Borges’s Creative Infidelities

Using comparative analyses of source and target texts, Leone Anderson examines Jorge Luis Borges’s residual presence in his Spanish-language translations of works by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner.

Argentine writer and critic Jorge Luis Borges did not see translation as an inferior form of artistic production to be defined primarily in terms of loss or unfaithfulness, but rather as a vast and rich source for literary innovation and aesthetic inquiry. Borges’s Creative Infidelities: Translating Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner explores what this view may have implied for his translations of Anglophone Modernist fiction: the last two pages of James Joyce’s Ulysses; Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Orlando; and William Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms].

Through full-length, manual comparisons of the English and Spanish texts, this book reveals the ways Borges inscribed his tastes, values and judgments–both about the individual works and about Modernist literature in general–onto his translations and how in doing so, he altered the identities of their characters, the ethical and rhetorical positioning of their narrators, their plots and even their genres.

This book is driven by storytelling: the stories of each texts’ origin and reception in English; of how they ended up in Borges’s hands and of his translation processes; of how, through his translations, the texts’ narratives were made to tell new stories; and of the extraordinary legacies of Borges’s Spanish translations of Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner.

This book foregrounds translation studies as an instrument to better understand the variations and cultural and political intentions of Borges’s work as a translator. Leah Leone Anderson’s focus on issues of gender in translation open our eyes to Borges’s curious manipulations of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner into Spanish. An excellent read! And a potential model for exploring aspects of gender in any translation. Luise von Flotow, Professor of Translation and Interpretation, University of Ottawa, Canada

In this engaging study of Borges’s acts of translations of Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, Leah Leone Anderson ably shows how translation can enact multifocal dialogues between author, text, and translator. Borges’s translations are imaginative interpretations of the base text that waver between creative infidelities and attempted hyperfidelity. Just as Borges attempted to expand the possibilities of Spanish literature by bringing into it translations of Modernist writers, he also expands the possibilities of Modernism through his translational practice. With Borges, translation is the sincerest form of flattery.  Samuel Slote, Professor in English, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Sparkling, original, insightful, Borges’s Creative Infidelities shows how Borges’s work as a translator is central to his creative practice. Through line-by-line comparisons of long form texts, Leone Anderson reveals how makes the chosen texts new. Undoubtedly the most important study to date of Borges and translation. Daniel E. Balderston, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh, USA