories for close
comparative consideration three of which are structure, style, and the role of the reader By
examining passages from each of these categories, they display the logic of Borges's
translation decisions and thus more accurately assess the contribution that his translation of
the Faulkner text makes to his new theory about the crucial role that reading plays in
literature.
Form and Structure
According to Earl Fitz and Ezra Fitz we can see that in his translation Borges is faithful to the
self interrogating macrostructure that is so integral to Faulkner's original text. He maintains
the same form, for example, of the two entwining stories ("The Wild Palms" and "Old Man")
that together constitute a ten-narrative sequence in the same alternating order as the original
("The Wild Palms," "Old Man," "The Wild Palms," "Old Man," etc.). As in the original,
Borges does not offer numerical chapter divisions and, again as in the original, he does not
soften or compromise the abrupt transitions between chapters. Borges, moreover, remains true
to the Faulknerian technique of mentioning, or alluding to, a piece of information that remains
mysterious and unexplained until much later in Yet while we can say with confidence that the
Borges translation is faithful to tbe overall structuring of The Wild Palms,'' there are some
notable exceptions, and these point to the way Borges was reading the Faulkner novel and
bow be envisioned be migbt improve it, particularly with respect to dramatic intensity, ironic
intertextual commentary, and readerly involvement. With regard to this last issue, it is
interesting to note tbat Borges, sensitive to what for his readers would have been the very
different culture and language of the rural American South of the 1930s, elects to offer a note
at the bottom of the first page of this chapter that explains to Spanish reader the meaning of
this reference: "Old Man: El Viejo: nombre familiar del río Misisipí (N. Del T.)" (29).'
Style
If structuring is generally a success story for the Borges translation, his struggle with the
intensely regional diction of The Wild Palms is more fraught with problems, not to the point
of failure but, more importantly, in ways that highlight the linguistic differences between
English and Spanish, their respective strengths and weaknesses. In the opening line of the
passage just cited, for example, Faulkner, in a line bristling with problems for the
reader/translator, writes, '"I reckon that means it [the levee] will bust tonight,' one convict
said" {WP 26). Borges translates this seemingly simple but, for the translator, very
complicated utterance by writing, "—Eso quiere decir que van a reventar esta noche—dijo
uno de los penados" (PS 36).
While most, if not all, these terms likely would have been understood by
educated Spanish language readers in 1940, a more problematic example is the
word "moccasin," from the fifth section of "Old Man." A kind of poisonous
snake common to the bayous and waterways of the South, the moccasin is the
specific kind of serpent the convict and his pregnant female charge encounter
as they battle the swiftly rising waters of the Mississippi River during the great
flood of 1927. Later in the same section, Faulkner's convict speaks again about
another moccasin but this time refers to it merely as ''just another snake" ( WP
193). In both instances, however, and in all subsequent references to this particular
animal, Borges translates the word "moccasin" as "serpiente," a tactic
which, owing to the Latin roots of both Spanish and English and alluding to
the danger lurking within the Garden of Eden, serves him well with "serpent"
but not so well with "moccasin," an Indian word which, in the Faulkner text,
resonates with tremendous regional specificity and mythic intensity {PS 247,
249)." And in the famous line where Faulkner has one of his characters appear
to allude, in the process of making a rather bizarre toast, to Ernest Hemingway,
"'Yah,' McCord said. 'Set, ye armourous sons, in a sea of hemingwaves,'"
Borges writes: " —Si —dijo Me Cor Another theory that needs to be considered,they feel, is
that Borges, in recognizing the shortcomings of The Wild Palms, chose to translate it precisely
because he felt this was the one Faulkner text that he felt he could make better in
"See also Waggoner 145. In discussing The Wild Palms, Waggoner observes that, in this
novel, "the reader must do part of the work which the novelist normally does for him" (145).
Before one rejects this possibility as translation heresy, one should
remember that this attitude about translation—that the translator bas the right
to improve a text (indeed, be bas an obligation to do so if be feels the original
text bas tbe potential to become a superior work of literary art)—guided
Borges's creative approach to translation work. Like Novalis (who, very strategically
and, one presumes, for the reader's benefit, is actually mentioned in
"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"), Borges believed the translator "could
reshape and improve an original" and that, important for our argument here,
"[a] translation can be more faithful to the work of literature than the original
wben the original fails to fulfill its own potentialities and latencies," which may
well have been bow Borges viewed The Wild Palms (Kristal, Invisible Work 31,
Mirror, Mask, Labyrinth
by Susan Steward
July 19/26, 2010
A lifelong admirer of the philosophy of Berkeley and Schopehauer, Borges had little time for
either empiricism or the conventions of realism. As he continually drew on legends,
attenuated out of a vanished origin and stating realities that may or may not be true, he
also turned to dreams, which at least brought him the paradoxical certainty of not being true—
except when they came true, as he so often believed they so often did. He therefore
particularly loved legends of dreaming, such as the story of the Chinese philosopher
Zhuangzi, who dreams he is a butterfly and awakens to find he is himself, and then wonders if
in truth he is Zhuangzi who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he is
Zhuangzi. And he liked to cite the long poem “The Conference of the Birds,” by the
Persian mystic Farid ud-Din Attar ; in it a group of birds traverse seven valleys in
pursuit of the Simurgh, king of all birds. They gradually discover “they are the Simurgh and
that the Simurgh is each one and all of them.” Themes of the inter-relatedness of all beings
and all destinies, of the other becoming the self, seemed to both frighten and console
Borges throughout his life. He testified that he was haunted from early childhood by three
nightmares: the mirror, the mask and the labyrinth. He writes in “Mirrors,” also translated by
Reid, of the anxieties of proliferation that such reflections produce:
I look on them as infinite, elemental fulfillers of a very ancient pact to multiply the world, as
in the act of generation, sleepless and dangerous. In a poem from 1942, “Of Heaven and
Hell,” here in a translation by Reid, Borges describes the terrible over determination of
the beloved’s, and one’s own, face: When Judgment Day sounds in the last trumpets
and planet and millennium both disintegrate, and all at once, O Time, all your ephemeral
pyramids cease to be, the colors and the lines that trace the past will in the semidarkness form
a face, a sleeping face, faithful, still, unchangeable (the face of the loved one, or,perhaps, your
own) and the sheer contemplation of that face—
never-changing, whole, beyond
corruption—
will be, for the rejected, an Inferno,
and, for the elected, Paradise.
Displacing the mask: Jorge Luis Borges and the
translation of narrative
Leah Elizabeth Leone
University of Iowa2011
Borges develops the idea that the artist's marginality is a prerequisite for his universality. "I
believe that we Argentines, we South Americans in general [. . .] can handle
all European themes, handle them without superstition, with an irreverence which can have,
and already does have, fortunate consequences" (Labyrinths, p. 184).^ Borges compares the
situation of Argentines (of Latin Americans in general) to that of Jews with respect to
Western culture, or Irish writers with respect to English literature—feeling marginal, he
claims, enables them to be innovative. For Borges, the real measure of a translation's
success is the cross-cultural encounter it allows:
Many instances of increased suspense and danger in the text are carried out through
Borges’s exchanging of roles between Charlotte and Harry, suggesting a fundamental
relationship the translator makes between gender and genre. When abandoning her family in
New Orleans for Chicago, Charlotte’s husband accompanies the couple to the train, and stays
on board for several stops, giving his wife one last chance to change her mind. One stop
before the station at which Rittenmeyer (nicknamed Rat) intends to depart the train, Charlotte
asks Harry if she may go speak with him. Harry is confused by the question, finding it absurd
that she should ask permission to speak to her own husband. He imagines Charlotte may be
thinking of going back to him, and that if she turns to look at him, she is actually saying
goodbye:
“Can I go back and speak to him a minute?”
“Can you go?—”
“Hammond is the next station.”
Why, he’s your husband, he was about to say but caught himself… But
she had already risen and passed him; he thought, If she stops and
looks back at me it will mean she is thinking, ‘Later I can always
know that at least I told him good-bye’ and she did stop and they
In the Spanish version, a very different scene occurs. When Charlotte asks permission
to see her husband, Harry coldly grants it, but, in a displacement of Charlotte’s words to his
mouth, reminds her that the next station is the one at which Rittenmeyer will be leaving the
train, as if warning her not to get off the train with him. When Charlotte walks away, Harry
does not imagine what she is thinking, but only that she is thinking:
—¿Puedo ir un momento a hablarle, un minuto?
—Puedes… Hammond es la próxima estación.
Pero es tu marido, estuvo a punto de decir, pero se contuvo… Pero
Carlota se había levantado y seguía adelante; él pensó: Si se para y me
mira querrá decir que está pensando. Más tarde sabré que al menos le
dije adiós, y se detuvo y se miraron y ella siguió. (54, emphasis in the
original)
In the Spanish, Harry holds back his anger rather than his confusion by not stating “pero es tu
marido.” Borges splits the last sentence into two; what Harry imagined Charlotte might be
thinking has become his own thoughts in the Spanish. He nonchalantly notes that at least he
said goodbye, staunchly bracing himself for Charlotte not to return.
Charlotte does not get off the train with Rat but follows through with her intention of
running away with Harry. When she comes back to her seat, she is worried Rat may get back
on the train, completely wearing away her defenses. Determined to leave him, she says to
Harry that her relationship with her husband must be severed—she and Harry must
immediately make love for the first time, dissolving her tie to Rat once and for all; she
subsequently orders him to change their seats to a private cabin.
“So you came back,” he said.
“You didn’t think I was. Neither did I.”
“But you did.”
“Only it’s not finished. If he were to get back on the train, with a ticket
to Slidell—” She turned, staring at him though she did not touch him.
“It’s not finished. It will have to be cut.” (53)
Again, in Spanish, Harry takes on an air of authority and coldness more appropriate to
detective fiction. His “so you came back” takes on an ironic tone when his sentimental
rejoinder, “but you did” is removed. Usurping Charlotte’s words, and consequently the
dominant role in the relationship, Harry takes the lead and demands Charlotte’s relationship
with her husband end:
—Así que has vuelto —dijo él.
—Tú no lo creías, ni yo tampoco.
—Pero no hemos concluido. Si vuelve al tren con un billete hasta
Slidell.
Se dio vuelta mirándolo pero sin tocarlo.
—No hemos concluido. Hay que darle un corte. (54)
There is no indication of who says the last line, but as it is he who contends “no hemos
concluido,” all evidence points to Harry demanding the “corte” with Rittenmeyer.
Furthermore, Harry’s concern that Rat get back on the train suggests male competition, a
potential duel, which is a necessary element of the detective genre Borges seeks to evoke.
Conclusion
Borges wrote in almost every genre and category ranging from fiction to non-fiction, poetry,
literary theory and history. Contrary to the traditional view in translation, he didn’t consider
translation as a replacement and substitute, but viewed it as the original fresh writing. For him
it is salient to take the readers into consideration; they are as equally as important as the
author. Because they are the ones who are going to interpret what they are reading. He used to
deal with paradoxical issues which made him question most of the ideas. What really made
him different from other translators in his translations was the way he considered translation
as a rewrite, which meant producing another work.
References
http://authorscalendar.info/jlborges.htm
Earl E. Fitz and Ezra E. Fitz. Faulkner, Borges and The Translation of the Wild Palms:The
Evolution of Borges’s Theory Concerning the Role of the Reader in the Game of Literature.
Johnson Christpher. Intertextuality and Translation:Borges, Browne, and Quevedo,
Translation and Literature 11(2002)
Mirror, Mask, LabyrinthJuly 19/26, 2010 Susan Steward
Leah Elizabeth Leone, Displacing the mask: Jorge Luis Borges and the translation of narrative, University of Iowa(2011)