Borges, the Jew by Stavans Ilan

Author:Stavans, Ilan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2016-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

PART IV

BEYOND TRANSLATION

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

—“On William Beckford’s Vathek” (1943)

A friend of mine gave me a precious gift: a small anthology of Borges’s work translated into Yiddish, published by YIVO (in Spanish, IWO) in Buenos Aires in 1976. Barely thirty pages long, it contains a few poems (including “To Israel” and “The Golem,” “The Secret Miracle,” and “Deutsches Requiem”). Reading it wasn’t particularly enlightening yet somehow it made me feel inspired. The existence of such anthology reminded me of an anecdote found in Saul Bellow’s travel book To Jerusalem and Back (1976). In it he tells of an encounter with Hebrew novelist Sh. Y. Agnon, with whom he talked about a number of topics, including translation.

Agnon asked Bellow if his worked had already been translated into Hebrew. Bellow replied that it had been rendered into other languages but not yet to the Sacred Tongue, which didn’t quite bother him since the number of Hebrew speakers then—as now—was small. Ah, replied Agnon, but in Hebrew “it will be saved” for the ages.

No piece of literature was ever “rescued” by being translated into Yiddish. Still, to me Borges in Yiddish feels (or could feel) close to home—almost as close as in the Spanish original. Unfortunately, the translations by Yitskhok Niborski, Mimi Pinzón, and Kahat Klieger aren’t, in my opinion, particularly imaginative.

Of all the intellectual exercises Borges engaged in throughout his career, the one that doesn’t directly address Jewish themes yet looks to me like a palette in which he reimagined, albeit tangentially, his obsession with his own Jewishness is translation. As a result of their status as outsiders, Jews have played a prominent role as linguistic bridges, either rendering works from one language to another, or else exploring the linguistic conundrum of humankind.

It is fatuous to claim—and I certainly don’t have any intention of doing so—that Borges’s translations are defined by his interest in things Jewish. On the contrary, they are rather uncontained, a multifarious effort that permeated his entire life and was the result of a genuine hunger for language as a paradox. That paradox is intimately linked to his location as an outsider and to his admiration for translators in general (he constantly praises them in his pages). That attitude distills a sensibility characteristic in Jewish culture.

Up until now, I have addressed the visible signs of his interest in Jewish themes. In this section and the next, I intend to talk about the invisible ones, namely, either about Borges as a practitioner of translation or about his condition as a wandering soul. I won’t push the Jewish connections, in part because in the choices I have made to reflect on the topic, Jews play no role. Still, to understand the larger implications of these reflections it is important to keep in mind that sensibility.

In early 1999, I published in the Times Literary Supplement a book review of Collected Fictions, by Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley. This volume was part of an orchestrated effort by the publisher Viking,

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