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Title: Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges, Alexander Coleman ISBN: 0-14-058721-7 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 03 April, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.62 (8 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Worth the time, very translatable poet
Comment: Borges possesses a very universal mind, as anyone who has read him knows. For this reason his poetry is also relatively translatable. It contains almost every important poem, with conjectures being his most famous. The translation provided is fairly good, although there are several instances of misjudgement, or that is my opinion anyway. For instance, one work title ¨El enemigo generoso¨ (the generous enemy) is translated into english as ¨The generous friend¨. While I certainly can appreciate the irony of this translation and its potential irony, i think borges, as an incredible mind, should be left to decide these matters for himself. Unless the cover first lists the translators'names. Nonetheless Borges'poetry is overshadowed by his shortstories (Ficciones and El Aleph), and I recommend all to read this book. Great diversity, and a very original mind
Rating: 4
Summary: Borges shines, translations are uneven
Comment: Borges was fascinated by English. As a kid, he grew up speaking it with his English grandmother and he spent the rest of his life ransacking the treasure-chest of English and American literature. In a famous prose-poem published in 1960, "Borges and I", he could cite Robert Louis Stevenson's prose as one his favorite things (alongside the taste of coffee and the strumming of a guitar). And even after he lost his eyesight in mid-age, most of the books he went on reading in his mind were in English.
Consequently, he sounds good in translation. It's tough to make Neruda or Lorca or even a lot of novelists writing in Spanish sound clear and convincing in English. Lorca, for example, wrote in a distinctively Andalusian idiom, and nobody who has never read his poetry in the original can understand how stilted he sounds in English. Borges, by contrast, had a more universal intellect and the strands of his writing span many non-Hispanic cultures. His reading in many different literatures left a deep imprint on him linguistically and helps explain why his work translates so well into other languages. While it's true that much of his poetry has a distinctly Argentine "flavor", it has many other flavors, as well. Depending on the poem, Borges can evoke Quevedo, Leopoldo Lugones, "Beowulf", the Icelandic Prose Edda, Whitman, Omar Khayyam, or Ralph Waldo Emerson. And yet the English influence is present in virtually all of his work.
Thirteen translators are featured in this anthology and the quality varies. Barnstone and Merwin are, as usual, impeccably accurate and 1000% unadventurous. Robert Fitzgerald shows yet again that his last name must be some kind of cosmic byword for quality (F. Scott, Edward, Ella, now Robert...). His version of "Odyssey, Book Twenty-Three" is breathtakingly tight and sweeping, actually more of a rendition than a word-for-word translation. Unlike Barnstone's somewhat stilted versions of Borges' sonnets, Fitzgerald manages to stick to the original rhyme-scheme without sounding forced. Unfortunately, he only did five poems in this book. ¡Qué lastima!
Alistair Reid did most of the work here. Reid is a perfect example of a fine translator who did some really great stuff back in the '60s, then apparently revised it to make stuffy literalists like Barnstone happy. For example, he took an excellent translation of "Limits" (which appeared in a 1967 book called "A Personal Anthology", which basically launched Borges's reputation in the United States) and altered it to make the words stick more closely to the original Spanish word order. It's still a good translation and all, but not as good as the first one. Other than that, though, I don't have any bones to pick with Reid.
Rating: 5
Summary: Translated?
Comment: Although in the beginning I ignored the Spanish, the English should serve as little more than a crutch for those who study Spanish. Heck, I'm a lowly second-year student and as I'm plugging away at the book, I'm amazed at how great the translations are on their own -- and how little they show Borges' style to an English audience. The poems are great in either language -- but if you have a knowledge of Spanish, you'd be best off buying a completely Spanish volume if you could find it for less.
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Title: Selected Non-Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, Eliot Weinberger, Esther Allen ISBN: 0140290117 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 31 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley ISBN: 0140286802 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: This Craft of Verse (4-CD Set) by Jorge Luis Borges ISBN: 0674005872 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: November, 2000 List Price(USD): $25.50 |
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Title: Everything & Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges, Donald A. Yates, James E. Ieby, John M. Fein, Eliot Winberger, James E. Irby, Jorge Borges, Eliot Weinberger ISBN: 0811214001 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: 01 April, 1999 List Price(USD): $8.50 |
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Title: Ficciones (English Translation) by Jorge Luis Borges, Anthony Kerrigan, Anthony Bonner ISBN: 0802130305 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: March, 1989 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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