Borges and Joyce Read online

  Molly Bloom's Obscene Passages

  As I have argued in the introduction, the idea of picturing the youthful, avantgardist Borges undertaking a translation of the last two pages of Molly’s erotic, unpunctuated soliloquy cannot but stand at odds with the received image of the blind Argentine bard, later renowned as much for his erudite ficciones as for his spartan, library-bound mythical existence. Of equal relevance is the crucial fact that during the early reception of Ulysses, the absence of punctuation and uninterrupted use of the innovatory technique of interior monologue in ‘Penelope’ turned the episode into a stylistic curiosity to most critics and commentators. Besides this revolutionary literary novelty, the episode had also earned a reputation for its unabashed obscenity, with its prolific allusions to male and female genitals, sexual practices, and scatology. Significantly, in a letter to Frank Budgen, Joyce himself boldly referred to ‘Penelope’ as ‘probably more obscene than any preceding episode’ (JJII 501), and explained, without inhibitions, how the metaphor of the female body is employed throughout the episode: ‘It turns like the huge earth ball slowly surely and evenly round and round spinning, its four cardinal points being the female breasts, arse, womb and cunt [...]’ (JJII 501). Regarding the fascinating critical history of ‘Penelope’ Richard Brown would claim that: ‘Critics have been reading the episode now for more than eighty years and the transition even between the kinds of reading practised during the past twenty or so years is striking, especially as regards the treatment of the body.’44 Again, Kathleen McCormick has skilfully summarized the numerous readings to which the body of Molly Bloom has been subjected: ‘Seen as obscene by many reviewers in the twenties, an earth goddess in the thirties and forties, a whore in the fifties and sixties, a realistic product of her historical formation in the seventies, and most recently a symbol of “écriture feminine,” Molly Bloom has been the subject of intense critical debate throughout the history of the reception of Ulysses’.45 Borges’s fragmentary translation of ‘Penelope’, as we shall soon discover, provides just one more fascinating reading in the larger narrative of Molly’s critical reception. Borges had the foresight to gift Latin America with the first translation of Molly Bloom’s sexually charged reverie. If Borges’s fragmentary translation is partly explained by his reluctance to perform a complete reading of the book, the fact that the fragments in question belong to ‘Penelope’ poses a different question altogether: why ‘Penelope’?46 To begin with Edwin Williamson has suggested that Borges’s entanglement in the sensuous web of ‘Penelope’ coincided with his infatuation with the Argentine poet, Norah Lange, the muse of Borges’s literary generation, a red-haired beauty of Norwegian extraction. ‘Running broadly in parallel to Borges’s reflections on Joyce’, argues Williamson, ‘we find a growing fascination with Norah Lange. On October 26 he told Guillermo de Torre that he was thinking of translating a passage from Ulysses, and in the same letter referred no fewer than three times to Norah, asking his Spanish friend what he thought of her poems’.47 Williamson’s conjecture about Borges’s infatuation with the teenage Norah has certainly produced a stir in the seemingly uneventful life of the ivory-towerish Borges. Further, previous biographers of Borges had presented this relationship as pure literary camaraderie, particularly since Lange had been closely involved with Borges in introducing the ultraist movement in Buenos Aires.48 Williamson’s hypothesis implies, moreover, a further onomastic parallel between Borges and Joyce, in a nominal analogy that links both ‘Nora(h)s’ as inspirational muses. In addition, Suzanne Jill Levine views Borges’s decision to translate Molly Bloom’s sexually charged reverie, as the confluence of ‘hedonistic’ and ‘esthetic’ impulses: ‘Homer’s seafaring adventure on the one hand and Joyce’s sexual adventure on the other appealed, respectively, to Borges the boy and Borges the man’.49

  Beyond Borges’s biographical context, the complex motives behind his translation of ‘Penelope’ ought to be considered in relation to the Francophone reception of Joyce. In this sense, it must be stressed that the trend to offer fragmentary translations of ‘Penelope’ was not a Borgesian peculiarity but had rather been initiated by Valery Larbaud during his Ulysses campaign in Paris. In his famous 1921 lecture, Larbaud himself had commissioned the translation of several excerpts of Ulysses, including the six final pages from ‘Penelope’. Furthermore, in the Parisian literary review Commerce, founded in 1924 by Paul Valery, Fargue and Larbaud himself,50 the last four pages of ‘Penelope’ appeared in a translation jointly signed by ‘MM. Valery Larbaud et Auguste Morel’.51 Since Larbaud had promptly sent a copy of this first issue to Güiraldes at the time he had been actively collaborating with Borges in Proa, it is valid to conclude that Borges had full access to these French translations. Just as Borges had closely followed Larbaud’s 1921 lecture on Joyce published in the Nouvelle Revue Française, so he had similar access to the translations published in Commerce, which offered French audiences a preview of Ulysses that ironically disclosed its ending, rather than beginning. Thus, Borges continued the translation history of Ulysses heralded by Larbaud in France, and similarly privileged a fragmentary rendering of the closing pages of ‘Penelope’. In this manner, a translation is no longer envisaged as an isolated exercise, but as part of an interactive sequence in which the translator engages in conversation not only with the ‘original’ but also with its existing afterlives.

  The oxymoronic device of introducing a book by its ending rather than beginning, certainly appealed to Borges, who opted for presenting Hispanic readers with a sexually charged preamble — and finale — of the last two pages. Jorge Schwartz, for instance, celebrates Borges’s translation strategy: ‘The fact that “The Last Page of Ulysses” became the first page of Ulysses published in the Spanish language, is an oxymoron whose symmetry would have pleased Borges’.52 Similarly Waisman argues that: ‘The last page of Ulysses in English thus becomes the first page of Ulysses into Spanish; the last page of Joyce’s great work becomes the first page of what would be a long and interesting textual dialogue that Borges holds with Joyce throughout his life’.53 Moreover, this translation tactic in which the ending becomes mutatis mutandis the beginning of Ulysses, converges with Joyce’s conception of ‘Penelope’ as an infinite episode with ‘no beginning, middle or end’ (Letters I 172) since Molly’s incessant flow of memories not only bring back her own past, but also circularly remember the whole book.

  The Task of the Translator

  It is noteworthy that Borges defied traditional approaches to translation that conceived the original as a sacrosanct, definitive text, and instead argued that the so-called original is nothing but a borrador [draft] of an incomplete and unstable text. In a 1946 review of Salas Subirat’s complete translation of Ulysses into Spanish, Borges reiterated this unconventional stance and privileged a translation of Ulysses that championed a re-creative, manipulative strategy. He concluded the review with a verdict that served as a warning to prospective translators of Joyce: ‘Joyce dilata y reforma el idioma inglés: su traductor tiene el deber de ensayar libertades congéneres’ (TR2 235) [Joyce expands and renovates the English language: the task of his translator is to exercise a similar freedom]. These radical precepts are conspicuously perceptible in his translation of ‘Penelope’, particularly since he aimed to present an autonomous version of Molly Bloom, namely, a résumé of ‘Penelope’ specifically written for the readership of Proa in 1925 and which is notorious for the several liberties taken with the original. Therefore, Borges’s immediate reaction back in 1925 was to approach language in an essentially Joycean way, that is, as a protean, flexible, and unfinished material. Appropriately, in his 1926 essay ‘The Infinite Language’ — which was published one year after his translation of ‘Penelope’ — he proposed a type of linguistic usage that promotes inventiveness and expansion, as part of a linguistic manifesto in which he encouraged writers to experiment with the Spanish language. Such call for action is exemplified with the coinage ‘amillonar’ [millioning] that, much l
ike a Joycean virtuoso performance, turns the numeral millón [million] into a verb: ‘Lo grandioso es amillonar el idioma’ (TE 39) [the grandiosity of millioning language]. This also meant that in his 1925 review of Ulysses Borges employed the noun millonario [millionaire] to refer to the stylistic tour de force of Joyce’s revolutionary book: ‘[Joyce] es millonario de vocablos y estilos’ (Inq. 27) [‘He is a millionaire of words and styles’] (SNF 14). Consequently, Borges concluded ‘The Infinite Language’ with an exhortation to fellow Argentine writers to regard the Spanish language not as a fixed idiom but as an unfinished sketch (TE 43). Borges’s ‘politics of language’, writes Beatriz Sarlo, ‘is based on the con viction that this language is a historic and modifiable instrument which can therefore both resist the system and offer a canvas on which to place the imprints of a sensibility and of a nation’.54 Yet it must be mentioned that the mature Borges later repudiated the passionate nationalistic outbursts and linguistic experiments of his young self. Following this trend, in 1946 Borges acknowledged the various diffi culties entailed in any rendering of Joyce’s ‘verbal mastery’ into the Romance languages:

  El inglés (como el alemán) es un idioma casi monosilábico, apto para la formación de voces compuestas. Joyce fue notoriamente feliz en tales conjunciones. El español (como el italiano, como el francés) consta de inmanejables polisílabos que es difícil unir

  (TR2 234).

  [English (like German) is an almost monosyllabic language, suitable for the formation of compound words. Joyce was notoriously successful with those conjunctions. Spanish (like Italian, like French) contains unmanageable polysyllables that are very difficult to bring together.]

  The polyglot Borges exemplified this claim with an excerpt from the French translation of Ulysses, by Morel, Larbaud et al. He compared and contrasted Joyce’s inventive compound phrases with the not-so-convincing French rendering that unsuccessfully turned their prior compactness into a string of single word units: ‘Joyce, que había escrito en el Ulises: bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghastcondled (sic), tuvo que resignarse a esta nulidad en la versión francesa: lit nuptial, lit de parturition, lit de mort aux spectrales bougies’ (TR2 234) [Joyce who had written in Ulysses: bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghastcondled (sic), had to resign himself to this nullity in the French version: lit nuptial, lit de parturition, lit de mort aux spectrales bougies]. Significantly, in the ‘The Infinite Language’ Borges had already advocated a more flexible use of prepositions in the Spanish language, proposing a more liberal usage of prefixes, infixes, and suffixes based on the model of the Germanic languages: ‘Esta licencia de añadirle prefijos a cualquier nombre sustantivo, verbo o epíteto, ya existe en alemán, idioma siempre enriquecible y sin límites que atesora muchas preposiciones de difícil igualación castellana’ (TE 41) [The practice of adding prefixes to any noun, verb, or epithet already exists in German, an ever expanding and limitless language that contains prepositions of difficult equivalence in Spanish]. Whereas this observation evinces Borges’s scepticism regarding the verbal elasticity of the Spanish language, on the other hand, he is calling for a linguistic reform that aims to transcend traditional views that resisted regional variations or innovative permutations. Borges’s youthful faith in the possibility of moving towards a more manageable Spanish language re-appeared in his praise of Salas Subirat’s occasional virtuoso performances in his translation of Ulysses:

  Muy superiores son aquellos pasajes en que el texto español es no menos neológico que el original. Verbigracia, éste, de la página 743: que no era un árbolcielo, no un antrocielo, no un bestiacielo, no un hombrecielo, que recta e inventivamente traduce: that it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not a heavenman

  (TR2 234).

  [Far more superior are those passages in which the Spanish text is no less neological than the original. For example, this one, from page 743: que no era un árbolcielo, no un antrocielo, no un bestiacielo, no un hombrecielo, that directly and inventively translates: that it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not a heavenman.]

  This compelling example from Salas’s translation demonstrates that rather than obeying strict linguistic limitations in the morphological structure of the Romance languages, the creativity and resourcefulness of the translator plays a significant role in the translation. And yet the linguistic difficulty in providing a match for all of Joyce’s verbal experiments obliged Borges to conclude his review with the statement: ‘A priori, una versión cabal del Ulises me parece imposible’ (TR2 234) [A priori, an exact version of Ulysses seems to me impossible]. Similarly, in 1982 Borges declared to Kearney and Heaney: ‘Joyce’s obsession with language makes him very difficult if not impossible to translate. Especially into Spanish — as I first discovered when I first translated a passage from Molly’s soliloquy in 1925.’55 But for Borges, it must be stressed, Ulysses is untranslatable only if the translator aims to produce a literal version of the text. Contrariwise, the ideal non-English version of Ulysses should strive to re-create Joyce’s linguistic polyvalence, rather than to merely provide a strict semantic equivalence. Thus, according to Borges, prospective translators of Ulysses must engage in an analogous linguistic playfulness and hence, share as much authorship as Joyce himself. In Borges and Translation Efraín Kristal summarizes Borges’s complex stance regarding the translatability of Joyce’s Ulysses:

  At times Borges referred to Ulysses as an impossible challenge to a translator, by which he meant it would be impossible to render all of Joyce’s verbal experiments into any other language. On other occasions he denied that the novel was untranslatable, recommending that it be used as a pretext for the creation of another work. For Borges some works of literature are more translatable than others, but no work of literature is untranslatable in principle, because a translator can always take the necessary liberties to achieve what any creative writer should strive for: a convincing work of literature.56

  The various difficulties inherent in the translation of Joyce’s last two texts are noteworthy, and even Joyce himself momentarily expressed certain doubts on the vast enterprise of rendering Ulysses into other languages: ‘At first he had thought, as he told Daniel Hummel, that the book could not be translated into another language’ (JJII 561). The difficulty of translating Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, argues John Paul Riquelme, is because ‘Joyce’s texts already contain so many dislocutions, which are themselves translations. These elements have already undergone a process of substitution and transformation that we may recognize and reenact when we encounter them’.57 Borges’s belief in re-creating a text, or using it as a ‘pre-text’ for the creation of another, was a radical practice shared by Joyce. It is well known that Joyce played an active role in the French and Italian translations of his own work, particularly in the Italian re-creation of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ in which the English version is recontextualized into a primarily Italian setting. In this respect, Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli notes that: ‘The ideal reader of this text is undoubtedly an Italian reader, who is offered the chance of hearing Anna Livia’s “silly and extravagant chatter” in the framework of a familiar, Italianized context’.58 Likewise, Borges applied this translation method to his own works, and actively engaged in collaborative enterprises that bestowed unprecedented freedom upon his translators.59 In this light, Borges conceived translation as a collective project, just as he declared in 1937 that ‘más que la obra de un solo hombre, el Ulises parece la labor de muchas generaciones’ (OC4 251) [rather than the work of a single man, Ulysses seems the work of many generations]. Borges and Joyce adhered, ultimately, to a re-creative translation practice that negated both traditional beliefs in faithful renditions or the more literal word-for-word equivalence.60

  'I haven't forgotten it all' (U 18.1472): Un-Translating Molly into Spanish

  It has now become clear that Borges aimed to present an autonomous version of ‘Penelope’ specifically written for the readership of the review Proa
. Faced with this challenging task, the young Borges may have asked himself: how can I translate a passage of a book renowned for its difficulty and controversy in a manner both comprehensible and introductory to an Argentine audience unfamiliar with Ulysses, without hindering the linguistic, stylistic, and cultural complexity of the original? Borges’s immediate answer to this question was to come up with his own in medias res of ‘Penelope’: ‘shall I wear a white rose’ (U 18.1553–54) [‘usaré una rosa blanca’] (TR1 201). What better way than to begin Molly’s monologue with her recurrent intonation of the popular song by H. S. Clarke and E. B. Farmer?61 Borges also decided to celebrate in his translation the stylistic trademark of ‘Penelope’, lack of punctuation, which gives the illusion of uninterruptedness of Molly’s thoughts. Another remarkable feature of Borges’s fragmentary rendering of Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated soliloquy is its distinctive colloquial tone rich in Argentine diction, which not only provided the appropriate idioms to convey the eroticism of the episode, but also added a distinctive linguistic significance to Molly’s notorious polyvalence. Inevitably, a vital consideration that Borges confronted in translating Ulysses into Spanish is whether Joyce’s text should be rendered in the peninsular or Argentine inflection of the language. Borges, who was aware of an analogous colonial situation between Spain/Argentina and England/Ireland, followed Joyce’s example in privileging his own vernacular dialect and proudly bestowed a distinctive Argentine idiosyncrasy upon Molly Bloom. In his review of Ulysses that preceded the translation he appropriately remarked: ‘James Joyce es irlandés. Siempre los irlandeses fueron agitadores famosos de la literatura de Inglaterra’ (Inq. 24) [‘James Joyce is Irish. The Irish have always been famous for being the iconoclasts of the British Isles’] (SNF 12). In effect, Borges’s decision to present readers of Proa with an Argentine-speaking version of Molly Bloom corresponded to the literary credo he professed in the mid-twenties, in which he advocated a colloquial use of River Plate Spanish. This search for an Argentine ‘essence’ is conveyed in his 1928 essay ‘The Language of the Argentines’ whereby he proclaimed that, ‘el no escrito idioma argentino sigue diciéndonos’ (IA 145) [the unwritten Argentine language still speaks us]. As a corroboration of his linguistic conviction to give literacy to a primarily oral vernacular, Borges innovatively rendered Molly Bloom with the Argentine second person pronoun ‘vos’. In other words, Borges challenged conventional practices that still employed the standard Spanish ‘tú’ as the customary norm for written texts, and instead utilized the River Plate spoken vernacular form: ‘para vos brilla el sol’ (TR1 201) [the sun shines for you’] (Joyce U 18.1571–72).62 ‘We must recall that in the 20s’, writes Beatriz Vegh, ‘Borges wanted to capture in his writing the essence of a certain Argentine tone of voice, a form of national identity that had been ignored by those who wanted the country to be just progressive and modern.’63