A Metamorphosis? Rewriting in Borges's Translations of Kafka

Abstract

1938 is a noteworthy year for Jorge Luis Borges. First, his father Jorge Guillermo dies on 24 February, ending a nearly forty-year relationship of shared literary interests and writerly aspirations. Just prior to his death, Jorge Guillermo asks his son to compensate for his shortcomings as an author by rewriting his poorly received novel, El caudillo (The Chieftain). Second, and around the same time, Borges translates and publishes a collection of nine stories by Franz Kafka under the title La metamorfosis (The Metamorphosis), including ‘Ante la ley’ (‘Before the Law’) and ‘La edificacion de la muralla china’ (‘The Great Wall of China’). Third, in December 1938 Borges comes down with blood poisoning after running into an open casement window – an accident that leads to his hospitalization and his writing of ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’ (‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’), the story Borges misleadingly claims as his first piece of prose fiction.1 In this study, I endeavour to show that there is a connection for Borges between translation and rewriting, which is forged (in part) by Borges’s translations of Kafka and by the impression left upon him by his father’s writing. Further, this association is anticipated in Jorge Guillermo’s 1920 and 1924–1925 translations of the Rubaiyat, which I examine in order to ascertain whether Borges borrows from his father’s approach to translation when he reworks Kafka’s The Zurau Aphorisms. I consider the translations made by both father and son alongside Borges’s theoretical writing on the topic to explore how Borges’s translation theory influences his translation practice. Thought of primarily as a prose writer, Borges is also a poet, a literary theorist, and a translator. As a child, he experiments with literary imitation and translation of the books he reads in his father’s library: ‘I first started writing when I was six or seven. I tried to imitate classic writers of Spanish –Miguel de Cervantes, for example. I had set down