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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. Largely considered the most important Hispanic writer of the 20th century, Borges''s revolutionary use of the Spanish language and irreverent approach to literature paved the way for a generation of Latin American authors. In this study, Leah Leone Anderson offers new perspectives on his translation theories and translations from English into Spanish, which play a major role in the author''s legacy and are credited in part with spurring the "Boom" in Latin American literature.Famous for his celebration of "creative infidelity" and his claim that "the original is unfaithful to the translation," Borges is widely assumed to be as iconoclastic a translator as he was an author, with an ability to faithfully recreate other authors'' styles in Spanish. This book puts the English sources and Borges''s Spanish translations side by side to examine the mark he left on narrative texts including Faulkner''s The Wild Palms (1939), Woolf''s A Room of One''s Own (1929) and Orlando (1928), and Joyce''s Ulysses (1922). Anderson reveals significant transformations to these texts, such as characterization, point of view, narrative time, author-narrator dynamics, and most notably, gender and sexuality. She sheds new light on Borges both as translator and writer and on the work of some of the English language''s most influential writers, showing to what extent translation practice can stem from a translator''s approach to and understanding of literature, and importantly, making a strong case for the study of translated literature and its impact.>
List of contents
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Note: Affective Orientation
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
- Methods, Frames, Approaches
1. A Faithful Rebellion: Joyce’s Molly Bloom in Borges’s Spanish
- Voyaging Away from the Metropolis
- Molly Bloom in Style and Content
- Gibraltar and the Argentine Pampas
2. The Long Shadow: Borges’s Translation of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
- Some Sexual Politics of Literature in Britain and Buenos Aires
- Borges and “Fiction”
- Individualizing the Systemic
- Women and Talent
3. Bringing Back the Biographer: Borges Translates Woolf’s Orlando
- Reception and Reflection
- Orlando, the Abnormal
- Orlando’s Marvelous Time
4. Changing Gender Changes Genre: Borges Translates Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms”
- Influence’s Influence: Writers’ and Critics’ Reception of Las palmeras salvajes
- Charlotte, Harry and the Destabilization of Gender
- Borges, Gender and Genre
5. Borges and Faulkner’s “Old Man”: Translating the Narrative of a Narration
- Faulkner’s “Exasperating Techniques”
- Borges’s New Narrators
- Textual Debris
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Leah Leone Anderson is Visiting Researcher in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA. Her research focuses on Jorge Luis Borges and María Rosa Oliver. She has served as a Board Member of the American Literary Translators Association and translates prose and literary scholarship from Spanish and Portuguese. She has taught translation at NYU, John Jay CUNY, UT-Brownsville, Minnesota State-Mankato, and UW-Milwaukee.
Summary
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.
