Borges and Textual Quality in Translation

Abstract

THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE BORGES dealt with translation problems. In hischildhood translation was a daily experience for him since he spokeboth Spanish and English at home. Later on he learnt French and German in Lausane, Switzerland, where he spent three years whenhe was a teenager. Most of his reading was. done in foteign languages, especially in English but also in French, German, and to a lesser extent in Italian and Portuguese. Borges translated little but regularly through his entire literarycareer, which was very long indeed. Among others, he translated into Spanish some pages of Ulysses, Faulkner's Wild Palms, Virginia Woolf 's A Room of One's Own, a selection of Whitman's Leaves ofGrass. Moreover, he translated a great number of quotations of writersand philosophers that he inserted copiously in his writings, includinghis fiction and poems.