Borges’s Creative Infidelities: Translating Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner

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 bookis 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.

Leah Leone Anderson isVisiting 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. She has served as a Board Member of the American Literary Translators Association, and translates prose from Spanish and Portuguese.