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Apr. 4th, 2009 05:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionMoved on to Borges' non-fiction a while back. One warning about the 500-page Penguin Selected Non-Fictions volume - about a dozen essays contain bizarre opacities, passages I absolutely couldn't decipher, all of which were translated by Suzanne Jill Levine (identified by her initials at the end of each). I don't know if she was incompetent or in a rush or what but she hurt my head. They mostly assigned her early and minor pieces, which are unfortunately probably the ones you'd be buying this volume for, since they're not in Labyrinths, Personal Anthology 1 or Borges: A Reader. Lots of great stuff in there anyway, and the other two translators read fine.
When rereading the fictions I stuck to the Borges/Norman Thomas Di Giovanni collaborations where they existed, then preferred Labyrinths over Ficciones out of nostalgia, and Ficciones and scattered later translations by Kerrigan, Reid and Feldman over the matter-of-fact Hurley ones.
I wish I'd realized that Di Giovanni put up a website late last year containing not just various bits he and Borges contributed to their '70s Dutton volumes, left out of Hurley's retranslations by the decision of Borges' widow (she and Di Giovanni are famously tangled up in copyright disputes and presumably litigation), but also translations of the Garden of Forking Paths ("Branching" here) and Maker volumes. He and Borges put a few of these into The Aleph & Other Stories, but couldn't get permission for the rest. Di Giovanni's language is pretty ambiguous about whether the new translations are just his or were worked on to some degree with Borges - a matter of consequence, since these include "Forking Paths" and "Orbis Tertius" and the library and lottery stories.
He mentions in one part of his website that they translated 20 books together, not all of which have been published. I'm only aware of ten that Dutton published (The Aleph & Other Stories (an anthology, not the Spanish Aleph), Dr. Brodie's Report, The Book of Sand, Selected Poems (w/ various poets), A Universal History of Infamy, Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, 6 Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, Evaristo Carriego, In Praise of Darkness, The Book of Imaginary Beings). Is he saying they translated basically everything Borges did until 1980 together? I wish he'd be clearer. There wouldn't have been copyright problems for any essay books except Other Inquisitions, which had already been put out in English, or any poetry books but The Maker, which had been translated as Dreamtigers. Di Giovanni does claim Dutton stopped working with him because he "became too expensive," which he replied to by offering his translations for free but no answer ever came. I can't tell if his ambiguities are defensive.
Ten more books, though! Even if he's counting Garden & Fictions separately, that would be astonishing.
When rereading the fictions I stuck to the Borges/Norman Thomas Di Giovanni collaborations where they existed, then preferred Labyrinths over Ficciones out of nostalgia, and Ficciones and scattered later translations by Kerrigan, Reid and Feldman over the matter-of-fact Hurley ones.
I wish I'd realized that Di Giovanni put up a website late last year containing not just various bits he and Borges contributed to their '70s Dutton volumes, left out of Hurley's retranslations by the decision of Borges' widow (she and Di Giovanni are famously tangled up in copyright disputes and presumably litigation), but also translations of the Garden of Forking Paths ("Branching" here) and Maker volumes. He and Borges put a few of these into The Aleph & Other Stories, but couldn't get permission for the rest. Di Giovanni's language is pretty ambiguous about whether the new translations are just his or were worked on to some degree with Borges - a matter of consequence, since these include "Forking Paths" and "Orbis Tertius" and the library and lottery stories.
He mentions in one part of his website that they translated 20 books together, not all of which have been published. I'm only aware of ten that Dutton published (The Aleph & Other Stories (an anthology, not the Spanish Aleph), Dr. Brodie's Report, The Book of Sand, Selected Poems (w/ various poets), A Universal History of Infamy, Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, 6 Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, Evaristo Carriego, In Praise of Darkness, The Book of Imaginary Beings). Is he saying they translated basically everything Borges did until 1980 together? I wish he'd be clearer. There wouldn't have been copyright problems for any essay books except Other Inquisitions, which had already been put out in English, or any poetry books but The Maker, which had been translated as Dreamtigers. Di Giovanni does claim Dutton stopped working with him because he "became too expensive," which he replied to by offering his translations for free but no answer ever came. I can't tell if his ambiguities are defensive.
Ten more books, though! Even if he's counting Garden & Fictions separately, that would be astonishing.
