Translating Borges

'By and large, translators of Borges are still Borges-tamers. Take the first sentence of the essay “La metáfora” (“On Metaphor”, rendered by Peter Roberston), one of the new pieces in On Writing: “The Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson, who accomplished many things in his highly eventful life, compiled a glossary of the traditional rhetorical metaphors of Icelandic poetry at the beginning of the thirteenth century”. This tries to overcome several difficulties by ironing them out, and ends up producing as many new creases. Never mind the oddly placed phrase “at the beginning of the thirteenth century”. Borges does not say “highly eventful life” (a cliché) but “intrincada vida” – “intricate life”, which may sound odd, but so it does in Spanish. Then, where the translation has “traditional rhetorical metaphors”, Borges has “figuras tradicionales”. “Figuras” is shorthand for “rhetorical figures”, which would have sufficed; “rhetorical metaphors” is meaningless. The original carries on for another three lines, shading into one of those mock-medieval lists that Borges was so fond of, while the translator splits the sentence in two, adds a redundant “in this compendium” (wasn’t it a glossary?), and links the terms of the list with verbs of his own invention. The result is a laboured eighty-four-word passage instead of the original seventy-two-word one.'

Martin Schifino Looks At New Anthologies Of The Writing Of Jorge Luis Borges – TLS