3.23.16
I transcribed the Spanish original from hard copy to a digital copy. Besides reading the text the first time, I believe this to one of the crucial moments in reading a text. When having to copy every single word, you not only have to write out every word in a text, but also have to recognize every word, letter, or sentence, on varying levels of consciousness. I could have found a copy in an electronic format and then copy and pasted it, but I viewed this process of re-writing the text, though tedious, as a key experience in learning how to read the text.
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4.01.16
Today I gave my first stab at translating Borges, an author that mystified me from the very first times I was shown him in high school Spanish classes. I didn’t understand him then, and although I’d like to say I understand him now, the truth is I don’t think I do. “Así es Borges,” is what my Spanish teacher used to tell me. In terms of technique, with this being my first productive step in the process (though the process doesn’t begin at the stage of writing – there is a great deal of reading that must take place before you even start to write) I stuck quite close to the original, and this resulted in an awkward, clunky version full of little threads sticking out in what I hope to be some sort of aesthetically appealing tapestry. I am going to wait a bit until I glance over this version again, to allow my mind to reset. This will be Version 1 (V1).
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4.13.16
I am now on my second version of my translation, going over all of the awkwardness that was my first version. It takes a while, but you learn a lot. Looking up words, phrases, observing the workings of language right there in front of you. Seeing languages intersect. As a linguist, I love this stuff. Again it takes time. But it already has been worth it. I might go out on a limb and say this is a stage of translating in which one can actively learn the most. Granted, I know I’m wrong when I say that – you learn throughout, in different ways. But, I think in this phase, I’m looking up more words than I had in the first, literal, awkward version. Here I am finding myself looking up synonyms, antonyms, etymologies that go beyond what my original word-to-word translation had been. And I anticipate myself, in the succeeding stages, taking my authorial/poetic/creative/whatever license and playing more with the syntax, defining clearer Borges’ style and finding some sort of abstract equivalence in English. All stages are different, I suppose.
One word I worked on today was the word cerril, which at this stage I have decided to translate as untamed in the passage on the Second Axiom of the library. It is a word I have never encountered in my linguistic adventures, and I envision myself adjusting it in the future, learning more on it and reading it in other contexts of different texts. Another weird instance was my treatment of the phrase “ M C V ” (spaces intentional). In my first version, I deleted those “spaces” between the letters, combining them, excluding the orthographic space. This orthographic space, in the Library, holds an important significance. But the space is one of the 25 orthographic symbols. So after thinking deeper on it, I changed it back to a series of three letters with spaces in between, an act that I believe is realized in my best efforts to respectfully represent the original text. As Haruki Murakami said, “translation is an act of kindness.” I am trying my best to be as kind as possible to the greatest stylistic writer of the twentieth-century.
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04.14.16
Today was a translation workshop in class. After getting some more information about the functioning of our website, we split up into groups to go over some parts in which we will have difficulty translation. I worked with Rob, and we discussed how his Quixote passages include obscure idiomatic expressions (Martinmas). This is quite an interesting topic that I would personally like to research. Proverbs, metaphors, idioms. They – along with all language – are deeply embedded in cultural values, norms, and customs. How do you work these kinks out so that the receiving audience knows what is happening? Should they in the first place?
In terms of my own translational quagmires, the punctual devices that Borges uses in the Library of Babel are crazy. Semi-colons, colons, parenthetical asides, dashes. How do I tease the nuances between all these out in a way that respects the source and replicates the effects of these punctuations? It had already been proving to be challenging, but as I look towards the end of the text, I am noticing even more instances of these colons and whatnot. It’s exciting work though. I love it. Now towards the end of revising Version 2, I see it starting to take (some dilapidated) shape. It’s insane to me how texts can be reborn into a new code, and emerge from the inter-lingual depths to stand on its own. My version is nowhere near standing on its own entirely yet, but I can see little clues that tell me it’s well on its way.
I’m reconsidering my translation of vasta as vast. I found the word extensive, and since the word vasta is repeated a lot in the original, I am going to change my translations as vast to extensive. I think extensive sounds better. Libraries can be vast, just as knowledge can, yes, but extensive-ness is more what I think Borges was getting at. Who am I to judge?
I just changed the word incontrovertible to undeniable because I was like, “what a weird word I have never heard. Let me not lose the reader here and domesticate a bit.” But I’m currently reading Borges translator Andrew Hurley’s piece What I Lost When I Translated Borges, and I figured out something incredible. He had trouble with Borges’ adjectives too, and its due to his affinity for hypallages, weird little instances of transposition between two syntactic segments. These adjectives, often applied to inanimate objects,truly speak on the capacity for the human to feel. He brings up the adjective unanimous, and how la noche unánime sounds awkward/odd/striking – even in Spanish. This is Borges. And like my high school teacher said, así es Borges. So, I think I’ll bring it back to incontrovertible. I’ll look for more of these examples.
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4.16.16
I finished up my second version today, and I ended up cleaning up quite a bit. In some places, earlier I had changed a serial phrase in a way that didn’t render the weight carried by Borges’ repetition. At some point during translating the following passage,
“Todo: la historia minuciosa del porvenir, las autobiografías de los arcángeles, el catálogo fiel de la Biblioteca, miles y miles de catálogos falsos, la demostración de la falacia de esos catálogos, la demostración de la falacia del catálogo verdadero, el evangelio gnóstico de Basilides, el comentario de ese evangelio, el comentario del comentario de ese evangelio, la relación verídica de tu muerte, la versión de cada libro a todas las lenguas, las interpolaciones de cada libro en todos los libros, el tratado que Beda pudo escribir (y no escribió) sobre la mitología de los sajones, los libros perdidos de Tácito.” (emphasis added on the italicized phrase)
I had translated the italicized la versión de cada libro a todas las lenguas to each book every language, and upon reviewing the second version before submitting it, I didn’t like the way each book in every language sounded. Listen for yourself:
“All: the thorough history of the future, the autobiographies of the arch angels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the manifestation of fallacy in these catalogues, the manifestation of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the veridical enlistment of your death, each book in every language, the interpolations of each book in all books, the treaty that Beda was able to write (and didn’t write) about the mythology of the Saxons, the lost books of Tacit.” (emphasis added)
I believe this was a passage where Borges is weighing heavily on the effect of the repetition of the at the beginning of every subordinate clause. For some reason, initially, I had thought it would be okay to make the phrase more concise, but now I think that was out of line for me to do. Again, I believe Borges is trying to accomplish something with the repetition of the at the start of every clause. So, upon submitting, I fixed it as the following:
“All: the thorough history of the future, the autobiographies of the arch angels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the manifestation of fallacy in these catalogues, the manifestation of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the veridical enlistment of your death, the version of each book in every language, the interpolations of each book in all books, the treaty that Beda was able to write (and didn’t write) about the mythology of the Saxons, the lost books of Tacit.” (emphasis added)
I think this phrase doesn’t stick out as much anymore, and is in keeping with the parallel phrasal structures that Borges employs in this excerpt.
Nico had brought up a question why I hadn’t translated Oh tiempo tus piramides which is found in the passage about the Second axiom of the Library. I have developed a pattern of keeping whatever is in italics (besides the axioms) as untouchable. All the weird letter combinations, the weird book titles towards the end – I kept them as they were. Additionally, I believe Borges meant to use exactly the letters he did here, producing a conglomerate of letters that lacks meaning, but that is a composition of the 25 possible orthographic characters. In this way, I am inclined to believe that those letters, regardless of what language it is in being translated into, should remain unchanged. If the “penultimate page said Oh tiempo tus piramides, then those exact letters are what I will be writing in the English version. Also, I’d like to thank Rob, who pointed out the fact that there is an error in the original. The last word, piramides, carries an accent mark over the a, something that would be an impossibility in the library. I decided to “fix” this in the new version.
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4.18.16
I consulted with members of the class about what I should do with Oh tiempo tus piramides, and I have decided that I am going to leave it and follow the line with brackets giving my translation o the phrase for readers who would want to know the translation. I think it’s a useful way as a translator to let the reader know that this text wasn’t originally in English. Maybe I’m going against the grain of trying to be invisible, but I do feel the need to leave the letters there as they were in the original, because simply, those were the characters on the page, in a universe whose orthographic constraints call for only 25 orthographic symbols. As I look towards revising for Version 3, I anticipate myself taking more of the creative/authorial license and adjusting the syntax(es) of the sentences. Switching phrases within a clause around, seeing what sounds the best, trying to echo the sound of the original.
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4.24.16
I am nearly done with Version 3 now; I will first say that much of this phase in the process was taking the creative leap outside of the box in which I have been confined so far, taking liberties with sentence structure, experimenting with new words to see how they fit. Reading the sentences I have translated aloud in both languages really helps at anchoring the sound of the texts. I have not officially recorded any readings yet, but I am continuing to say things out loud in hopes of catching something awkward. Interestingly enough, I have faced a couple instances in which I finally seem to understand what Borges is saying, though I had thought I understood them a long time ago. Just when you think you know, Borges takes it away. The translation process is beginning to feel labyrinthine, in typical Borgesian fashion, and it is easy to get lost and disoriented in the context of the story.
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4.30.16
Today I worked on what will be my final version of “The Library of Babel”. I don’t think you ever can reach a final in translation; Lydia Davis mentions how a translation only becomes final because of its due date. But I know I will go over this version in the future, tweaking certain things, leaving others. In the last phase (Version 3), I found that I may have stepped too far outside the mold in my creative license, which led to my style becoming more obvious than the style of Borges. For example, I knew I was too far out there when I read the following line in the intro paragraph aloud:
“Every hexagon is arranged like another, and that, the duplicate of any other”
In my opinion, that is way too musical for Borges, and so I took it down, and replaced it with a more direct translation, something I think Borges would have supported. I finalized the following:
“Every hexagon is arranged like any other:”
I think that suffices. I must ensure that my style isn’t more noticeable than the original’s; I want to be kind to the original. I want to respect it, and faithfully replicate its message. The musicality in the first example does not succeed in doing that. So, I had to make it more direct, and the rest of my time will be spent on being more direct, less verbose. I was inspired by an interview with Borges in The Paris Review, where he said that when he was a younger writer, he had the tendency to overstate things. With time, he realized that it is more effective to be direct, simple, and clear with words and sentences. So, for the final version I took out instances where I thought I sounded too wordy, and fixed these parts by simplifying it, consulting the original, and leaning more towards a foreignized version, wherein the original word choice and sentence structure remains more or less intact.
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5.1.16
I officially recorded myself reading the texts – in both Spanish in English – to put onto the website. Readers will be able to click and listen to a reading and follow along with the written form. This was very difficult; my throat hurts from recording over 40 minutes of material. I tried my best to read clear, but it is a difficult task. Overall, I am confident in my readings.
I did not know whether to read the footnotes as they appear in the body of the text, or to make a separate recording of them that listeners can consult at the bottom. When they experience a foot note while reading, they can pause the main audio recording, and find the footnote recording at the bottom, listen to the footnote, and then continue. Besides, there are only four footnotes, and I think recording them at the end allows for a smoother body text. But the readers are given all the resources to conveniently follow along. By being forced to read every word, phrase and sentence out loud, I was able to spot some typos and finish tweaking my final translation. At this point, I’d like to say I’m finished, but I know I will tweak stuff in the future, and regardless of if those versions will be published, I will be making changes purely for myself.