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as "Song of Songs" instead of for its implied meaning as "The Highest Song")
can generate its own strange kind of beauty. In his 1951 essay "La muralla y
los libros," Borges describes the aesthetic act as "a revelation that does not
take place" [una revelacion que no se produce]. Perhaps this idea of an event
that does not take place could also characterize what happens in translation,
in so far as the passage from one language to another introduces an uncanny
excess or gap between two scenes.
Chapter Two discusses a number of the works which Borges himself trans-
lated, either in whole or in part. This diverse list includes poems, short stories
and fragments of novels by Chesterton, Poe, Whitman, Woolf, Angelus Silesius,
several German expressionist poets, Hesse, Kafka, The Arabian Nights, and the
Skaldic poetry of the Prose Edda. Kristal provides examples of various forms
of alteration (condensations, omissions and strategic rewritings) carried out by
Borges in his translations. He also mentions that certain translations, such as
those of German expressionist poetry, played an important role in shaping the
intellectual scene in Argentina during Borges's time. In this respect, Kristal's
study might have been enriched by a more sustained analysis of contextual
questions. It would seem that Borges's work as a translator, together with his
reflections on problems of translation in his own writing, could make a valuable
contribution to the study—initiated by Beatriz Sarlo and others—of how Borges
intervenes in the conflict between tradition and modernity in Argentina.
The third chapter of Invisible Work enumerates the thematic presence
of translation in Borges's fiction, while also demonstrating that a number
of Borges's fictions are in fact re-writings of other stories ("La muerte y la
brujula," for instance, is a re-writing of both Poe's "The Purloined Letter" and
London's "The Minions of Midas"). The examples presented in this chapter
pose intriguing questions about the relation between the fantastic and credu-
lity (how do literary fantasies manage to convince us at some level even when
they make no pretense of following realistic codes of representation?), and
about narrative order and disorder, or the literary effects of non sequitur and
discontinuity. This chapter also raises some questions that could be further
developed. For instance, Kristal notes that "one of the most common openings
of a Borges fiction is a short text by a narrator who introduces a translated
manuscript constituting the body of the story. . . . As in Cervantes, Borges's
narrators are often not in a better position than the reader to understand the
contents of the text they have decided to offer to a reading public" (97). One
wonders if the prototypical gesture of placing translation at the threshold
of the text could shed new light on Borges's thinking about literary history,
or about the constitution of what we call "literature" in accordance with
the historical emergence of certain concepts, both legal (copyright laws) and
philosophical (the subject defined as the origin of its representations, as the
one who signs, etc.). By the same token, a narrator calling attention to the fal-
libility of memory (as Kristal describes in the same passage cited above) is also
a recognizable Borgesian trope. What do these characteristic pronouncements.
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which often appear at the origin of the narrator's relato, attesting to a lacuna
or gap between the speaking subject and recollection, tell us about Borges's
understanding of subjectivity, language and the narrative act?
Kristal concludes his study by asserting that translation presents a singular
set of considerations that should not be overshadowed by other topoi that
have been popularized in Borges criticism in recent years: "No skepticism,
irony, or even humor can obscure the central role that translation has played
in every one of his literary pursuits, including the project of incorporating
philosophical material into his fictional world. Nor can anything place in
doubt Borges's design, as with other twentieth-century writers such as Kafka
and Beckett, to resist facile interpretation" (145). It would be difficult to
argue with Kristal's advocating serious and rigorous readings of Borges. But
in my view the assertion of translation's "central role" invites the following
question: What would prevent us from examining translation together with
Borgesian skepticism, irony and humor, not as a concession to interpretive
reductionism but precisely as an attempt to resist the reduction of the literary
to formulaic readings and applied concepts?
Sergio Waisman's Borges and Translation consists of five central chapters
and an epilogue. The first chapter discusses the role played by translation in
the Argentine tradition, beginning with foundational texts such as Sarmiento's
Facundo (1845) and then jumping to the 1920s and 30s. This latter period
saw the end ofthe open immigration policies which had shaped social and eco-
nomic development in Argentina since the middle of the nineteenth century.
Translation provides a productive framework for examining the intellectual
scene encountered by Borges in Buenos Aires in the 1920s and 30s, a time
and place defined by linguistic and cultural heterogeneity together with efforts
coming from various points on the political spectrum to establish a sense of
national unity. In addition to its role in fostering the production of national
culture, Waisman argues that translation also provided Argentine intellectuals
with a way to situate themselves in relation to Furope and the United States.
For instance, he states that the translation projects undertaken by Victoria
Ocampo (for many years the editor of the cultural journal Sur) and others
affirmed the possibility of "(re)creating a center in the circumference" (35).
While this may be an accurate description of Ocampo's intentions, the notion
of putting translation to work in the interest of a new centrism would seem to
contradict Borges's insistence—which is underscored by Kristal and elsewhere
by Waisman himself—that a radicalized understanding of translation would
make the idea of unmediated originality or centrality unsustainable.
The second chapter discusses Borges's views on translation in the context of
theoretical debates about the nature of translation as well as the criteria used
to judge it. Key reference points in this chapter include the Newman/Arnold
debate, and texts by Schleiermacher, Benjamin, Jakobson, Derrida and Venuti.
Waisman begins this chapter by asserting that literary criticism has yet to
engage sufficiently with the relation between Borges and translation: on one
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hand, the question of translation has until now been understudied in Borges
criticism, while at the same time Borges's own contributions to thinking about
translation have by and large been ignored by translation theorists. It is some-
what surprising, in this context, that Waisman omits from his own bibliogra-
phy an essay on Borges, Joyce and translation by one of the most important
English-language translators of Latin American writers (Suzanne Jill Levine's
1997 article "Notes to Borges's Notes on Joyce: Infinite Affinities").
One of the important distinctions established in Chapter Two concerns the
difference between "Classical" and "Romantic" notions of authorship, a dis-
tinction Borges elaborates in his early essay "Las dos maneras de traducir"
(1926). Whereas Borges describes Classicism as seeking artistic perfection at the
expense of the idiosyncrasies of the individual artist. Romanticism is defined
by a "reverence of the 'I'" or the view that all artistic creation presupposes a
creative subject. This distinction gives rise to competing views about transla-
tion: the Classical attitude tends to favor loose translations with ample use of
periphrasis, while the Romantic attitude produces literal translations which seek
to remain faithful to the original subject's intentions. Assuming that one accepts
the premise that all translations can be identified with one or the other atti-
tude (and I suspect that some of Borges's later comments on translation would
cast doubt on this premise), it would be interesting to consider in which camp
Waisman's notion of artistic "irreverence" falls. Waisman certainly intends for
the term to characterize the spirit of Borges's attacks on a certain Romantic
tradition that is still held as sacred by many today. But the Romantic notion of
the subject merely postulates that amidst all appearance, transformation and
flux there must be an "I" that is the center of activity—an act of symbolization
which retroactively unifies what is otherwise chaotic. But since Waisman uses
the term "irreverent" somewhat indiscriminately to describe virtually all of
Borges's engagements with the tradition, there would seem to be no real limits
to irreverence in Waisman's reading. In the absence of any limit, it is difficult
to see how a concept of authorial "irreverence" (itself a form of activity) could
avoid reproducing a version of the Romantic "I" despite its best intentions.
The third and fourth chapters look at Borges's essays and prose, beginning
with the Historia universal de la infamia (1935). The central argument in
these two chapters is much the same as the starting point taken by Kristal: for
Borges, writing from its very beginnings implicates processes of reading and
translation that we ordinarily think of as coming afterwards. In Waisman's
view, the impossibility of separating literature from translation has an impor-
tant bearing on Borges's confrontation with the question of what it means to
write in Argentina. The radicalization of translation, or the notion that trans-
lation is co-originary with writing, provides Borges with the means to engage
"irreverently" with Western literary history. That is to say, radical translation
gives Borges a powerful weapon against the Eurocentric tendency to reduce
Argentine literary production to a secondary status vis-a-vis the tradition, as
the imitation or emulation of "true" artistic creativity. Borges's radicalization
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Edwin Wiliamson. Borges. A Life. New York: Viking, 2004, Pp. 574.