It is well known that Jorge Luis Borges was a translator, but this
has been considered a curious minor aspect of his literary
achievement. Few have been aware of the number of texts he
translated, the importance he attached to this activity, or the
extent to which the translated works inform his own stories and
poems.
Between the age of ten, when he translated Oscar Wilde, and the
end of his life, when he prepared a Spanish version of the Prose
Edda, Borges transformed the work of Poe, Kafka, Hesse, Kipling,
Melville, Gide, Faulkner, Whitman, Woolf, Chesterton, and many
others. In a multitude of essays, lectures, and interviews Borges
analyzed the versions of others and developed an engaging view
about translation. He held that a translation can improve an
original, that contradictory renderings of the same work can be
equally valid, and that an original can be unfaithful to a
translation.
Borges's bold habits as translator and his views on translation
had a decisive impact on his creative process. Translation is also
a recurrent motif in Borges's stories. In "The Immortal," for
example, a character who has lived for many centuries regains
knowledge of poems he had authored, and almost forgotten, by way of
modern translations. Many of Borges's fictions include actual or
imagined translations, and some of his most important characters
are translators. In "Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote,"
Borges's character is a respected Symbolist poet, but also a
translator, and the narrator insists that Menard's masterpiece-his
"invisible work"-adds unsuspected layers of meaning to Cervantes's
"Don Quixote." George Steiner cites this short story as "the most
acute, most concentrated commentary anyone has offered on the
business of translation."
In an age where many discussions of translation revolve around
the dichotomy faithful/unfaithful, this book will surprise and
delight even Borges's closest readers and critics.
General
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