Borges Translates Joyce Who Translates Himself

Abstract

Borges Translates Joyce Who Translates Himself Mark Harman (bio) Only three years after the first appearance of Ulysses in Paris, Jorge Luis Borges calls himself, with uncharacteristic immodesty, “the first Hispanic adventurer” to have reached the shores of Ulysses. Yet his pioneering 1925 review of the novel is ambivalent. Although he praises Joyce’s artistic audacity and stylistic prowess, that of “a millionaire of words and styles,” he infuses the piece with barbed comments, especially about the inordinate demands Joyce makes on his readers. Yet he also pays homage to Joyce by appending to the review his partial translation of the final “Penelope” chapter of Ulysses. However, in “Fragment on Joyce,” a piece written to mark Joyce’s death in Zurich in 1941, he claims that he did not so much read as skim the book, savoring only individual passages and scenes. Borges’s upsetting of received opinion about translation is legendary. In his view, translations are not necessarily inferior to so-called originals: In “The Homeric Versions,” he suggests that all writers can do is create drafts, since there is no such thing as a definitive text, a concept which corresponds “only to exhaustion or religion.” In “On William Beckford’s Vathek,” he famously claims—not entirely tongue-in-cheek—that “the original is unfaithful to the translation.” Borges began his lifelong side-career as a literary translator at the age of nine with a Spanish rendering of Oscar Wilde’s The Fairy Prince. His lengthy practice as a translator does not, however, quite live up to his provocative pronouncements about the craft. Although he takes some liberties in his—often collaborative—Spanish translations of prose works by the likes of G. K. Chesterton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Franz Kafka, Jack London, Henri Michaux, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson, the original versions of those texts are by and large—to use Borges’s provocative phrasing—not “unfaithful” to his translations. Although by no means as prolific a translator as Borges, Joyce had even more languages at his fingertips than the Argentinian writer. Among his achievements as a translator are renderings of “Stephen’s Green,” a modest little poem by an Irish contemporary of his, James Stephens, into five languages. It was to Stephens, best-known today as the author of a witty fantasy novel, The Crock of Gold, that the ailing Joyce contemplated entrusting the unenviable task of completing his intricately woven and indefatigably punning Finnegans Wake. [End Page 201] Joyce’s renderings of “Stephen’s Green” into French, German, Italian, Latin, and Norwegian, which can be found in Richard Ellmann’s magisterial biography of the Irish writer, are a linguistic tour de force. Joyce even wanted to add a sixth language by having Stephens himself translate his poem into Irish. Unfortunately, Stephens’s grasp of Irish was not up to the task. Here, by way of a sample, is the original poem, followed by Joyce’s French version: Stephen’s Green The wind stood up and gave a shout.He whistled on his fingers and Kicked the withered leaves aboutAnd thumped the branches with his hand And said he’d kill and kill and kill,And so he will and so he will. Les Verts de Jacques Le vent d’un saut lance son cri,Se siffle sur les doigts et puis Trépigne les feuilles d’automne,Craque les branches qu’il assomme. Je tuerai, crie-t-il, holà!Et vous verrez s’il le fera! James Joyce’s fondness for James Stephens’s poem is not altogether surprising. Like Stephens, he had a thing about the name Stephen: Stephen Dedalus, his alter ego in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, bears that first name as does his own grandson, Stephen James Joyce, whose birth he memorializes in “Ecce Puer,” his finest poem. Writing to James Stephens in December 1931, Joyce downplays his French version, calling it a mere “pleasantry” and its title “Jacques’s Greens” an “obvious pun” on Stephens’s title, the name of a popular park in the center of Dublin. Joyce’s subsequent comment about the rendering of Stephens’s “thumped” as “craque” shows, however, his confident grasp of...