Invisible Work: Borges and Translation/Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery

Romanic Review, Mar-May 2007 by Dove, Patrick

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Efraín Kristal. Invisible Work: Borges and Translation, Vanderbilt University Press: Nashville, 2002. Pp. 213.

Sergio Waisman. Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery, Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory Series; Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005. Pp. 267.

Questions about translation represented a life-long preoccupation for Jorge Luis Borges. His first foray into the practice of translation, as recounted by his mother, was a version of Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince" published in the Buenos Aires newspaper El país when Borges was nine years old. However, it was not until very recently that scholars began to acknowledge the importance of translation for a broader critical understanding of both Borges's career as a writer and of his contributions to literary modernity. Efraín Kristal's Invisible Work: Borges and Translation (Vanderbilt University Press, 2002) and Sergio Waisman's Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery (Bucknell University Press, 2005) are the first book-length studies of Borges and translation, and as such they represent much-needed contributions to Borges criticism. Waisman's book is part of the "Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory" series, edited by Aníbal González, which has made a number of important contributions to rethinking the relation between Latin American literature and literary theory in recent years.

Kristal and Waisman share the premise that translation represents more than just one literary activity among many, and both view Borges as dispelling the common view of translation as an inferior form of production. In Novalis's praise for August Schlegel's translation of Shakespeare, Kristal locates what could serve as a shared epigraph for these two studies: "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" (as quoted in Kristal, p. 32). This statement presents a counterpoint to the oft-repeated warning "traduttore traditore" and a counterpoint to the idea that translation should be judged according to the fidelity it maintains (or fails to maintain) to the original. If Borges helps us to see that, when everything is said and done, all literature is in fact translation, then it would seem that Borges also obliges us to reexamine what we understand by "literature" and "translation" as such.

Despite this common point of departure, the approaches taken by Kristal and Waisman differ in several important ways. For one, Kristal proposes to discuss Borges as a writer who engages freely with a broad range of classical and modern texts, unencumbered by the "peripheral" status often attributed to those writing in Latin America. Translation provides the truth of "original" creative writing regardless of when and where it is produced: Borges's fictions and essays emphasize repeatedly that artistic novelty derives not from a pure origin but from repetition and creative transformation of literary history-of ideas, figures and stories taken from other traditions. Waisman, on the other hand, develops his argument by emphasizing the motif of Borges as peripheral writer. According to this view, Borges emphasizes the "marginal" stigma in order to turn it into an advantage. The peripheral space of Argentina provides access as well as critical distance, allowing a writer like Borges to question presuppositions which a cosmopolitan writer might regard as eternal truths-or not even stop to consider at all. "Irreverence" functions as the master term in Waisman's study, naming Borges's keen sense of humor in relation to the sacred truths of the Western tradition as well as his subtle attacks on its sacred ideas and assumptions. It may be that one could arrive at a provisional point of agreement between these two critical perspectives by recalling Roberto Fernandez Retamar's remark that no (or at least very few) European writer(s) can claim to possess Borges's vast familiarity with the Western tradition. It could only occur to one who has been branded a "colonial" writer to aspire to an encyclopedic knowledge of the tradition.

Kristal's book contains three central chapters. The first chapter discusses Borges's views on translation. It begins with a paraphrase of one of Borges's more provocative statements: in certain cases it so happens that the original work proves to be "unfaithful" to its translation. This seemingly absurd claim sheds light on Borgesian literary aesthetics. For one, it stands on its head the usual criteria for judging translation, suggesting that translation should be evaluated not for its likeness to the original but instead for the way it takes advantage of new aesthetic possibilities that arise in crossing from one language to another. Borges's assertion also implies that what distinguishes literature from other uses of language does not reside in (or at least cannot be reduced to) the ideas or concepts that literature might be presumed to convey: after all, if literary language were reducible to a concern for its meaning, then the question of fidelity would be unavoidable when it comes to translation. Above and beyond meaning, literary writing mobilizes another sense of communication: as the transmission or passing-on of affect (my term, not Kristal's). It is whether literature moves us or not that determines its success or failure. In this light, Kristal emphasizes the important point that Borges's views on translation remain difficult to categorize as being for or against any particular artistic position. If Borges clearly rejects fidelity as a standard for evaluating a translation, he does not advocate infidelity for its own sake. Nor does he view "loose" translations as necessarily superior to "literal" translations. Borges finds the merit of a given translation in its ability to surprise us by producing new aesthetic effects that were untapped in the original. Surprise, however, can only happen where calculation overshoots its mark. For instance, Kristal describes Borges's comment that in certain cases an overly literal translation (such as when the phrase ... is translated literally as "Song of Songs" instead of for its implied meaning as "The Highest Song") can generate its own strange kind of beauty. In his 1951 essay "La muralla y los libros," Borges describes the aesthetic act as "a revelation that does not take place" [una revelacion que no se produce]. Perhaps this idea of an event that does not take place could also characterize what happens in translation, in so far as the passage from one language to another introduces an uncanny excess or gap between two scenes.