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

Romanic Review, Mar-May 2007 by Dove, Patrick

Chapter Two discusses a number of the works which Borges himself translated, either in whole or in part. This diverse list includes poems, short stories and fragments of novels by Chesterton, Poe, Whitman, Woolf, Angelus Silesius, several German expressionist poets, Hesse, Kafka, The Arabian Nights, and the Skaldic poetry of the Prose Edda. Kristal provides examples of various forms of alteration (condensations, omissions and strategic rewritings) carried out by Borges in his translations. He also mentions that certain translations, such as those of German expressionist poetry, played an important role in shaping the intellectual scene in Argentina during Borges's time. In this respect, Kristal's study might have been enriched by a more sustained analysis of contextual questions. It would seem that Borges's work as a translator, together with his reflections on problems of translation in his own writing, could make a valuable contribution to the study-initiated by Beatriz Sarlo and others-of how Borges intervenes in the conflict between tradition and modernity in Argentina.

The third chapter of Invisible Work enumerates the thematic presence of translation in Borges's fiction, while also demonstrating that a number of Borges's fictions are in fact re-writings of other stories ("La muerte y la briijula," for instance, is a re-writing of both Poe's "The Purloined Letter" and London's "The Minions of Midas"). The examples presented in this chapter pose intriguing questions about the relation between the fantastic and credulity (how do literary fantasies manage to convince us at some level even when they make no pretense of following realistic codes of representation?), and about narrative order and disorder, or the literary effects of non sequitur and discontinuity. This chapter also raises some questions that could be further developed. For instance, Kristal notes that "one of the most common openings of a Borges fiction is a short text by a narrator who introduces a translated manuscript constituting the body of the story. . . . As in Cervantes, Borges's narrators are often not in a better position than the reader to understand the contents of the text they have decided to offer to a reading public" (97). One wonders if the prototypical gesture of placing translation at the threshold of the text could shed new light on Borges's thinking about literary history, or about the constitution of what we call "literature" in accordance with the historical emergence of certain concepts, both legal (copyright laws) and philosophical (the subject defined as the origin of its representations, as the one who signs, etc.). By the same token, a narrator calling attention to the fallibility of memory (as Kristal describes in the same passage cited above) is also a recognizable Borgesian trope. What do these characteristic pronouncements, which often appear at the origin of the narrator's relato, attesting to a lacuna or gap between the speaking subject and recollection, tell us about Borges's understanding of subjectivity, language and the narrative act?