Literary Translation II.

Hernndez, Bernarda Guagnini, Valeria (2014)

Borges and Translation
1. CONTEXT
a. Importance of contextualization:
i. Borgess irrelevant shift towards Latin America
ii. Margins are not necessarily limits
iii. Margins as a place for potentiality
iv. Displacement and irreverence
2. Borges translation theory
a. It has been excluded in anthologies on translation
b. Borges objected the idea that a translator should follow a particular approach, either
literal or paraphrasing
c. Main essays on these topics:
i. Las dos maneras de traducir (1926)
ii. Las versiones homricas (1932)
iii. Los traductores de Las 1001 noches (1935)
d. Key ideas:
i. Most translation theories prioritize the original over the translated text. For
Borges, there are no definitive texts
1. Influenced by Walter Benjamin: The Task of the Translator:
Translations restore what is missing in the original, they are not
self-sufficient
ii. Translation as a powerful site of innovation and resistance for the periphery
iii. Multiplicity and difference is not a disaster, but a field of potentiality
iv. Literature is translation
3. Las dos maneras de traducir
a. Focus of the essay: translatability of poetry
b. Originals and translations have different values for different readers, even for
readers of the same language
c. Translation is displaced in time and place, its a point of departure to reconsider
issues of aesthetic value and cultural difference
d. Determining the texts meaning: importance of the context (where, when it is read
and by whom)
e. There are two possible ways of translating:
i. PARAPHRASE:
1. Associated with Classicism (interest in the work of art and not in
the artist)
2. It seeks absolute perfection in translation at all cost of localisms and
rarities
3. It leaves behind specific elements of the poetic voice: words,
syntax, metaphors, etc
4. Emphasis on the sense
ii. METAPHRASE (Literal Translation)
1. Associated with Romanticism (interest in the artist at the cost of the
work of art)
2. Borges opposes this view
3. Emphasis on the wording
f. Borges challenges the premise that translation is always accompanied with loss
g. Borges questions the idea that there are too many essential differences between
languages for translation to succeed
i. Based on Roman Jackobson: Poetry cannot be translated. It is goverened by
paronomasia (relationships between phonemic and semantic units)
h. For Borges, poetry if perfectly translatable. Translation can be seen as a potential
site of gain, and not one of loss.
4. Las versiones Homricas
a. To talk about translation is to talk about aesthetics
b. Various translations of an original represent multiple perspectives of an unstable
object
c. The mutability inherent in all texts
d. All texts are drafts, both original and translations
e. Literature as a series of multiple reflected versions: quotations, citations, allusions,
and an infinite system of intertexualities without a single, stable core.
f. Translation of the classics is always rereading them
g. Borges compares translations, not original and translation
i. Lack of knowledge of the source: heterogeneous wealth
ii. Uncertainty about the original is what opens the way for numerous possible
versions of a text
h. Borges speaks of the difficulty of determining what belongs to the poet and what
belong to the language
i. Its impossible to know what the original means because it is inseparable
from its context
ii. This joyful difficulty is what creates the potentiality for translation
i. Newman-Arnold polemic: Framing Fidelity
i. In 1861-1862 the poetic/critic Arnold and the critic/translator Newmark
engaged in a drawn-out debate over the two main opposing approaches to
translation
ii. Debate: whether to be faithful to the letter or to the spirit of the original
(Assuming it is impossible to be faithful to both)
iii. Newman translated The Illiad in 1856 and undertakes a literal approach.
Anrold critiques this metaphrashes and argues in favour of paraphrase.
iv. Borges suggests that both are equally valid by identifying the value in terms
of the pleasures obtained by the reader.
v. Borges turns a debate about methodology into a debate on aesthetics and
values
vi. None of the versions are faithful for it is impossible to reproduce Homers
cultural and historical context.
vii. South American reader challenges the notion of original and fidelity
(notions established and maintained in the centre) to reformulate them from
the margins.
5. Theorizing Translation in the 20
th
century: Borges, Benjamin, Derrida
i. Borges and Benjamin: both utilise translation to access a discussion of
aesthetics
ii. Benjamin
1. (Essay: The Task of the Translator): analogy between languages:
fractured vessel, in which each language contributes a fragment
toward the whole. Theres a pure language (utopia)
2. His essay is a significant break with the past: fidelity towards
viewing translation as a complement of the original
3. Religious imperative to translate, to recover a universal that existed
before the fall of the Tower of Babel.
4. Benjamin: Translation as complementation to the original. It
reveals the originals missing parts
iii. Borges:
1. the Tower of Babel is NOT a failure, but a site of opportunity
2. Translation need not try to fix a broken vessel to be legitimate and
potentially valuable, it exists on a potentially equal plane with the
original
3. Irreverence and playfulness
4. If Borges values literalness it is not because it leads to a fidelity
grounded on linguistic complementation but because of its
aesthetic pleasures
iv. Derrida:
1. Importance of the sacred in relation to translability
2. Paradoxical nature of translation: necessary and impossible
3. Although translation is seen as complementary to the original, the
original still maintains a place of privilege.
4. Some texts in literature are sacred, and thus, untranslatable.
6. Los traductores de las 1001 noches. The valorization of creative infidelities
i. Importance of displacements. They crate a potential for new and
unexpected meanings
ii. Theory of mistranslation
iii. Borges compares three versions of The Thousand and One Nights
1. Version 1: Gallands version (1704-1717)
a. It contains stories that have never been found in the original
version, including some famous tales such as Aladdin
and Ali Baba
b. None of the translators who have followed dare to omit
them
c. The idea of an original is destabilized
2. Version 2: Edward Lanes version (1840)
a. His version excludes everything that he found morally
objectionable
b. This is explained in a series of footnotes in which he
explains he has left something out and justifies his
omission
c. Moral rationale for modificatios
d. For Borges this is disinfecting, he repudiates that.
e. It is the translators individual literary habits and not the
sacred status of the original that must be taken into account
in the final analysis of a translation.
3. Version 3: Burtons version
a. He achieves an effect of hyperfidelity by executing a series
of creative infidelities: substitutions, disparate vocabulary,
neologisms, foreign terms, alterations, omissions and
interpolations
b. His main problem was how to interest 19
th
century British
gentleman in 13
th
century Arabian serialized stories
c. He proposes falsifications to improve the original
d. For Borges, these irreverencies are the merit of his
translation
e. Burton becomes the figure of translator/recreator for Borges
iv. Borges discusses the translation of The Thousand and One Nights into
French by Maradus in 1889
1. The translator claimed to be the most faifhful and literal of the
translators
2. Borges gives examples in which Maradus changes and rewriges,
adds and complements for a perceived lack in the original
3. For Borges this freedom is characteristic of intersemiotic
translation. As Maradus reads the original, he paints his version
of it in a new language and in a new context through his own
habits of the translator, his own syntactic movement
4. The value of Maradus translation does not lie in the fact that it is
faithful and literal but rather in the creative infidelities that lead to
his transmutative translation.
5. Borges inverts the relationship between fidelity and value and frees
himself from the constraints of traditional translation theory.
6. Conception of limitlessness in translation
v. Borges discusses for four German versions of The Nights
1. Gustavo Weils version (1939-42)
a. Borges praises only the infidelities (interpolations and
falsifications)
2. Max Hennings version (1095-97)
3. Felix Paul Greves version (1879-1948)
4. Enno Littmanns version (1923-28)
a. It replaced the previous ones
b. For Borges it is the best version available
c. Littmann did not make use of any of the styles or literatures
available to hum from the past German traditions
d. It is the tradition of the target language that allows
translators and writers to create versions which are
valuable recreations of the pre-texts. Their meanings are,
paradoxically, both new and the same as those in the
source texts.
7. Borges translates Cummings. Hyperfidelity and South American Appropiation
a. Borges translated the American Modernis poest e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
b. Working with the same poet, Borges in one case deforms the source text and in two
other translations he stays very close to the form of the original (but giving it
rioplatense flavour)
c. Borges translated a poem and he presented the third stanza in prose
d. Irrevernt translation:
i. Translated only one stanza out of four
ii. Prosification
iii. Interstion of pragmented prosification into his own text about cummings
e. It seeks to recreate in Spanish the lexical innovations found in cummingss poems.
f. Translation of Buffalo Bill
i. Borgess version sounds and looks like cummings
ii. Stallion translated as padrillo where a more neutral choice would have
benn segmental or garaon
iii. Act of linguistic acculturation: relation to Argentine Pampas
8. Summary
a. Lawrence Venuti has argued against domestic translations (the ones that read
fluently in the target language)
b. Borges suggests that the processes involved in domestication are present in ALL
translations
c. Borges never assumes that a translation will do anything other than deform the
original.
d. Borges suggest that this potentiality is a much richer way to translate that
Littmanns innocuous and ineffective netrual attempt.
e. The issue on domestication is made more complex given that Borges speaks from
the margins and not at all form the centre of the empire.
f. The ethics and the aesthethics of translation are fundamentally different in the
periphery than they are in the centre
i. Techniques that in the centre contribute to projects of cultural imperialism
can, in the periphery, form as a form of resistance, a withdrawing of
political as well as literary maps.
ii. In Latin America a domesticating translation can represent an appropriation
from the Metropolis through linguistic acculturation.
g. Subjective nature of the borders
h. Opening of new territories for Latin American writers
i. Borgess concept of creative infidelities, combined with his irreverent questioning
of the definitive text, displaces Western European and US canons, legitimizes his
own writing in Argentina and opens a way for innovation in the margins and the
centre alike.