The Critique: Kerrigan’s Library

Every translation is embedded in a historical moment, a moment of distinct social norms, political norms, and linguistic norms. In the year of 1962, almost instantaneously, Borges’ “The Library of Babel” was translated twice: one by James E. Irby and Donald A. Yates in a collection called Labyrinths, the other by Anthony Kerrigan published in Collected Fictions. These were the first translations of Borges’ fictional work, and their existence may be mainly due to Borges’ splitting the Prix Formentor award in 1961 with Samuel Beckett, and award that made people aware of Borges’ literary genius. What follows will be a review of Kerrigan’s translation from 1962, a one that, now in he year of 2016, is 54 years removed, overshadowed by Hurley’s 1998 Collected Fictions. On the broadest level, the difference in Kerrigan’s language from both Hurley’s translation and my translation is a testament to what I stated before: translations are and can only be the product of a certain historical time. This is not to say that translations cannot gain an elevated status and be considered as “classic” – there are certainly translations of classics that are seen as the pinnacle (Lydia Davis’ Madame Bovary, for example), but even her Bovary will one day be supplanted by a “new” version of Flaubert’s classic.

Kerrigan’s translation starts out smooth, and the presence of punctuation marks is striking; colons, semicolons, dashes. And this is fitting, considering Borges’ affinity for odd punctuation in the story. However, continuing on through the story, Kerrigan’s replication of Borges’ punctuation dissolves, and Kerrigan starts to break up sentences. In most cases, when presented with an ellipsis in the original, Kerrigan opts for breaking up the paragraphs; this, I feel, is not in keeping with what I believe Borges was trying to do by employing these ellipses. More often than not, they are encountered towards the end of a paragraph in the original, usually followed by two, three, or four lines. At one point Kerrigan breaks up one paragraph into three different sections, a move that I feel cannot be adequately justified. As I said above, I think Borges employs these ellipses for a reason; he puts them towards the end to make the reader think they are done with a section, for them to restart their engine only to be abruptly stopped again, only some lines later. This adds to the interminable feel that this story possesses. The paragraphs, the sentences all start and stop, and then start again, and in my translation I tried replicated this effect by keeping the ellipses as they are.

While talking about the legend of the “Man of the Book”, Kerrigan does something interesting as well. Throughout the original, Borges uses Latinate phrases, a strategy that reflects the detached, pseudo-academic, sardonic tone that is present in his style. When translating these phrases, I chose to leave them as they are to replicate the pseudo-academic style. However, Kerrigan inserted his own Latin phrase at the end of the paragraph, in my opinion to the detriment of the original:

“Someone proposed a regressive approach: in order to locate book A, first consult book B which will indicate the location of A; in order to locate book B, first consult book C, and so on ad infinitum…”

I do not think the idea of “until infinity” is lost here, but that is not the issue for me. Kerrigan did not italicize this Latin phrase, yet in the original, Borges uses italics on these Latinate phrases. I think Borges used the phrases he did for a reason, and in my translation process, I saw it to be crucial to leave italics as they were. I am curious as to why Kerrigan added this in. When it comes to how I translate, typically, if something as explicit as a Latin phrase is not in the original, I keep it out of the translation. I think writers use the foreign phrases they use for reasons, and as a translator, I do not feel comfortable in taking the creative license to add something as rhetorically effective and explicit as Latin phrases. Granted, it is inevitable to add words in a translation because of the way cross-linguistic structures are mapped onto one another, but I think Kerrigan was a bit out of line here. Furthermore, we see here another separation of a paragraph, as the sentence ends with an ellipses and marks a new paragraph.

Though Kerrigan took liberties in his restructuring of the text, I believe his work to be a fairly solid piece. In particular, I think his use of antiquated words matches up with Borges’ well, but this could be a result of the temporal proximity in which these two texts stand in relation to one another. For the most part, he stays close to the cognates of Borges’ vocabulary, and does so in an effective – though not always smooth – way.