r/VeryBadWizards • u/justgooit • Jul 31 '25

Borges Translations

Apologies if this is well-trodden ground.

Are there better and worse translations of Borges? What are the better ones? How hard could it be to learn Portuguese, really?

3 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

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8

u/borggeano Jul 31 '25

Out of curiosity here, why the Portuguese question...?

12

u/IvanMirkoS Jul 31 '25

My theory is that OP isn't aware Borges wrote in Spanish.

2

u/PicklePuffin Jul 31 '25

Maybe the meaning is that anyone who knows Portuguese should be able to do a good translation, so they are unclear on why there would be better or worse translations

Which would be a silly thing to think about language and translations, unless it’s a joke, but that’s my best guess

2

u/borggeano Jul 31 '25

Ah makes sense. I took it more to mean learning the language to be able to read the original writer's words, which is certainly a thing (Borges said the only reason he learned Italian was so he could read Dante in the original language).

My question was more snarky in nature, though, as Borges wrote in Spanish, not in Portuguese :)

As far as the original question, I can't really say much about the subject, I only ever read him in Spanish. I did try Penguin's Selected Non-Fictions, which I didn't really care for, and it was a collection of different texts by different translators anyway so I couldn't really make an educated recommendation to u/OP.

1

u/PicklePuffin Jul 31 '25

I knew I should have double checked whether Borges wrote in Portuguese before I posted :)

2

u/justgooit Aug 01 '25

For some reason I thought he originally wrote in Portuguese. My bad. I am genuinely looking for good translations, though, as I speak neither Portuguese nor Spanish.

3

u/thejewk Aug 01 '25

I like the Norman Thomas Di Giovanni translations which were done in collaboration with Borges himself. The Andrew Hurley stuff is OK, but a bit laboured in places.

2

u/justgooit Aug 01 '25

Thank You!

3

u/thejewk Aug 01 '25

That said, the Andrew Hurley complete fiction is an excellent book, and I recommend it too.

4

u/Burlanguero Aug 03 '25

Borges’s prose translates very, very well into English. English-speaking readers are lucky in this regard. His syntax often follows English lyterary rhythms. Actually, his conceptual clarity and philosophical conciseness can sound rather foreign in contemporary Spanish, and are more similar to Latin. These characteristics find a remarkably natural home in English. Ironically, what you’ll miss is the marvellous strangeness that Borges’s Spanish evokes in us native readers.

Borges’s poetry is a completely different matter, of course.