I was first introduced to Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges in my high school Spanish class. I remember leaving class that day unsure of my own reality, completely enveloped in Borges’ web of magical realism. Since then, I have studied many other Latin American authors, but none of them have rendered my own perceptions of reality useless quite like Borges has done, time and time again. To be able to revisit an author that had confused me so much is an absolute honor, but to be translating him extends far beyond that. Through translating him, I have seen his brilliant style shine firsthand. I have seen how his style transfers; I have seen it in motion. These moments remind me not only of the beauty that exists in writing but also of the significance of translators. Translators are messengers that relay the genius of Borges into the other language-speaking spheres, and I think Borges would agree with me here: he was a translator himself. In this light, I can only hope to render his work in English in a way that sheds light on his literary genius and his authorial savvy.
Through researching Borges, I have discovered just how influential Borges’ oeuvre has been in literature – he has been deemed the father of the Latin American novel, influencing the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Gabriel García Marquez, and Carlos Fuentes. As literary critic Marcela Valdes remarks:
“Borges’ influence on Latin American literature is like Sherwood Anderson’s effect on American fiction: so deep that it has become difficult to name a major contemporary writer who hasn’t been touched by it. Some of them are affected indirectly – through Julio Cortázar’s short stories or César Aira’s novels or Roberto Bolaño’s everything. The detached tone that marks so much of Bolaño’s fiction, giving it that eerie twilight-zone feeling, is straight out of Borges, though Bolaño bent it to his own ends.”
But Borges would readily admit that he himself was influenced by a host of writers – among them It makes sense for Borges to challenge themes of authorship in his works; as mentioned above, he himself was a translator. He translated influential authors such as Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka – all of whom are positioned in the literary canon. I believe his career as a writer and his career as a translator are not separate in the least bit.
But it is not his literary influence alone that led me to this work. Embedded in his works are questions about authorship, authenticity, and originality – issues that are also central to discourse the translator’s position in the twenty-first century. Should we see translators? Should they be visible? Should the reader know when a work has been translated? I think seeing the translator as a creative agent in literature is crucial, because translation is necessarily a form of re-writing. In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, Borges reviews a fictional twentieth-century writer’s attempt to completely re-create Don Quixote line-for-line. In this story, the reader must re-conceptualize the meaning of original. The reader must recognize that nothing is new, and that everything is a mere “refreshed” version of something from the past. Translators, just like Menard in the story, are constantly re-writing an original. I as well, to some extent, have re-written “The Library of Babel” by translating it. I have played with the sentence structures in attempts to domesticate, only to rearrange them back in ways that stuck closer to Borges’ selective syntax. These decisions were not always clear, and in translating Borges, I chose to minimize instances where my style as a writer became more noticeable than Borges’ literary style.
It makes sense for Borges to challenge themes of authorship in his works; as mentioned above, he himself was a translator. He translated influential authors such as Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka – all of whom are positioned in the literary canon. I believe his career as a writer and his career as a translator are not separate in the least bit.
He stressed the important of etymology in word choice; and as a translator, I love this about him. He chose words that readers must break down both morphologically and historically in order to understand. In translating him, I tried to reflect this. I kept words like incontrovertible and compendium; I left Latinate phrases alone. I stuck close to the word bank provided by Borges. These are just some of the choices I made to reflect Borges’ use of antiquated words with rich etymologies. I intend to have conveyed that in my translation.
Reading Borges is a journey through time and space, forward and backward and stationary all at the same time. And since translators are often believed to be the best readers of a text, it’s fair to say that I have been on one incredible journey – quite honestly I do not know where I am at this point. Not that that’s a bad thing. Borges intends to disorient. That is what makes Borges, Borges. I do believe in the work I have done to render Borges in English, though I cannot say it was easy. As translation often goes, there are a number of different choices I could have made, and it would be an accomplishment in my eyes to have made even a handful of choices for which Borges himself would have advocated. Every translator is an agent embedded in a certain moment -be it social, political, or linguistic. Every translation is a product of its unique historical context. That is why it is crucial – and will always be crucial – to translate classic works. Just as words change meaning over time, so too can the interpretations of novels. My translation, just as all translations do, will one day cease to reflect the societal moment. And that’s okay. But for right now, I am proud of the work that I have put forth.
Brendon MacKeen is completing a degree in Spanish with minors in Portuguese, Linguistics, Anthropology, and Comparative Literatu
re at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has experience studying a variety of languages – Catalan, Italian, Swedish, Quechua – but focuses on Spanish to English translations. His first experience translating was with a book on Incan architecture by Santiago Agurto Calvo, titled Estudios Acerca de la Construcción Arquitectura y Planeamiento de los Incas. He has also translated an academic paper on the number system in a language called Chatino, spoken in the coastal southern mountains in Oaxaca, Mexico. In his spare time, he enjoys hiking, and has completed the Camino de Santiago del Norte, an 850-kilometer walk across the Atlantic coast of Spain.