Invisible Work: Borges and Translation

Abstract

It is well known that Jorge Luis Borges was a translator, but this has been considered a curious minor aspect of his literary achievement. Few have been aware of number of texts he translated, importance he attached to this activity, or extent to which translated works inform his own stories and poems. Between age of ten, when he translated Oscar Wilde, and end of his life, when he prepared a Spanish version of Prose Edda, Borges transformed of Poe, Kafka, Hesse, Kipling, Melville, Gide, Faulkner, Whitman, Woolf, Chesterton, and many others. In a multitude of essays, lectures, and interviews Borges analyzed versions of others and developed an engaging view about He held that a translation can improve an original, that contradictory renderings of same can be equally valid, and that an original can be unfaithful to Borges's bold habits as translator and his views on translation had a decisive impact on his creative process. Translation is also a recurrent motif in Borges's stories. In The Immortal, for example, a character who has lived for many centuries regains knowledge of poems he had authored, and almost forgotten, by way of modern translations. Many of Borges's fictions include actual or imagined translations, and some of his most important characters are translators. In Pierre Menard, author of Quixote, Borges's character is a respected Symbolist poet, but also a translator, and narrator insists that Menard's masterpiece - his invisible work - adds unsuspected layers of meaning to Cervantes's Don Quixote. George Steiner cites this short story as the most acute, most concentrated commentary anyone has offered on business of translation. In an age where many discussions of translation revolve around dichotomy faithful/unfaithful, this book will surprise and delight even Borges's closest readers and critics.