Writing with Borges

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This was published 20 years ago

Writing with Borges

The great Argentinian writer believed translations could produce greater works than the original. Richard Flanagan looks at a remarkable literary partnership.

Franz Kafka's friendship with his editor, Max Brod, wrote Walter Benjamin, "is a question mark which he chose to put in the margin of his life". In the annals of 20th-century literature, Jorge Luis Borges's friendship with his English translator, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, may rank, on the evidence of this book, as no less perplexing.

Recounting through eight essays about Borges, his work and the years he spent with the great Argentinian writer, di Giovanni's prose can sometimes seem as leaden and dull as Borges was otherwise.

Yet between 1967 and 1972, in collaboration with di Giovanni, Borges - blind, old and fearful of his powers fading - reworked some of his best stories and poems into what are arguably not just fine translations of the greatest Spanish language writer of the 20th century, but some of 20th-century English literature's finest original works.

To his credit, di Giovanni makes no claim for himself other than his friendship and work with Borges, and his book is, by its own admission, a modest volume that seeks to be - and succeeds - an act of homage to Borges, the man he acknowledges as his master.

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Sometimes melancholic and occasionally irritating, the book's touchstone is di Giovanni's friendship with Borges and the insights that provides. Although di Giovanni is discreet and respectful, the book offers up the occasional fascinating tidbit.

On Borges's various hapless passions for Buenos Aires society women with literary pretensions, di Giovanni notes that Borges described them to him as "all unforgettable, all forgotten". The forewords Borges wrote for their books were, "it was said, the kiss of death" in Argentinian literary circles.

These essays reveal Borges as a very human figure, an idea of the writer at odds with the monstrous literary genius he is too often lauded as being.

Di Giovanni despises such over-reverence of Borges, both because of its untruth and the way such a view corrupts readings and translations of a writer he views as a great storyteller.

Borges himself translated from English into Spanish, and his work would seem to speak to his own conception of the great artistic possibilities of translation. For example, William Faulkner's pivotal influence on the writers of the Latin American boom has been acknowledged by everyone from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Maria Vargas Llosa.

But it was not the Faulkner of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury that initially fired these writers, but the Faulkner of The Wild Palms, as rendered in Spanish by Borges. Could Borges's translation of The Wild Palms be the work of genius the original is not; the great novel, he, Borges, never wrote?

For all his belief in the creative possibilities in translating, Borges was aware of the incompetence and misunderstanding that can attend translation.

But his self-confessed scepticism did not incline him towards the fashion for literal translations, which, he argued in a lecture at Harvard in 1967, "would have been a crime to translators in ages past. They were thinking of something far worthier. They wanted to prove that the vernacular was as capable of a great poem as the original".

Among his audience was the young di Giovanni, who wrote to Borges, asking to meet. Curiously, Borges, notorious for never answering letters, replied.

Di Giovanni met not the great Borges but an old man; shy, lacking in confidence, depressed with his recent marriage and fearful that he had lost his ability to write, a man so unable to effect a change in his life that di Giovanni was to later engineer a trip to Cordoba to facilitate Borges's divorce from his first wife, Elsa Astete Millan.

Together they sought to honour Borges's glorious vision of what was possible with translation: work as good as, even better, than the original. To translate, for Borges, was an invitation to create no less significant than the invitation to write.

Translators tend to be poorly paid and overworked. Although some gain an acquaintanceship and occasionally a friendship with a writer, this is rare. Of necessity they must do their work quickly, generally in a different country, and their contact with an author is normally restricted to a brief correspondence in which a few factual questions about local details are asked.

The collaboration of di Giovanni and Borges was of a different order. They quickly hit on a process not so much of translation but of - in Borges's words - "re-creation" of his works in English.

They would meet daily in the gloomy recesses of the National Library of Argentina, where Borges enjoyed a sinecure as director. Here they revelled in books and words, di Giovanni recalling how they would both savour smelling an ancient dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy that sat on the table at which they worked, discussing nuances of meaning and purpose, sometimes introducing or deleting whole sentences or even paragraphs, always attempting to ensure that the overall story was enhanced in its English incarnation.

At such work, wrote Borges, they did not consider themselves two men: "We think we are really one mind at work."

Pedantic as they were, their bedrock was ideas and story, not words, acting on Borges's belief that he tried "to say what I have to say perhaps not through words, but in spite of them".

Paradoxically, though, their grail was not style, their "re-creations" contain English of beauty and some times dazzling virtuosity.

Borges brought to the task several unusual qualities. He was bilingual, having grown up, as he put it, "in a garden, behind a fence of iron palings, and in a library of endless English books". He had first read Don Quixote as a child in English. As an adult he would often conceive titles, phrases and sentences for his works in English and then translate them back into Spanish.

For all his ambition with his English stories, Borges's ultimate position on translating was sanguine: he believed the test of great literature was its capacity to survive mistranslation and remain compelling.

"The 'perfect' page is precisely the one that consists of those delicate fringes that are so easily worn away," he wrote. "On the contrary, the page that becomes immortal can traverse the fires of typographical errors, approximate translations and inattentive or erroneous readings without losing its soul in the process.

"Don Quixote wins posthumous battles against his translators and survives each and every careless version. The writer's overriding passion is his subject. Genuine literature is as indifferent to a rough-hewn phrase as it is to a smooth sentence."

Di Giovanni lacks such largesse. He nitpicks at the failings of other more recent translations; notably Andrew Hurley's much-vaunted 1998 compendium of Borges's fiction, published here by Penguin. His real criticism is never made; it is more, one suspects, in the nature of the deepest of personal hurts.

Such carping, and di Giovanni's book generally, make little sense without understanding his own cruel fate at the hands of the Borges Estate, administered by Maria Kodama, the woman half his age, who Borges married eight weeks before his death.

Translators are normally either paid a set, small fee by the publisher for their work, or, less commonly, a very low percentage of royalties. Borges had hit upon a generous and highly unusual agreement with di Giovanni that saw them split royalties equally.

For the Borges estate, this arrangement meant a 50 per cent reduction in its income from English language editions of some of his main works.

In the mid-1990s Kodama had a New York agent negotiate a lucrative new English-language deal, selling the English translation rights to Borges's complete Spanish works. These would be the official English language editions, authorised by Borges's estate, rendering the work by Borges and di Giovanni redundant and unpublishable, and giving Maria Kodama full copyright and the Borges estate 100 per cent of English royalties.

Bizarrely, in the name of Borges, this was condemning to obscurity those very works Borges had co-authored in English.

Di Giovanni's story, which is implicit but never told in this odd volume, is of a loyal friend whose most significant work has been largely lost - hopefully not permanently - due to the woman Borges loved expressing her respect for her dead husband by managing his literary estate with a strong hand. Literature does not lend itself to the pathos of such a story, because love always plays better between the clapboards than friendship.

Perhaps this is why, finally, we recognise Borges less in di Giovanni's pages than we do in Borges's own, and why we feel we come closest to Borges in his own writings when he speaks of his love for other writers' books; not in such works' triumph over death, but in their transcendence of the individual soul.

As Borges had Shakespeare write, and di Giovanni translate: "I, who have been no man, am all men."

All collaboration is mysterious, wrote Borges. On di Giovanni reading him the finished English draft of his feted story The Circular Ruins, Borges wept.

"Caramba," he said. "I wish I could still write like that."

Through his friendship with di Giovanni, no longer in Spanish but in the tongue of his Staffordshire grandmother, in the language of the writers he revered - Shakespeare and Stevenson, de Quincey and Chesterton - Borges still was writing like that.

Like the ironies in which he delighted, Borges's tears, unexpected as they are beautiful, appear to us as a truth pregnant with a destiny that once realised would, through the actions of his widow, finally prove unfulfilled. But then, as Borges, so often disappointed and humiliated in love, had told di Giovanni on his first morning in Buenos Aires: "Here, in Argentina, friendship is more important than love."

Richard Flanagan won the Commonwealth Writers' prize for his most recent novel, Gould's Book of Fish.

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