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Chapter 2: Borges as Translator
- Vanderbilt University Press
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36 chapter 2 Borges as Translator Admirals, soldiers, statesmen, moved her not at all. But the very thought of a great writer stirred her to such a pitch of belief that she almost believed him to be invisible. —Virginia Woolf O ne of Borges’s first literary exercises, as a seven-year-old boy, was a translation of sorts.1 He filled a notebook with transcriptions of Greco-Roman myths in the charmingly clumsy English of a gifted child learning to write in a foreign language .2 In his version of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth, a theme that would inspire some of his most famous pages, the young Borges retains several names in Spanish, as if he felt a special affection for their sound in the language in which he first heard them, even as their stories could be transposed into a language he was learning (before he had mastered its grammar or spelling): When Theseo was young, his father went to another country and was made king, liveing nothing to his son but his sword and sandles. One day his mother gave him the sandles and sword. So he went in serch, in serch of his father. Soon he went there, and soon find himself in his father’s castle. There have had been a war in Creta and Thepas, and Creta was victory , Dedalo made a great laberinto, on which live the moster called minotauro.3 Borges as Translator 37 The versions are not mere transcriptions. At this tender age they already include personal additions such as a touching lament in his version of Acteon’s death: “Oh Action, why did you went to look at Diana?” Borges learned early that the vicissitudes of a translation are subject to the accidents of language. In his first published work—a translation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” published in a Buenos Aires newspaper in 1910—we find such a surprise.4 In the original a male swallow loves a fickle female reed-bird. Borges translates swallow as “la golondrina,” using the female article “la,” which does not determine the gender of the bird as there is no masculine alternative for the word. It would, however, sound awkward and technical in Spanish to use the female article to refer to a male swallow and would be poetically unsound. Spanish poetry invariably represents swallows as female. The young Borges transforms Wilde’s male swallow into a female swallow, and the female reed-bird into a male bird. Whatever his reasons, and we shall examine some possibilities below, the young Borges imposes in his translation a set of connotations —regarding the friendship of the Happy Prince and the swallow and their shared kiss—that distinguishes the translation, where the swallow is female, from the original, where it is male. BORGES DISCUSSED Wilde’s children’s stories in the prologue to a 1966 illustrated edition containing “The Happy Prince.” The book circulated in Latin America in a collection of classics for young people, including modified versions of Don Quixote, The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, Robinson Crusoe, and the stories of Shakespeare ’s plays. Borges’s observations on the pitfalls of translating Wilde may have been lost on most young readers, for whom the collection was intended: “[Wilde] gravely assured his friends he had conceived one of his tales in black and silver, and yet the French translation had come out blue and rose.” Borges proceeds to quote Wilde’s own remark about “a change that reveals the greater capacity of the English language [than the French] to express somber tonalities.”5 Borges alerts his readers to the layers of meaning in Wilde’s tales: “At first we let ourselves go with the plot, we then feel the pleasantry, the tenderness, the jest, the delicate play of con- [35.172.231.232] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:28 GMT) 38 Invisible Work trasts, and finally perhaps the secret irony.”6 Borges concludes his prologue praising Wilde’s “perennial youth, and the splendor of his malicious innocence.”7 A Spanish version of “The Happy Prince,” included in the volume with Borges’s prologue but not translated by him, renders the tenderness of the original but not its “secret irony” or “malicious innocence.” In the sanitized translation the veiled love story between the two male protagonists is eradicated by transforming the male swallow of the original into a female swallow.8 Even the earnest declaration “you must kiss me on the lips, for...