University of Iowa Displacing the mask: Jorge Luis Borges and the translation of narrative (original) (raw)
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Gender and Translation: Spanish Translation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, by Jorge Luis Borges
Mutatis Mutandis Revista Latinoamericana De Traduccion, 2013
Jorge Luis Borges translated into Spanish Orlando: A Biography, written by Virginia Woolf, nine years after its publication, in 1928. In the novel, Virginia Woolf sought to chart a path that would lead to a perfect harmony between the two sexes in the mind. However, the translation of the Argentine author has a number of changes that allows us to examine the personal character that he gave to his translation as a reflection of his conscious or unconscious covert patriarchal ideology.
2024
Este trabajo busca estudiar y analizar la relación que existe entre la traducción y la ideología, basándose en las teorías de la traducción feminista y usando como objeto de análisis la novela de Virgina Woolf, Orlando (1928) y la traducción de la misma realizada por Jorge Luis Borges (1937). Además, busca también exponer los dilemas de género que existen en la traducción inglés-español y distintas técnicas para solucionarlos. This dissertation seeks to study and analyse the relationship between translation and ideology, based on the theories of feminist translation and using as an object of analysis the novel by Virgina Woolf, Orlando (1928) and the translation of the same by Jorge Luis Borges (1937). In addition, it also seeks to expose the gender dilemmas that exist in English-Spanish translation and different techniques for solving them.
The Androgynous Mind: Reading Jorge Luis Borges through Virginia Woolf
Variaciones Borges, 2022
This article sketches a tradition of feminist writing and thought that paved the way for some of Jorge Luis Borges's most remarkable stories. Beginning with an examination of the Argentine author's literary relationship with Virginia Woolf, it considers Orlando: A Biography (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929), both of which Borges translated into Spanish, as precursors to important themes of gender fluidity and female creativity in several of his own stories. It also examines Borges's literary relationship with his mother, Leonor Acevedo de Borges, who, along with other women who supported his literary production in his later years, deserves to be credited as one of the twentieth century's great literary amanuenses, as well as a translator in her own right. 1 Quote from her memoirs, as dictated to Alicia Jurado (Hadis 263).
(Un)Faithful Renditions: Gender Dynamics in an Adaptation of Don Gil de las calzas verdes
the translation by means of adaptations that will provide meaningful alternatives for the target audiences. Barbara Godard highlights the strong affinities existing between theatrical dialogue and the discourses of a society. When this dialogue is translated, translators are limited and restrained by both linguistic and cultural differences as well as untranslatable representations between source and target. Solving these gaps entails a decision-making process never exempt from ideological bias. Indeed, these solutions are embedded in "demands for relevance and pertinence to the doxa of the target culture in the selection of a text and in the determination of specific translation strategies" (Godard 333). This essay examines the process of adaptation for an upcoming New York production of Don Gil de las calzas verdes, subject of an ASTR Targeted Research Areas Grant. The idea of adapting Don Gil came to us after the successful rendition of Lope de Vega's The Dog in the Manger adapted and directed by Dave Dalton, one of the writers of this article. As Jeff Lewonczyk documents, the 2006 off-off-Broadway rendition of Dog brought the Golden Age play into a contemporary context and attracted a renewed interest in Spanish classical theater among an English-speaking young audience in New York. It also signaled the beginning of our collaboration. As is always the case with shared artistic endeavors, the demarcation of intellectual property becomes blurred and untraceable. In our case, the beginning of our collaboration was precise and should be acknowledged here. The adaptation of Don Gil is credited to Dave Dalton. Raúl Galoppe suggested the play first and joined the project later on out of sheer enthusiasm at the prospect of disseminating Tirso's work among non-specialists in New York City. Thus the preliminary roles were quite easily assigned according to our fields of expertise. While one was to envision, produce, and direct a first draft of the translated/adapted text (Dalton), the other was to provide linguistic and cultural background as well as critical and theoretical frameworks, both in Tirso's comedias and in suitable translation approaches (Galoppe). Once we started, these two areas of expertise began to overlap, and we feel that our common point of view is well served by the shared voice of this article. Our new version of Don Gil, tentatively entitled Love's a Bitch, is founded on the premise that adaptation entails legitimate transpositions, creative and interpretative acts of appropriation, and extended intertextual engagements with the adapted work (Hutcheon 6-9). We approach the material in terms of story and playability, as a paraphrase of the original, with the intention to foreground common human traits such as desire, jealousy, and deception in ways understandable and palatable for a contemporary general public unaware of early-modern Spanish conventions. The adaptation emphasizes animation within the new text by focusing on the most intriguing aspects of the original and eliminating characters and subplots less critical to the forward movement of the play. Another important emphasis of the adaptation is assuring a significant arc
The task of the main character of J.L. Borges' short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is not very difficult, indeed, Pierre Menard decides to re-write word by word Cervantes' Don Quixote. However, he presumes to accomplish this undertaking not merely by coping the novel, but rather by reproducing it as if the Don Quixote naturally arose through Menard's subjectivity and creativity. The French character does not intend to write an adaptation of Miguel Cervantes, a sort of “Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on La Cannebière or Don Quixote on Wall Street” (Borges, 48), since being a man of good taste he considers adaptations mere anachronisms. “He did not want to compose another Quixote - which is easy - but the Quixote itself . [...] [H]e did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide - word for word and line for line -.” (Borges, 48. Emphasis by Borges). In order to achieve his goal Menard presupposes two possible alternatives: “[k]now Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.” Or “go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.” (Borges, 48-49). Menard, obviously, opts for the latter. J.L. Borges describes the singular work of this fictional French literary critic and symbolist poet, as a sort of encomium, a critical review that attempts to re-establish what Borges calls the “subterranean” work of Menard. The form adopted by Borges is the first element that destabilizes the reader's mind, since Borges starts to play with the plausibility of the references that he uses for his paradoxical review; he merges fictitious characters with prominent figures of literary and philosophic history as Paul Valéry, Bertrand Russel or Leibniz. The parodic intent of the story towards the literary critique is evident through out the entire narration, e.g. the ironic reference to the “unforgettable vendredis” hosted by the unlikely Baroness de Bancourt. The continuous shifting between narrative and literary critique, fictitious and veritable, plausible and contradictory, creates an infinite web of references that merges into Borges' labyrinthian writing, whereof Pierre Menard represents the first victim. The density and the strict bond between content and form inherent Borges' writing has allowed, over the years, the proliferation of numerous critical readings on Pierre Menard..., that have attempted to give a plausible interpretation of this short story through different perspectives and disciplinary fields, such as literary criticism, history, philosophy or psychology. Borges' subtle narrative capacity of creating stories whereof is impossible to discern if an element is central or peripheral and to separate the content from the form, creates a sort of illogical dynamic of plausible and contradictory entities that allows the coexistence of diverging and, occasionally, oppositional theories. The embracing nature of Borge's Pierre Menard... is identifiable also in Walter Benjamin's short essay The Task of the Translator. Indeed, this theoretical text has begotten several rereadings, wherein numerous thinkers exposed their interpretations, that, as with Menard, occasionally resulted as contrasting theories. Benjamin's and Borges' texts share the possibility of allowing the dynamic tension between contraries, in fact they both tend to ground their own existence on their multiplicity; paradoxically they feed on the tensions that derive from their interpretation. As Pierre Menard..., The Task of the Translator constantly creates a series of inter-textual and extra-textual references that render it ineffable in its entirety. Moreover, also in Benjamin's text the content and the form through which it has been expressed, appear absolutely inseverable so that the purpose pursued by the author could be accomplished. It succeeds in rendering possible the coexistence of contradictory element, for instance “the text is full of tropes, and it selects tropes which convey the illusion of totality. It seems to relapse into the tropological errors that it denounces.” (De Man, 30) Hence, this communal embracing nature of both texts onstitutes the root cause of their permanence or their “afterlife” as Benjamin calls it. Since they are texts which reflect on the aesthetic production of a work of art, on the nature of art itself, hence upon themselves as writing expressions, they envelop the reader/critic who is occasionally attracted and rejected by them. Therefore, I presume that they both own the features that Benjamin identifies in the original work, c'est-à-dire contain[ing] the law governing the translation: its translatability.” (70) Simultaneously, their originality is not affected by the act of translation because “[j]ust as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a translation issues from the original not so much from its life as from its afterlife.” (Benjamin, 71) Besides the conceptual contiguity of these works, I reckon that these two text could be analysed next to each other for these particular and communal aesthetic features. Hence, by defining Pierre Menard as the translator of the Quixote, I will attempt to explain why although his “subterranean” work slightly touches Cervantes' Don Quixote, he diverges form the Spanish novel to reach different meanings; “[j]ust as a tangent [that] touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity.” (Benjamin, 80). In the first section of this essay, I will briefly resume Benjamin's The Task of the Translator, while in the other two sections I will concentrate my analysis on Borges' text.
Queer Rebels: Rewriting Literary Traditions in Contemporary Spanish Novels
Queer Rebels: Rewriting Literary Traditions in Contemporary Spanish Novels, 2022
‘Queer Rebels’ is a study of gay narrative writings published in Spain at the turn of the 20th century. The book scrutinises the ways in which the literary production of contemporary Spanish gay authors – José Luis de Juan, Luis G. Martín, Juan Gil-Albert, Juan Goytisolo, Eduardo Mendicutti, Luis Antonio de Villena and Álvaro Pombo – engages with homophobic and homophile discourses, as well as with the vernacular and international literary legacy. The first part revolves around the metaphor of a rebellious scribe who queers literary tradition by clandestinely weaving changes into copies of the books he makes. This subversive writing act, named ‘Mazuf’s gesture’ after the protagonist of José Luis de Juan’s ‘This Breathing World’ (1999), is examined in four highly intertextual works by other writers. The second part of the book explores Luis Antonio de Villena and Álvaro Pombo, who in their different ways seek to coin their own definitions of homosexual experience in opposition both to the homophobic discourses of the past and to the homonormative regimes of the commercialised and trivialised gay culture of today. In their novels, ‘Mazuf’s gesture’ involves playing a sophisticated queer game with readers and their expectations.
Reimagining Cervantes's Don Quixote: A Modern Lens, Through Borges's Vision of Literature
Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, held Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote in the highest regard, often praising it as a masterpiece of world literature. For Borges, Don Quixote was more than just a tale of a misguided knight—it was a profound meditation on the nature of fiction, reality, and the power of storytelling. Both Cervantes and Borges blurred the lines between imagination and the real world, crafting narratives that questioned the very essence of authorship and perception. In their works, the themes of impossible quests, multiple perspectives, and the recursive nature of time serve as a bridge between the two literary giants. This article explores how Borges’s storytelling techniques mirror and build upon the innovations Cervantes pioneered, revealing a shared vision of literature as an endless, transformative quest.
Quaderns Revista De Traduccio, 2012
This paper is part of a corpus-based research on gender in translation aimed at showing how gender is used and/or abused in the translation of literary texts from English into Italian. Drawing upon feminist theories of language and translation and feminist practices in translation, it is our intention to show how gender is manipulated in translation in an attempt to define feminist translation strategies. Translating a feminist text does not necessarily imply that the translator working on that text is a feminist. In Italy, moreover, it is very hard to find cases of declared feminist translators as compared to other countries, such as Canada or Spain for instance. Our interest, therefore, lies in the possibility to frame specific strategies as feminist and to see if in the corpus of texts we are analyzing they are carried out or not. The second part of the essay focuses on the first example of our study: Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and three of the translations that have been published in the Italian context.