Between the years 1967-68 writer Jorge Luis
Borges delivered six lectures at Harvard University ( published as
"This Craft of Verse", Harvard University Press,2000).
(btw: I only have the text in Spanish, so I
cannot render it back with precision into English when I quote fom it.)
In his fourth lecture, Borges dwells on
the question of translation and quotes Matthew Arnold's words: "literal translations engender estrangement and ostentation
( estranhamento e bizarria)". Borges illustrates how a literal
translation may also create "beauty and singularity"
( singularidade e beleza). In his discussion he mentioned Sir Richard
Burton's translation of Quitab alif laila wa laila,
following the Persian original to obtain: "Book of the thousand nights
and a night", instead of a more common "Book of the thousand and one
nights", thereby creating an unintended shock of surprise to English
ears. Borges praises FitzGerald's translation of Khayyám, for
example, by his having added the word "left" to obtain a delicate and
forebodingly "sinister" effect: "Dreaming when
dawn's left hand was in the sky/ I heard a voice
within the tavern cry..."
In these lectures there was no mention of
VN's 1964 published translation of "Eugene Onegin", nor to the ensuing
debates about a translator's role and adherence to the literal
rendering, probably because Borges's delivery was not aimed at a
profound analysis of translation, nor did he seem to plan to fully
explore "the enigma of poetry." Borges
advanced the hypothesis that poetic liberties, as in the multiple
translations of Homer ( such as Pope's and Chapman's) were based on
the realization that Homer was a mere human being and therefore his
words could be tampered with. He noted that things changed radically
after the time when Luther translated the Bible for that was a Holy
Script, authored by the Holy Ghost, and not even a slight variation
from the original could be admitted.
Borges returned to Hamlet's suicidal
thoughts (First Lecture): "When he himself might his
quietus make/ With a bare bodkin". For him these words are
not particularly beautiful and yet they acquire the status of
"poetry" because of their context. Borges wrote: " At present, nobody
would dare to employ these words [quietus, bodkin] because
they would remain as a quotation extracted from Shakespeare's
original."