“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)