Borges' translations, what would Borges think?

[Klowey]

I found this interesting article on Borges' translations, delving into what Borges would say.

medium.com/@michael.marcus/dear-mr-bo...

Looks like a few of his duplicated stories are available in different translations. Any comments or opinions?

[Tom]

Thanks for posting this piece, Klowey. Looks really interesting.
My kind of thing, these comparative commentaries.
Look forward to reading and commenting asap.

[Klowey]

Thank you Tom. I'm so happy someone else finds it interesting.

If you are a Borges' fan, I am just finishing listening to his incredible 6 lecture series from 1967-78 on youtube that was also transcribed into a book, This Craft of Verse. He talks about writing, mostly poetry, and also about translations and the significance of the original language it was written in. He has been blind for 15 years before giving this lecture so had no notes to refer to. And his memory and knowledge of millennia of work is mind-boggling. He quotes works in Spanish, English, French, and German, maybe more.

To find the audio lectures on youtube, search on:
"This Craft of Verse" "Borges"

Choose the one with 4:18:48 minutes and you'll get a nice little introduction.

00:00 - The riddle of poetry
44:21 - The metaphor
1:31:01 - The telling of the tale
2:02:46 - Word music and translation
2:42:22 - Thought and poetry
3:23:06 - Poets creed

[Tom]

Fascinating article, Klowey. I'd read elsewhere that Borges' attitude re translation is the antithesis to that of Nabokov, who apparently was zealously ideological about striving for "fidelity" to author, to point that his own translation of Pushkin is considered damn near unreadable. I'm impressed with B's humility regarding the potentially unlimited range of translations, and his acknowledging the influence of English on his native tongue. His Spanish is more English than Spanish!

As a reader, I'm in the camp translation as attempt to capture the "spirit" of a work. I don't worry about what I'm missing, I just want something that sounds "good" to my ear, acknowledging that my ear is tuned to my own preferences built up over a lifetime of reading. (hell, I'm sure I miss plenty reading Charles Lamb essays, but that doesn't inhibit my love of his wit and melancholy.) The more variety, the better, as far as I'm concerned. Just more fun for me in comparing them. Just this morning I was reading two versions of Cavafy poem, "The City," each with significantly different word choices. Instead of judging them, it just made me want to get a third version, in this case, Mendelsohn's translation. (my current record for multiple translations is 4, for La Fontaine's verse fables.)

I'm pasting an excerpt here from interview with Boris Drayluk, regarding his upcoming translation of Isaac Babel stories, which sums up my position perfectly:

BD: "This all requires trust in one’s own feeling for the text, one’s own sense of its cumulative impact. But whom else can we trust but ourselves? I don’t for a minute believe that every reader of my translation will experience exactly what I experience when reading the original, but I have the satisfaction of knowing that I’ve struggled to communicate my experience fully – to recreate the original’s self-consistent universe. I recently gave an interview to The Arkansas International, in which I outlined my approach to poetic translation – an approach I also adopt when working with prose texts as rich and suggestive as Babel’s: “For as long as I’m translating a poem, I take on a consciousness that could have given rise to the original. I don’t become the human being who wrote the original, of course, but I step into some version of that person’s mind – the version contained in, or hinted at, or perhaps constructed by the poem in front of me. Minds emanate from poems, try to envelop and infect us as we read; they want to take us over, and, if their intricate plans come together, they do. Poetic translators go one step further than readers – our bodies possessed, we set to work on new poems in the target language.” In Babel’s Red Cavalry, several tonal strands – a lyrical, sometime expressionistic evocation of the landscape, a meditation on the past, a blistering exchange in juicy dialect, and the telegraphic beats of a military dispatch – are woven together into one story. A Red Cavalry story can read like a miniature cycle of prose poems, and as I translate, I try to enter the mindset of each of these poems."

I'm also including link to Jenny McPhee's site on her Italian translations, and the art of translation in general Worth looking up for obsessive translation freaks like us.

https://jennymcphee.com/translations/

Lastly, thanks much for rec re B's This Craft of Verse. I'll be looking that up asap!