#andrew hurley
Meow Hurley.
I take photos at shows I go to, then sometimes I just gotta meow one or two of them
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Professor Andrew Hurley, the best-known translator of Borges into English, on reproducing Borges’ intentionally-stilted style:
“But what I saw was interesting from a Translation Studies or reception-studies point of view, because what I saw was that English-language writers and critics always commented with great wonder and admiration on Borges’s themes, the subjects and philosophico-literary treatment of his stories, his playing with genres, whereas Spanish-language writers and critics, especially at the beginning of his or their career, almost invariably commented on another aspect of his work: his style, his prose, his writing itself. Not that the themes and subjects and genre play didn’t startle and waken Spanish-language readers’ imaginations, sometimes even change their lives and art — Carlos Fuentes, for instance, has spoken very movingly about the influence on him of Borges’s subjects and cultural eclecticism. But to writers and readers in Spanish, the subjects or “stuff” of the fictions was often simply not as shocking, not as disorienting, not as liberating, not as “new”, as the prose itself was. {…}
What I Lost When I Translated Jorge Luis Borges — by Andrew Hurley | INVERSE JOURNAL
Clearly, Borges himself felt that he was doing something that he, at least, had not done before: he was purifying, streamlining his style, paring it down, trimming away the fat, bringing it out of an earlier complexity into a “plainer” mode. (Not, he said, that it was “simple”, for there was nothing simple about it; it was just not as decorative and/or shocking and relentlessly “avant-garde”). So that became one important rule for me: the prose of the translation was to be as “frugal”, as “direct”, as “restrained”, in Vargas Llosa’s words, or as tight, economical, and efficient, as I saw it, as Borges’s own prose was. As in the Spanish, every word had to carry its own weight. I had to shift gears out of the baroque of the writers I had recently been translating, Reinaldo Arenas and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, and into a taut classicism.
{…}But what I needed to guide me in the actual choices I had to make were the details of the style, and there were two things that made me aware of the most remarkable of Borges’s hallmarks: his adjectives. First there was a remarkable sentence by Borges himself in the preface to El Hacedor: “To left and right, absorbed in their waking dream, rows of readers’ momentary profiles in the light of the ‘scholarly lamps’, as a Miltonian displacement of adjectives [hypallage] would have it. I recall having recalled that trope here in the Library once before, and then that other adjective of setting — the Lunario’s ‘arid camel’, and then that hexameter from the Aeneid that employs, and surpasses, the same artifice: Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbran’”. This hypallage, as it is called in English — arid camel, scholarly lamps — was, I realized, everywhere in Borges, for it both opens and closes the fictional corpus. In the first sentence of the first “biography” in A Universal History of Iniquity (1935) we read this: “In 1517, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, feeling great pity for the Indians who grew worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines… ”, laboriosos infiernos. And at the end of his career, in one of the last fictions that he wrote, “The Rose of Paracelsus”, in the volume Shakespeare’s Memory, Borges uses this trope twice: fatigado sillón/ “weary chair”, and mano sacrílega/ “sacrilegious hand”. Thus we are presented with a stylistic trait, a fingerprint, that identifies Borges throughout his career. Other clear examples of this technique are una cicatriz rencorosa/ “a vengeful scar”, alcohol pendenciero/belligerent alcohol”, biblioteca ilegible/ “illegible library”, and dentelladas blancas y bruscas/ “brusque, white bites”.{…}
{…}The second part of my awakening to the importance of Borges’s adjectives came in that Vargas Llosa essay that I quoted a second ago. There, Vargas Llosa specifically mentions Borges’s “strikingly original use of adjectives and adverbs”. That made me realize that I had somehow to deal with the words that Spanish-language readers and commentators had puzzled over for years; I could not simply translate them into invisibility. One of the most famous opening lines in Spanish literature is this: Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche: “No one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night”. What an odd adjective, “unanimous”. It is so odd, in fact, that one is sorely tempted to put something like “all-encompassing”, so as to make it “comprehensible” to the reader. But it is just as odd in Spanish, as Vargas Llosa has told us, and it clearly responds to Borges’s intention, expressed explicitly in the story “The Immortal” (which I’ll talk about in just a second), to let the Latin root govern the Spanish (and, by extension, English) usage. In “The Dead Man” there is a “splendid” woman: Her red hair glows; indeed, I believe that in Borges, splendid always has either the etymological sense of glowing or the sense only slightly metaphorized from that, of glorious. Somewhere else there are “concave” hands: cupped, of course. And there are many more “odd” examples besides. These two techniques, hypallage and etymologized adjectives and adverbs, are present throughout the entire course of Borges’s career. They are also traits he surely found and recognized in some of the English writers he most admired, and sometimes translated — Emerson and Thoreau and de Quincey and Sir Thomas Browne — all of whom employed words with their etymological force, though none of them were so radically “classical” or “plain” as Borges himself. Indeed, unlike them Borges used the technique of what I’ve called etymologized words as a way of cutting through the baroque, trimming it down, not perpetuating it — as a way of making an efficient writing, packing a great deal of meaning into the story by freighting words with not just dictionary meaning, but their entire historical significance.
{…} But back to the distinguishing marks of Borges’s style. As I began to edit and revise my translations, I discovered that they seemed choppy to me, that I could never manage to read with any speed, that I kept getting stopped by what were remarkably short sentences, by periods or by the semi-colons that linked otherwise independent clauses together. It has been my experience through the translation of a couple of million words of Spanish or so that Spanish writers do not use many semi-colons; they use commas and conjunctions, or frequently relative pronouns, to link clauses together so they flow. They employ a style filled with compound-complex sentences; they concatenate clauses, pack a sentence with all the baggage it will bear — and then pack in a little more and sit on it. Not Borges. Borges apparently wanted to slow the reader down by using the speed bumps, those policias muertos, of the period and the semicolon. As I began to look more closely, I realized some other things. Borges, of course, as I had known since the beginning, likes parallelism, chiasmus, subtle repetitions-with-variations. He is a very classical writer, in that sense. But what I also realized was that he is a paratactic rather than hypotactic writer, using coordinating conjunctions (and, but, etc.) much more often than subordinating. This is also the style of Whitman, from whom Borges seems to have borrowed those “mismatched catalogs” that he is famous for. And punctuating with the semi-colon correlates with that tendency toward parataxis, for it suppresses or soft-pedals the causal connections that another writer might make with subordinating conjunctions and other sorts of explanations. The suppression frees Borges from having to make explicit how one detail or fact or sentence is related to the other — does a consequently go here? a while? a nonetheless? a because? a despite? — and I believe it adds to the mysteriousness that we sense in some of the statements, the sense that some unexplained or inexplicable thing lies under the surface of this prose. The semi-colon also produces spareness, and a particular, recognizable rhythm. It became clear to me in a way that I had never really analyzed before, but only intuited, that Borges was, in a word, a man who had not just studied but absorbed the rules of classical rhetoric.
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