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MLN 119.2 (2004) 388-392



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Daniel Balderston and Marcy Schwartz, Eds. Voice-overs: Translation and Latin American Literature. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. x + 266 pp.
Efraín Kristal. Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Nashville: Vanderbilt U. Press, 2002. xxii + 213 pp.

Translation today is a topic for lively debate among academicians, yet it remains a stepchild of both literary and pedagogical studies; the work of translation itself is granted little intellectual prestige in the academy. Two timely and welcome books on the art and intellect of translation may help to change that state of affairs. In Voice-overs, Daniel Balderston and Marcy Schwartz approach translation as a mosaic of poetics, methods and intellectual challenges elaborated by generations of creative writers, critics and translators whose identities often overlap. Efraín Kristal's Invisible Work scrutinizes the role of translation in Jorge Luis Borges's writing. Kristal's study demonstrates how essential not only the concept but also the realities and the activity of translation are to Borges's poetics. Borges was first and last a translator, Kristal implies, and examining his relationship to translation is an effective way to get under his skin.

Invisible Work's exceptional value lies in Kristal's success at taking Borges's measure—explicating his work and proceedings in impeccably objective terms. Kristal focuses on one of Borges's most fundamental—and most maddening—conceits: that all literature is a form of translation, that all translation results in an "original" text, and that the translator may—indeed is obligated to—judge, appropriate and remake every text he or she encounters. [End Page 388] Part one of Invisible Work details Borges's perspectives on translation. Kristal presents Borges's discourses on the speciousness of "original texts," the potential of translations to improve upon their antecedents, the importance of the work over the author, the problems of linguistic idiosyncrasies and language change over time, the need to capture the "foreignness" of a text in its translation, the translator's engagement in literary tradition, and so on. In sum, this chapter reveals Borges's arguments for a translator who makes the work his or her own yet simultaneously makes himself or herself transparent.

Kristal's best demonstration of how Borges worked through these delicately balanced arguments is his examination of Borges's presentation of the nineteenth-century Arnold-Newman debates regarding the translation into English of the Illiad. Kristal reveals how Borges adapts the recounting of this argument to his own purposes ". . . so that their irreconcilable differences appear to involve matters of preference" (21). Kristal's review of Borges's commentary on the Arabian Nights similarly makes concrete the slippery and at times deceptive relationship Borges developed both with the works he translated and with the practice of translation itself.

Parts two and three of Invisible Work comprise a painstaking examination of Borges's poetics at work in his translations and—most fascinating—in the incorporation of translation into his fiction. Borges's lifelong practices of appropriation, adaptation and suppression—the "invisible" face of his writing—are made sharply visible. We see Borges's use of prior, un-credited, translations and his increasingly audacious interpolations into works he translated; his adoption of Whitman as a literary model and his complete suppression of his 1920s assertions of autobiographical nature of writing—a combination culminating in frequent inversions of Whitman's themes; his "improvement" on Poe's style and his wholesale reorienting of Poe's famous "Purloined Letter"; his excision of religious elements in myths and legends and his constant return to the uncanny, illusion and dream. In all of these examples, Kristal offers a richly documented portrayal of Borges's relationship to translation.

Part three, in which Kristal mines Borges's fiction for evidence of the role of translation in the author's poetics, reveals the full presence of translation in Borges's writing. Translation is shown to be at the heart of Borges's societal and political critique as well as his understanding of aesthetic and cultural expression. For Borges, contemporary political crises are...

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