The Two Ways to Translate, by Jorge Luis Borges (1926)
Translated by Eric Gelsinger
meddlers, and liars. The sentence traduttore traditore is pronounced to general approbation, and a
little Italian joke suffices to condemn an entire caste of men. I suspect first-hand experience is not
called upon in this condemnatory trial (here I find myself weaving, unintentionally, a legal allegory)
and th
a very easy sentence to remember; secondly, thoughts or pseudo-thoughts expressed in puns appear
to be inevitable and prefigured by the language itself; thirdly, the conformist tendency to sting and
bite whenever possible; and finally, the desire to appear smart. For my part, I do believe in good
translations of literary works (to say nothing of didactic or speculative works), and, in my opinion,
even poetry is translatable. The Venezuelan author Pérez Bonalde, with his exemplary translation of
The Raven,
however faithful or pleasurable it may be, will never be for us what the original is for North
Americans, and the objection is difficult to overrule. Likewise, the verses of Evaristo Carriego might
seem impoverished when heard by a Chilean as opposed to an Argentinian like myself who suspects
the afternoons by the shore, the local color, and details of the landscape not explicit in the verse: a
wealth, when passed from Argentina to Chile, can only find itself diminished.
The difficulties of translation are various. The already overtasked Novalis (Werke, page 207, part
three of the Friedemann edition) indicated that every word has one peculiar meaning all its own as
well as other meanings connotative and arbitrary. In prose, the common sense of the word is that
which is binding, and finding its equivalent tends to be rather easy. In verse, and above all in the
periods known for decadence (which is to say literary indolence and mere recollection) the case is
different. There, the meaning of the word is not what matters but its ambience, its connotation, its
gesture. Words become incantations and the poetry aspires to magic. It performs its conjurations and
which for us is already an invitation to poetry, is tasteless in the mouths of Bushmen who consider
privileged in these parts, a Jewish friend confessed to me
that he found it downright comical and that its engagement for poetic purposes could only be
1
credit to Arturo Costa Álvarez) is decent in Spain but derogatory in America.
1
Literally: a subject, citizen, or national.
were poetically efficacious twenty years ago, but
they no longer do the job, and only survive in the poetry of San José de Flores3 or Bánfield4. It is well
documented that every literary generation has its favorite words that work like good luck charms and
wrap immensity into a pretty box and whose use, and as soon as they are written down, serves as
tremendous relief to the harried imaginations of inept writers pressed for time. Such words exhaust
themselves in short order, and the writer who has gone to the well too many times (the modern man,
the contemporary man, the man of erudition) runs the chance or rather meets his destiny of being
considered a counterfeiter or a maniac. This usually serves him well enough: every perfection, even
the perfection of bad taste, can win a man fame. To be immortally tacky is a way to survive like any
other.
2
There are works very straightforward to read that are incredibly difficult to translate. Take this stanza
of Martín Fierro, perhaps my favorite of them all, for it speaks of happiness:
El gaucho más infeliz
Tenía tropilla de un pelo
No le faltaba un consuelo
y andaba la gente lista.
Tendiendo al campo la vista,
Sólo vía haciendo y cielo5.
2
Charming, azure, regal, filial.
3
San José de Flores is an outer barrio of Buenos Aires. Later in life, Borges would write a prologue for the catalog of the
.
Tengo profundos recuerdos personales de San José de Flores, de las tardes y de las noches de Flores; estas aquí no son
importantes. Sé que en ese barrio no tan lejano, que bordea la puesta del sol, vivió Eduardo Gutiérrez, que hizo de Juan
Moreira de Morón, el primer gaucho arquetípico, y Fernández Moreno, quien descubrió que la simple llanura que los escritores
denominaban la pampa debería ser cantada con simples palabras, y Nalé Roxlo, cuyos últimos años transcurrieron bajo el terror
de las sesiones de la Academia Argentina de Letras, y Roberto Ledesma que ha legado más de un soneto memorable, y Wally
Zenner, quien escribió este verso: Morir de ti, espléndida y desnuda.
Guillermo Roux, cuyo libro tengo el honor de prologar, nació en ese barrio.
Yo no viví el tiempo de las quintas hoy perdidas- pero sé que en esos grandes terrenos de árboles, de plantas, de
pájaros, de fuentes, de rejas y a veces de plazas y estatuas, estaban vinculadas a Flores como así también a Montevideo.
Buenos Aires tiene, comúnmente hablando, sólo tres puntos cardinales: el oeste, el norte y el sur. Al ángulo del este le
damos el nombre del centro. El Centro natural sería la llanura, no las inundadas cuestas que dan al río o al Riachuelo. Me
animo a predecir que antes de que pasen cincuenta años el centro de la ciudad será Flores y las tierras que lo rodean.
(Borges J. L., Guillermo Roux, Edit. por Rey, Jean Dominique, Rizzoli, Nueva York, 1984. Asociación Borgesiana de
Buenos Aires.)
Bánfield is a city just south of Buenos Aires and considered part of Greater Buenos Aires. It is associated with steam
engines, railroad tracks, and Julio Cortázar. Borges would pass through Bánfield whenever he would travel between
Buenos Aires and his childhood summer home in Adrogué
4
5
Even the poorest gaucho
had a string of matching horses,
he could always find some amusement, people were ready for anything . . . .
The difficulty lies in the word
girl, or perhaps . . . .
e
I suppose that, universally speaking, there are two kinds of translations. One practices literalness,
and the other practices paraphrase. The first corresponds to a romantic mentality: the second to the
classical. Allow me to set out the reasons for my affirmation in order to divest it of its air of paradox.
Classical minds are interested only in the work of art and never in the artist. They believe in
perfection and they search for it. They disdain localisms, rarities, and contingencies. Poetry should
be no less beautiful than the moon: eternal, dispassionate, and impartial. Under classicism,
metaphor, to take an example, is not considered as a means of emphasis nor as a kind of personal
vision, but as a way of obtaining poetic truth; once employed, it can (and should) be used by
everyone. Every literature possesses a repertoire of these truths, and the translator must understand
how to use it to his advantage so as to arrive not only at words, but at a syntax and at the appropriate
traditional metaphors of his own language. This procedure might strike us as sacrilege, and
sometimes it is. Our condemnation, nonetheless, is a sin of optimism, as the majority of metaphors
are no longer representational in nature, but merely mechanical. No one, upon hearing the word
ey only seek the man. And the man (as
everyone knows) is not eternal or archetypical he is Diego Fulano, is he not? He is Juan Mengano6.
He inhabits a climate and possesses a body, life story, present, future -- and even a death --that is his
alone. Heaven forbid you tinker with even a single word he has left us!
literalness of a translation. Not to mention that the far-away and foreign always constitute beauty.
Novalis lucidly identified this romantic sentiment: The philosophy of far-off lands sounds as poetry
to our ears. Everything becomes poetic at a distance: distant mountains, distant men, distant deeds,
and all the rest. From here, we derive what is fundamentally poetic in our nature: poetry of the night
and of shadow. (Werke, III, 213). A delectation of the foreign, a journey through space and time, a
this is what is promised by the translations of ancient works: a
promise that tends to be confined to the prologue. The declared purpose of rendering truth makes a
falsifier of the translator because he, in order to conserve the exotic of what he translates, finds
This English translation, by Kate Ward Kavanagh (2008), is the best I know and can be found in its entirety here:
http://www.sparrowthorn.com/
Fulano and Mengano are used in Argentinian and Uruguayan Spanish as John Doe is used in English for cases of
nomen nescio.
6
himself obliged to overshade with local color, to lengthen the horns of the demons, to cloy you with
whatever sweet is found, and to emphasize unto mendacity.
As far as the innumerable versions of famous books that have exhausted and continued to exhaust
the presses, I suspect that in the end they are a play of variations and little more. At times, a
translator may take advantage of the carelessness and idiocy of a previous text in order to feature
himself in an advantageous comparison. But, this game can be played just as well within a given
literature, so why bother moving between languages? Martín Fierro famously begins with these ritual
a cantar al compás de la vigü
and now let us
spend our days debating which of the two versions is worse. The first utterly ridiculous and labored
is practically literal.
7
:
This essay originally appeared in the Argentine daily La Prensa on August 1, 1926, a few weeks short
th
birthday. It is his earliest statement on the subject of translation8.
The title of the essay, The Two Ways to Translate might strike one as severely categorical,
especially for a writer who argued against the notion of a definitive text throughout his life, who
9
defined translation as
s unfaithful to the translation
and who made the pronouncement
Vathek was far superior to the French original. Indeed,
ssible might yield a
less literal rendition of his title were it not for the fact
is a reference to literary
history.
In 1856, the linguist Francis Newman published
Iliad Faithfully Translated Into Unrhymed
with the greater care,
English Metre
the more foreign it may happen to be
d
reader ought, if possible, to forget that it is a translation at all, and be lulled into the illusion that he
is reading an original work. . . . A translator must by no means so set his aim; for his first duty is a
7
These versions can be translated more or less accordingly:
Here I come to sing, to the beat of my vihuela (original)
In the very same place where I find myself, I am beginning to sing with my guitar (literal and labored)
Brother of my guitar, I here begin my song. (grandiloquent paraphrase).
Kristal, Efraín. 2002. Invisible Work: Borges and Translation, pg 15. Vanderbilt University Press.
Selected Non-Fictions, ed. and trans. Eliot Weinberger, pg 69. New
York: Penguin.
8
9
historical one: to be faithful . . . 10 In service of these ends, Newman employed antiquated words
and non-existent English sentence-structures so as to capture every nuance of the original Greek.
The result was striking:
oh goddess, the resentment
And forward flung to Aides
Of heroes, and their very selves
And unto every fowl, (for so
From that first day when feud arose
The son of Atreus, prince of men,
full many a gallant spirit
did toss to dogs that ravin,
implacable, and parted
and Achilles the godlike.
translation, he has his easy remedy, --to keep aloof from it,
11
he enjoined.
Arnold wrote
Matthew Arnold did not heed the injunction.
authority of so eminent a Professor led his students to misconceive entirely the chief work of the
Greek world. And so, in a series of lectures (later published as On Translating Homer) the admired
poet demonstrated in eviscerating detail
Homer by his general effect, and not by his single words, and [a scholar who is not pedantic]
demands but one thing in a translation that it shall, as nearly as possible, reproduce for him the
general effect of Homer.
In response, Newman published his own pamphlet: Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice: a
Reply to Matthew Arnold in which he
periphrastic handling of those elements of Homer such as the double epithet which an Englishman
might find strange.
12
microscopic examination. . . . His process obliterates everything characteristic, great
Newman volleyed, before mounting a spirited defense of his translating the names of certain horses.
This, at least, was the shape of the contest as recast by Borges i
Versions.
summarizes the exchange tidily:
The beautiful Newman-Arnold debate (1861-62), more important than either of its participants,
extensively argued the two basic methods of translation. Newman defended the literal mode, the
retention of all verbal singularities; Arnold, the strict elimination of details that distract or detain the
reader, the subordination of the Homer who is irregular in every line to the essential or conventional
Homer, one composed of a syntactical simplicity, a simplicity of ideas, a flowing rapidity, and
Newman, Francis William. 1856.
Iliad Faithfully Translated Into Unrhymed English Metre, pp x -xvi. Retrieved
from https://archive.org/details/iliadhomerfaith00newmgoog
11
Ibid
12
Newman, Francis William. 1862. Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice: a Reply to Matthew Arnold, pg 63.
Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/homerictranslat01newmgoog
10
loftiness. The latter method provides the pleasures of uniformity and nobility; the former, of
continuous and small surprises.13
In truth, the debate was mostly technical in nature; a great portion of the dispute revolved around
meter, for example. And Arnold and Newman did not always differ on the point of recreating the
effects as opposed to the details of Homer; only they disagreed as to what those
characterization of the debate is also faulty on the matter of syntax: Arnold actually defended
syntactical constructions. Nevertheless, here we have the origins of the two ways
Once Borges has establsihed his two ways he is able to construct a literary equation that reformulates
one of his major preoccupations between the years 1922-1931: a binary that sets the Classical literary
style in opposition to the Romantic style. In a series of essays, most notably
trast an impersonal Classical
style and a personal Romantic style at the same time as he was developing a fiction style that
contained elements of both. According to Borges, the Classical mind is one for which
of men and eras is incident
for the Romantic mind,
a literary work is above all an expression of an individua
, he
eves in the ample
writer, on the other hand, insists
to achieve historical value.
s his biographical self as a touchstone
However, Borges does not return to this analogy in his later writings about translation. His 1932
(1934-1936) are both informed by his Newman-Arnold model, but neither makes mention of the
Classical vs Romantic dichotomy. Nor does Borges employ the analogy in his later reviews or in his
prefaces to translated works. The Newman-Arnold controversy continues to figure into his writings,
but it begins to serve a grea
(as he would have
them) in order to rise above them. He does not take sides, but positions himself just outside of the
debate and achieves a kind of synthesis. A literal translation can yield surprising, and fortuitously
strange results; it can also yield grotesque nonsense. A periphrastic translation can be the best way to
convey the effects of the original; it can also destroy those effects. One should do whatever is best.
The grand purpose is the improvement of literature, and if it means a mutation of the original, so be
it.
Invisible Work:
Borges and Translation Efraín Kristal argues that Borges ultimately agreed with Novalis that:
end all literature is translation
translation, and that the very plot o
13
York: Penguin.
wherein an interpolation in an 18th
Selected Non-Fictions, ed. and trans. Eliot Weinberger, pg 71. New
century critical edition becomes a part of the canon, was re-enacted by Borges when he interpolated
Urn Burial. Kristal also points to a passage of
a paragraph in his translation of
Borges
the ideas of
14
the original.
the quotations I culled from the exchange, I worked to show that Borges rendition has a firm
essays and fiction might strive to
rather than defend its historicity is also a conclusion not without
foundation.
14
Kristal, Efraín. 2002. Invisible Work: Borges and Translation, pp 32-34. Vanderbilt University Press.