More Borgesian than Borges?: Joyce, Borges, and Translation

Authors

  • Mark Harman Elizabethtown College (Elizabethtown, PA, USA)

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v21i1.3244

Keywords:

Translation Theory; Self-translation; De-localizing; Italianizing.

Abstract

This essay focuses on the ambivalent relationship between Jorge Luis Borges and James Joyce from the perspective of literary translation as well as of the Argentinian writer’s fluctuating attitude towards his Irish counterpart. Both writers are polylingual artists and life-long translators. Borges was fond of making provocative statements about translation, though his own translations are rarely as radical as his theories about the craft. He could not enjoy the comparatively unfettered freedom of a self-translator like Joyce, whose Italianizing rendering of an excerpt from Finnegans Wake is more Borgesian than Borges.

 

Author Biography

  • Mark Harman, Elizabethtown College (Elizabethtown, PA, USA)

    A native of Dublin, Mark Harman, Professor of English and German at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, has translated various German-language authors, including two novels by Kafka— Amerika: The Missing Person; The Castle which won the Modern Language Association’s Lois Roth Award—and works by Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse as well as contemporary writers. Editor and co-translator of Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays and Critical Responses, he has also written widely about modern German and Irish literature, with a special emphasis on Kafka, Beckett, and Joyce, for publications including the Times Literary Supplement, New Hibernia Review, Sewanee Review, and newspapers in the U.S., Germany, and Ireland. He is currently completing an annotated volume of his translations of selected Kafka stories.

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Published

2019-07-17

Issue

Vol. 21 No. 1 (2019): ABEI Journal 21.1

Section

Voices from South America

How to Cite

Harman, M. (2019). More Borgesian than Borges?: Joyce, Borges, and Translation. ABEI Journal, 21(1), 63-68. https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v21i1.3244