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

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.