BORGES WORDMUSIC AND TRANSLATION By Merve ENOL ZDEMR
BORGES’ «WORDMUSIC AND TRANSLATION» By Merve ŞENOL ÖZDEMİR
REVIEW OF «WORD-MUSIC AND TRANSLATION» “Word-Music and Translation” is a lecture of the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges given at Harvard University during the 1960 s. Jorge Luis Borges is a short-story writer, essayist, poet, and translator, and a significant figure in Spanish literature. His lectures at Harvard University mainly focused on the topic of poetry translation. Among these lectures are “The Riddle of Poetry”, “The Metaphor”, “The Telling of the Tale”, “Word-Music and Translation”, “Thought and Poetry”, and “A Poet’s Creed. ”
By the late 1950 s, Borges started to lose his eyesight and became completely blind. As he was too blind to read from a text, he gave his lectures without notes. Balderston points out that “Borges’ performances in his lectures are dazzling as he quotes poems and other texts in a number of languages, from memory. ” Borges’ lectures at Harvard University were recorded and these recordings were transcribed and published in 2000 under the title “This Craft of Verse” by Harvard University Press. In his lecture “Word-Music and Translation”, Borges goes into a discussion of the possibilities and success of verse translation. He provides a list of examples from Tennyson’s translation of The Ode of Brunanburh to Arthur Symons’ and later Roy Campbell’s translations of San Juan de la Cruz’s great poem "Noche oscura del alma”.
He comments on Roy Campbell’s translation of the famous line “estando ya mi casa sosegada”— “When all the house was hushed”. In his own words Borges states: “here we have the word "all, " which gives a sense of space, a sense of vastness to the line. And then the beautiful, the lovely English word "hushed. " "Hushed" seems to give us somehow the very music of silence” (Borges, 2002). What is meant to be reflected by the comment “‘hushed’ seemed to give us the very music of silence” is that poetry does not only embody a verbal score but also a musical score that can only be felt when the poem is read.
Borges, later on, stresses the problem of literal translation. With literal translation, Borges does not intend to stress word-for-word translation, but he stresses the fact that a literal and a true translation constitutes beauty. Borges states that “Matthew Arnold pointed out that if a text be translated literally, then false emphases were created”. However, Borges, in his speech, replied to Arnold’s view on literal translation (Borges, 2002): Matthew Arnold advised the translator of Homer to have a Bible at his elbow. He said that the Bible in English might be a kind of standard for a translation of Homer. Yet if Matthew Arnold had looked closely into his Bible, he might have seen that the English Bible is full of literal translations, and that part of the great beauty of the English Bible lies in those literal translations.
We understand that with literal translation, Borges stresses the beauty of translating the foreign words with their true counterparts in the target language shaped by different cultural and historical codes. Borges goes on asking how literal translations began? In his opinion literal translations had a theological origin and he thinks that literal translations came from Bible translations. He states that (Borges, 2002) When it came to translating the Bible, that was something quite different, because the Bible was supposed to have been written by the Holy Ghost. If we think of the Holy Ghost, if we think of the infinite intelligence of God undertaking a literary task, then we are not allowed to think of any chance elements - of any haphazard elements - in his work. No - if God writes a book, if God condescends to literature, then every word, every letter, as the Kabbalists said, must have been thought out. And it might be blasphemy to tamper with the text
Borges notes that though he thinks Stefan George’s translations of Baudelaire are better than Baudelaire, yet “this will do Stefan George no good, since people who are interested in Baudelaire—and I have been very much interested in Baudelaire -think of his words as coming from him”. This remark of his is based upon his comment on translation, that is “a translation is never judged verbally. It should be judged verbally, but it never is” (Borges, 2002). He continues expressing that “the beauty of a poem—be it an original or a translation—matters to many writers less than the circumstances of the beauty of the poem”. The reason that Baudelaire’s “voice” in the French original matters is because that “voice” is interpreted as “coming from” that author, and from “the context of his whole life”.
Borges was engaged with translation, especially verse or poetry translation, in three ways: as a translator, critic, and a writer. Having published his first translation at the age of eleven (he translated Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince”), Borges adopted a sense of translation that can be referred to as “falsificication” because for Borges, “translation as falsification lies in the core of the creative process of “writing” (Kefala, 2007). In his book Invisible Work: Borges and Translation, Efrain Kristal shows that Borges’ translations are by no means mere linguistic renderings of an original text but “transformations” (cited in Kefala, 2007). Borges sees even writing as transformation since a creative process calls for transforming and adapting the works of others. Kristal comments on Borges’ view of “transformation” by putting forward that “Borges developed a way of writing fiction informed by his own approach to translation: a way of writing that wilfully adopts, transforms, and adapts the works of others” (Kristal, 2002).
In the article “Translation as Metaphor: Three Versions of Borges”, Alfred J. Mac. Adam points out that “all literature [……. ] is a translatio (transfer, translation) between traditions, individuals, and languages” (Mac. Adam, 1975). According to Kefala, “this is exactly what Borges does when it comes to writing: he transfer (translates) literary, religious, and philosophical narratives to his own texts, and in doing so, he appropriates, distorts, and falsifies them” (Kefala, 2007). Borges seems to opt for a verse translation that is “happily and creatively infidel”. “The notion of happy and creative infedility is directly related to the concept of “translating against” -and consequently the notion of “writing against”, which Borges introduces in his essay on The Arabian Nights: “Lane translated against Galland, Burton against Lane; to understand Burton, we must understand this hostile dynasty” (cited in Kefala, 2007).
In Kefala’s words: “Borges conceives translation and writing as actions which are always taken against the texts of the past because to write/translate is to change, to modify, and to be irreverent towards those texts since [. . . ] every modificiation is sacrrilegious” (Kefala, 2007). In addition, Borges argues that there are infinite number of texts and each and every one of them is not inferior to the original. On the contrary, Borges argues, “to assume that every combination of elements is necessarily inferior to its original form is to assume that draft 9 is necessarily inferior to draft H- for there can only be drafts. The concept of the ‘definitive text’ corresponds only to religion or exhaustion” (cited in Kefala, 2007).
“Translation, falsification, and distortion, are for Borges, interchangeable notions for writing; the writer and translator or the writer-translator produce texts that are not less original than the texts they translate, falsify or distort, given that there is no such thing as a ‘definitive text’ but multiple ‘drafts’ and potentially infinite versions (translations)” (Kefala, 2007).
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