How Literal is the 1972 Translation Into English of J.L. Borges' Historia Universal de la Infamia?

Introduction

In 1972, the first translation into English of Borges’ book Historia universal de la infamia (hereinafter, HUI) was published with the title A Universal History of Infamy. HUI had first been published in Spanish in 1935. Translating it into English was considered in 1968 by the author and the translator (Norman Thomas di Giovanni); both would have agreed to do the work in collaboration. The joint translation began in 1971, but Borges soon decided to suspend his collaboration. This means that the finally published translation of HUI was the responsibility of di Giovanni, who is the only one to get credit for the translation. Some of the translations included in A Universal History of Infamy had appeared in magazines in the previous months.¹

HUI is an important book in Borges’ literary career. It contains his first short story (“Hombre de la esquina rosada”) and other narrative pieces. The book represents a first step in the direction of short story writing, an activity which Borges will concentrate on during 1939-53, as documented in his two most celebrated books: Ficciones (1st ed.: 1944) and El Aleph (1st ed.: 1949).

Di Giovanni (2003) claimed to have convinced Borges, in the (northern) spring of 1968, to translate HUI together. His argument was that anyone could translate the book, but that they would do a better job. Instead, what, according to di Giovanni, convinced Borges was the possibility of not just translating, but rewriting HUI. Unlike the poems of the 1920s, drastically altered (in Spanish) by Borges between 1943 and 1977,² Borges thought that it was not a good idea to do the same with early prose. The essays of the 1920s were suppressed and the prose of the period 1930-5 basically preserved, with qualms.

The present article contributes to assessing the quality of di Giovanni’s published HUI translation. We adopt a rather simple approach to checking how faithfully the translation reproduces the original text. We concentrate almost exclusively in identifying textual innovations by the translator. This approach is justified in the present case. On the one hand, the literature on the nature of the translations of Borges’ work is still in its infancy, so it is worth devoting time to analyzing partial aspects of that huge corpus.³ On the other, di Giovanni’s translation tends to deviate from literality. Although the clear focus of our study is translation criticism, we also keep an eye on how this translation project evolved.

In assessing the degree of literality with which di Giovanni translated HUI, this article owes much to translation studies, with their emphasis on how translating a text into another language transforms its meaning.⁴ The fact that we concentrate on di Giovanni’s limitations should not be interpreted to mean that his translation is not a potentially valuable reading of the original – one that reflects a meaningful approach to translation. We do abstract here from characterizing the full scope of this HUI translation. We only mention in passing contextual aspects such as whether the 1972 HUI translation follows a norm that seeks to adapt Borges to the market of the receiving country.⁵

On top of simplicity, one of the advantages of our approach is transparency. As reference points we report both the text in Spanish and our own literal translation into English. The interested reader can modify the reference translation as she deems fit, and then adjust the judgements accordingly. Our basic analysis should be expanded by future research, which may consider complementary areas such as di Giovanni’s fluidity of discourse, his achievements in the choice of words and syntax, his apparent goals (including his text’s suitability to the target audience) and a comparison with Andrew Hurley’s rendition of the same book (Borges, 1998). Such extensions may draw on the developments seen in translation studies over the last decades (see e.g., Munday et al., 2022), including the descriptive stance of funcionalist/communicative or sociocultural approaches, as well as recent cognitive analyses.