Michael Marcus has an extraordinarily interesting Medium post on Borges and his translators; after some introductory paragraphs about Borges himself and disagreements over the different translations of his stories, he points out that “Borges himself was fluent in English, and was prolific in translating English works into Spanish” and asks: “Why didn’t he translate his stories on his own?”
When trying to determine which translation is ‘best’, more insight into Borges’ mind is found than was bargained for — a rabbit-hole pursuit, uncovering discovery after discovery that surprises us with his tastes and his views. In a way that is perhaps typical of Borges, he provided an answer before many of us even came to ask the question.
He then compares four versions — by Anthony Bonner, James E. Irby, Andrew Hurley, and Norman Thomas Di Giovanni — of the opening sentence of “Las ruinas circulares” (The Circular Ruins), commendably giving it first in the original: “Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche…” He discusses each translation in some detail; of Bonnier’s, for example, he says:
Infinitas aldeas is translated as numberless villages, suggesting that the villages in the South are so similar as to be almost indistinguishable when looked at collectively.
Readers of this version may pick up on an authoritative tone, almost biblical in its rendering. This is cemented when we come to the point where the man is described as having an invincible intent: the original describes him as having ‘su invencible propósito’. Propósito is one of those words that be interpreted in different ways — Irby’s later translation will call it an invincible purpose; Hurley goes so far as to change it to unconquerable plan — just one example of how variation of a key phrase can affect how the story is received.
He ends with Di Giovanni’s, concluding “This version, without question, deviates the most from the original. For anyone reading Di Giovanni’s version for the first time, would it surprise you to find out that Borges was involved in this translation more than any other?” This leads into a description of how a young Di Giovanni became Borges’s official translator and their close collaboration:
Borges and Di Giovanni would record every session they had on tape. In a sampling of these sessions, we can hear that every sentence, every key word was picked at. Particular words are debated — sometimes across hours. Sometimes, they would stay with a paragraph for an entire session.
After more discussion of the various versions, he says:
Our position as the audience of Borges in English, perhaps, is not to critique the work of translators with a sense of bias; but rather, to point out the differences in creative choices and note their effects across the story.
Which makes sense to me. He then writes about the loss involved in “our practical inability to experience Borges’ literary context with respect to Latin American literature, specifically at that time,” quoting Mario Vargas Llosa on Borges’ impact on Spanish prose:
Borges’s prose is an anomaly, for in opting for the strictest frugality he deeply disobeys the Spanish language’s natural tendency toward excess… Borges made a radical innovation in the stylistic tradition of Spanish. By purifying it, by intellectualizing and coloring it in such a personal way, he showed that the language… was potentially much richer and more flexible than tradition seemed to indicate…
In the footnotes, he adds the very pleasing lagniappe of quoting the “Nadie no vio disembarcar” sentence in “the French translation that launched him onto the world stage”; I regret having to report that it has several misprints: “bamboo” should be “bambou,” “s’enforcer” s/b “s’enfoncer,” and “la lèper” s/b “la lèpre.” But such are the perils of online writing — nobody to proofread you!
https://www.mexicodesconocido.com.mx/el-encuentro-entre-juan-rulfo-y-jorge-luis-borges-dos-grandes-de-la-literatura-latinoamericana.html
According to this, Borges had a very high regard for Juan Rulfo. Pedro Páramo was published in 1955 and apparently was a strong influence on “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. I am not sure if it is fair to credit Borges with introducing the “spare” style, but I am sure Vargas-Llosa would have explained his statement better.
I much prefer di Giovanni’s version of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius to any other I’ve read.
He seems to have been treated pretty abominably by Maria Kodama.
Incidentally, I hereby declare that Borges was a Science Fiction writer. All dissenting opinions are to be dismissed as mere snobbery. (“If it’s good, it’s not SF.”)
Traditionally, the flim-flam worked in the other direction. It was precisely because Borges was thought of as a Serious Writer that LeGuin touted Philip K. Dick as “our own homegrown Borges” – it was a way of telling the sort of people who didn’t read SF writers that they should give Dick a chance.
He seems to have been treated pretty abominably by Maria Kodama.
Yes, as described here (from 2003):
The name Tlön was hijacked by the execrable Curtis Yarvin for one of his no doubt visionary projects
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit
once again confirming that when it comes to SF (sic), the technofascists have read all the words, but failed to grasp any of the meaning.
By free-association on “knowing all the words”:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bogz2xZy-bo
Oh, you know all the words and you sung all the notes
But you never quite learned the song she sung
I can tell by the sadness in your eyes
That you never quite learned the song
Rowan Williams, one of our more cerebral Archbishops of Canterbury, picked this as one of his Desert Island Discs.
Also, the Incredible String Band were Scottish, and therefore Worthy.
And Bob Dylan once said that one of their songs was “quite good.”
No comment.
The journeyman American rock and roller Peter Case wrote a lovely little memoir about being a doped-up 15-year-old American fan of the Incredible String Band in 1969. https://petercase.com/in-praise-of-the-incredible-string-band/
I find it particularly interesting because it is set in the same town in Western New York where my mother grew up – it’s possible Case had some overlapping hippie-era mutual acquaintances with my youngest uncle, who’s six years older than him.
That said, I’ve known lots of Americans who got obsessed with one or another British musical act from former decades that was comparatively unsuccessful/niche in the U.S., and the ISB has faded so far as to be notably uncompetitive in that area. The recent death of Danny Thompson provoked a (small) outpouring of enthusiastic remarks about how great the not-entirely-dissimilar Pentangle had been, once upon a time. Danny had played on a few ISB albums and there are other connections (e.g. Licorice McKechnie was once engaged to Bert Jansch, although the nuptials never actually came off), but neither that nor any other likely future news story seems likely to provoke a similar response.
Nice link. Thanks, JWB.
(Case evidently thinks the Hedgehog’s Song is a bit twee. I can see that. But I’m with the Archbishop of Canterbury on this.)
the not-entirely-dissimilar Pentangle
Speak, memory! (or rather, sing.) I haven’t thought about Pentangle since approx 1973 (probably Top of the Pops). And yet I could recall the tune for ‘Light Flight’ — and then verified it at Youtube.
Of the ISB I remember nothing, neither do I recognise any of their numbers (I find listening so painful, I’m pretty sure I would [**] [***]). Were they not on TotP?
[**] My rejoinder to those who say ‘If you can remember it, you can’t have been there’ is I neither was there nor remember [****] the ’60’s/’70’s.
[***] An endorsement from Dylan is what I’d call a counter-recommendation. It turns out with much retrospect some of his early stuff was “quite good” — but not as performed by him.
[****] Apparently with some exceptions.
If it’s good, it’s not SF.
I am reminded of a network discussion in the early days of whether Gravity’s Rainbow was / is. Pretty sure it was the old sf-lovers list. There is some bits here, but not as much as I remember.
Were they not on TotP?
Captain Beefheart was, once. And, I believe, Tom Waits. He used a megaphone. And who shall blame him?
[My family’s most secure claim to universal esteem is that my brother, at the time a long term inpatient, told a visiting Jimmy Saville to “fuck off.” We Eddyshaws have the mystical gift of Discernment.]
Thanks, JWB, that was a good piece – it’s been awhile since I put ISB on, but that’s what I’ll listen to next.
Edited to add: I forgot this comment was on the Borges post, that was one of the most interesting pieces on translation I’ve ever read
@de
One shudders when thinking what Mr. Saville had requested your brother to do, in order to provoke that response.
He had walked into the room. (I think we can agree that my brother’s response was proportionate and appropriate.)
that was one of the most interesting pieces on translation I’ve ever read
I am pleased!
The BBC was not always a good steward of its own legacy and for its first dozen or so years Top of the Pops was one of the programs subject to the penny-wise-pound-foolish practice of reusing the magnetic tape episodes were initially recorded on, with the result that a LOT of TOTP content is missing from the archives, with some holes having been filled in with collectors’ off-the-air recordings etc. but many remaining unfilled. In many but I expect not all cases it is known from contemporaneous written sources what is missing, e.g. there is a crowd of obsessive cultists out there who would be made very happy if someone found a recording (however nth generation and low quality) of the 8/14/1969 episode including Fairport Convention, since there is zero surviving video footage from any source of the classic 1968-69 lineup with Sandy Denny.*
One number from a 1972 recording of the Incredible String Band reportedly appeared on “a BBC Transcription Disc LP, ‘Top Of The Pops No. 836’ (catalogue number 130057, expiry date 30.3.73), for overseas radio station use.” But I think the title of the “disc” was a misnomer, because it sounds like it was an audio-only recording that had been made for potential use on John Peel’s radio show but not actually aired in the UK (probably because Peel’s staff deliberately recorded more material than he would have airtime for so that he could pick and choose).
*The surviving video evidence of the not-nearly-so-awesome 1974-76 era after Sandy had returned but many others had left in a Ship-of-Theseus sort of way is basically a minute long. They appeared on some ITV program but we don’t even have video of the entire song because the copy that survived stops abruptly just before they got to the second verse.
In America, Pentangle were never on the top of anything, except the estimation of enthusiasts like me who had every Fairport/Steeleye Span/Pentangle album.
Pace AntC, I don’t know if The Pentangle (as the BBC arthrously billed them) was ever on TOTP but they did feature in an early episode of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Concert_(British_TV_series). Which was in fact a better situation for your more diehard fans, because a single musical act typically got a whole half-hour to itself and played live rather than miming to their latest-hit studio recording. It seems to have had a different vibe from the Old Grey Whistle Test, which the BBC started airing a year later, apparently in a later-at-night time slot. There’s other non-BBC tv footage of Pentangle (originally aired on the likes of ITV, Grenada, some Belgian network, etc. …) also from the early Seventies of reasonably high quality that’s easy to find on youtube.
!
@David M.: Well, Christina “Licorice” McK. to the authorities. And eventually Mrs. Lambert, for a while. And if her mysterious disappearance many decades ago didn’t just mean “died w/o corpse ever found-or-identified” (presumably the most likely possibility) then some other assumed name or names as well. Scottish naming practices – what can I tell you?
I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of the Incredible String Band, but I do listen to Pentangle.
Strange that no-one has picked up on the badly quoted first sentence of Borges’ story, especially given LH’s remark on proofreaders.
It should of course read “Nadie lo vio desembarcar…”
Woops! Good catch, thanks, and I’ve fixed it.
A small peeve: How come no one realized that “Nadie no vio disembarcar en la unánime noche…” is not what Borges, SF or not SF, wrote. That’s not Spanish. It’s not even a typo, as it appears twice here. The original, in perfect Spanish, is “Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la únanime noche…” (cf https://ciudadseva.com/texto/las-ruinas-circulares/, first line) EDITED: And I now see that nb caught it and commented on it while I was laboriously writing this. Ah well) EDITED AGAIN: it’s “desembarcar”, not “disembarcar”
Speaking of Borges (if I may be allowed a personal anecdote): I attended the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires (the most prestigious and la-di-da high school in that city, at least at that time, no idea what its status is nowadays), which herded all students to the auditorium every Friday afternoon for a special event. One such event was Borges come to speak to us. Disappointingly, he didn’t (speak to us, that is), he just walked painfully on stage, sat on a chair in the center of such stage, and lectured us on ancient Norse sagas. If I had known the expression WTF at that time I certainly would have said it, and I wouldn’t have been the only one. Not one word of that lecture stuck to my adolescent brain. My father’s reaction when I told him about it was “Well, never go listen to a writer speaking, and never read the words that a politician writes”. That did stick.
Sigh. Fixed that one too, and gave myself a rap across the knuckles.