Borges and Kafka: Sons and Writers by Sarah Roger (review)

The grounds for comparison of this superb study on Borges and Kafka are incontrovertible. As Sarah Roger's usefully annotated bibliography makes clear, Jorge Luis Borges wrote sixty-five pieces that mention or discuss Kafka, beginning in 1935 and ending in 1995 (131–48). Her first appendix lists all of the stories by Kafka that Borges "mentioned by name, reviewed or translated" (149). In her multiply sectioned bibliography, there are two sections of Borges's translations of Kafka: the first lists eleven translations of Kafka attributed to Borges alone; the second lists seven translations of Kafka attributed to Borges in collaboration with others, usually Adolfo Bioy Casares. She has also done her homework in the secondary literature concerning criticism that focuses specifically on Borges and Kafka. Here she lists thirty-four essays (two of which are hers), seven dissertations, and three books. A more general section on secondary sources lists interpretations of Kafka, general studies of Borges, biographical studies, and books and essays on the question of influence in literature. She includes a section on Kafka that takes in his works published in German, as well as translations into English. She cites from editions of Kafka's works that Borges "would most likely have read" (xiii).

Roger begins by stating that she has followed the model set by Humberto Núñez-Faraco's Borges and Dante: Echoes of a Literary Friendship (2006) and by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán's Borges and Joyce: An Infinite Conversation (2011). A more influential model, surely, is a work she does not mention: Riccardo Ricceri's Dante e il dantismo immanente nell' opera di Jorge Luis Borges.¹ In the subjects and sequence of the individual chapters, as well as in the subjects and sequence of the various bibliographies, Ricceri's and Roger's books are remarkably similar.

In his essay, "The Task of the Translator," Walter Benjamin famously asserts that it is the translation, not the original text, which secures the afterlife of the original. I would amend that to say that it is primarily the uses to which the original text is put by later authors that secures the afterlife of that text or author. By using Kafka to the extent he does, Borges secures Kafka's afterlife in Latin America, though that was probably not his original intention. Borges had a similar relationship with the work of Joyce and Dante. He also translated, for example, Whitman, G. K. Chesterton, and Snorri Sturluson, in addition to German expressionist poets, as Efraín Kristal documents in his 2002 book, Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Answering a request for biographical information to publicize a lecture in 1953, Borges introduced himself as, first, "the translator of Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and Henri Michaud" (Kristal xi). The story goes that Borges practiced the art of translation from the age of nine when he translated Oscar Wilde's short story, "The Happy Prince," subsequently published in the Argentinian newspaper El País in 1910. In my mind, however, Borges is, more than anything else, what I call a "referential author": he writes by referencing other authors, texts, and ideas.

Borges's relationship with his mother, Leonor Acevedo de Borges, does not receive Roger's sustained attention. She is mentioned by name a total of six times in the book, discussed in two pages and then largely "put to one side" (16). In Buenos Aires, it was generally assumed that Borges's mother was the most important person in his life, all the more so after the death of his father and after Borges fils went blind, for it was she who read to him, took his dictation, worked with him on translations, and accompanied him to conferences and other public events. I myself remember being told by a colleague, before interviewing Borges in the spring of 1976 for Philosophy and Literature,² that, since his mother had died the previous year at age ninety...