Invisible Work: Borges and Translation

Chapter 1: Borges on Translation

1 chapter 1 Borges on Translation It must be visible, or invisible, Invisible or visible or both. —Wallace Stevens B orges affirmed, in earnest, that an original can be unfaithful to a translation. He vehemently objected to claims that certain translations he admired are “true to the original” and derided the presuppositions of purists for whom all translations are necessarily deceitful in one way or another. Borges would often protest , with various degrees of irony, against the assumption—ingrained in the Italian adage traduttore traditore—that a translator is a traitor to an original. He referred to it alternatively as a superstition or pun. For Borges the Italian expression, unfairly prejudiced in favor of the original, is an erroneous generalization that conflates difference with treachery. The idea that literary translations are inherently inferior to their originals is, for Borges, based on the false assumption that some works of literature must be assumed definitive. But for Borges, no such thing as a definitive work exists, and therefore, a translator’s inevitable transformation of the original is not necessarily to the detriment of the work. Difference, for Borges, is not a sufficient criterion for the superiority of the original. Those who demand that a translated text be different from the original and yet reproduce the original’s every nuance and detail assume that a work of literature has some sort of religious or legal status, as if a literary work were like the Bible, a sacred text dic- 2 Invisible Work tated to “copyists by the Holy Spirit.”1 Those for whom an original work has the status of scripture might assume that the alteration of a single detail of the literary work (such as the numerical value that the kabbalists attribute to every Hebrew letter) is akin to mutilating a binding clause in a legal document. In a sense they would hold the literary translator up to an impossible, misleading standard. A translation cannot be identical to its original and claim to be a translation, and the differences between a translation and its original are not necessarily betrayals. A legal clause is not mutilated when a translator finds appropriate equivalencies for the sake of judicial clarity; and the literary qualities of a work are not mutilated when a translator modifies the original to reproduce artistic effects that would otherwise be lost. For Borges, condemning a literary translation because it is not identical to the original is as unfair as condemning the translation of a contract because its equivalencies are not literary. A translator rewrites a sequence of words with a different sequence of words. The unavoidable changes that any translation presents vis-à-vis its original are, in and of themselves, insufficient grounds for claiming a translation is either dishonest or inferior to the original. Borges was certain that a translation could enrich or surpass an original and that one of the most fertile of all literary experiences is a comparative survey of the versions of a work. Borges thought of the original as a text produced not by a superior being but by a fallible human, a text laden with possibilities and potentialities, attainments and failures. Borges, for whom a translation “is a variation one is justified in attempting,”2 would have few scruples about editing the original as he translated. A good translator , according to him, might choose to treat the original as a good writer treats a draft of a work in progress. In fact, for Borges, the translators of a work may be more beneficial to the work than its author, not because they have a superior literary sense but because their lack of vested interest in the text as it was published makes them more effective as editors: “It is far easier to forgo someone else’s vanities than one’s own.”3 According to Borges translators should be willing to cut, add, and transform for the sake of the work. The process can be as endless in a translation as in the creation of Borges on Translation 3 an original. In the preface to his translation of Paul Valéry’s “Le Cemetière Marin,” Nestor Ibarra makes a comment that Borges would appreciate: “my translation is infinitely perfectible, since it is the first.”4 Ibarra, who appears as a character in Borges’s fictional world, was also one of his first translators into French. In his translations of Borges’s stories and poems...