Borges and Joyce Read online

Page 7


  Amongst the other lexical choices and inflections from River Plate Spanish that Borges deliberately included in his colloquial, yet ideologically charged translation of ‘Penelope’, is the reiterated use of the adjective ‘lindo/a’, hence rendering Molly’s ‘a nice plant’ (U 18.1556) to ‘una linda planta’ (TR1 201) and ‘beautiful country’ (U 18.1559) to the superlative form of ‘campo lindísimo’ (TR1 201).64 This lexical choice becomes more apparent if examined in conjunction with ‘The Language of the Argentines’ in which Borges raises the issue of the differences between peninsular Spanish and the Argentine variation of the imperial language: ‘No hemos variado [los argentinos] el sentido intrínseco de las palabras, pero sí su connotación [...] La palabra súbdito [...] es decente en España y denigrativa en América [...] Nuestro lindo es palabra que se juega entera para elogiar; el de los españoles no es aprobativo con tantas ganas’ (IA 147) [[Argentines] have not changed the intrinsic meaning of a word, but rather its connotation [...] The word subject [...] is respectful in Spain but pejorative in Latin America. Our lindo is a word that bursts with compliments; the one of the Spaniards does not praise with the same emphasis]. What Borges aspired to do with his usage of a specific type of Argentine Spanish was, ultimately, to demonstrate that it is possible to turn an allegedly colloquial dialect into a valid literary form. Moreover, the informality of the vernacular also appealed to Borges as an adequate solution to convey the linguistic illusion of uninterruptedness of Molly’s unpunctuated interior monologue. Several critics and translators have praised this element, for instance, Conde Parrilla states that: ‘Borges’s one page of “Penelope” has the noteworthy feature of its genuinely colloquial style’;65 Schwartz similarly says: ‘[Borges] twists and turns the language to suit Molly’s interior monologue’;66 while Waisman claims: ‘Borges finds ways to translate the orality of Molly’s monologue’.67 Finally, Levine has remarked that: ‘Many Hispanic readers have agreed that the Latin American translators of North American and English literature (among them writers such as Borges and the Cuban Lino Novas Calvo), because of the very nature of their Argentine or Cuban brand of Spanish, produced more vivid and colloquial translations than their Spanish cousins’.68

  But in order to turn his fragmentary excerpt into an independent piece, Borges also legitimized a translation practice that promoted the deliberate omission of certain details from the text. In relation to Borges’s aesthetic of omission Kristal offers a useful synopsis:

  (1) Borges’s most common practice as a translator was to remove what he once called the ‘padding’ of a work: words and passages that seem redundant, superfluous, or inconsequential. (2) He removed textual distractions. This stratagem involves cutting part of the content of a literary work that might distract attention from another aspect Borges would prefer to highlight. (3) Borges often added a major or minor nuance not in the original: changing a title, for instance. (4) Borges sometimes rewrote a work in the light of another, as when he inscribes a post-Nietzschean sensibility to his translation of Angelus Silesius.69

  As has been noted by Willson,70 Joyce’s Irish setting on ‘Howth head’, among the rhododendrons, is strategically deleted and the two lovers are placed instead in a more universal pastoral setting ‘tirados en el pasto’ [lying on the grass] (TR1 201). If Borges deleted the crucial setting of Howth he retained, on the other hand, Molly’s allusion to the popular Lipton’s store in central Dublin, ‘[the] tea, wine, spirit, and provisions merchants [located] in 59–61 Dame Street’71 and noticeably conveyed Molly’s indulgence for sumptuous patisserie as: ‘esas masas divinas de lo de Lipton’ (TR1 201), ‘those fairy cakes in Liptons’ (U 18.1554). Borges also excluded several nominal references, principally the names of Molly’s lovers that his Proa readers would have ignored or found confusing, and replaced them with the anonymous versions of ‘fulano y zutano’ [Mr so and so] (TR1 201). This translation preference highlighted, most of all, the interchangeability of all her male suitors, which goes hand-in-hand with Molly’s subsequent reflection at the decisive moment she accepts Blooms amorous proposal: ‘and I thought well as well him as another’ (U 18. 1604–05). Other significant appellative changes are his rendering of ‘Hester’ into the Hispanic version of ‘Ester’ and ‘old captain Groves’ into the more generic version of ‘capitán’. To crown the protean onomastics of his translation, Borges follows Molly’s final orgasmic ‘Yes’ with the Hispanic version of Joyce’s first name, whose authorial signature is distinctively turned into Jaime Joyce. Borges, however, erased Joyce’s final signature: ‘Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914–1921’.

  Infinitely Translatable: Molly Bloom

  Apart from restoring to Molly her alleged Spanish fluency — albeit in the River Plate variant: ‘I wonder could I get my tongue round any of the Spanish como esta usted muy bien gracias y usted see I haven’t forgotten it all’ (U 18.1471–72) — Borges also offers an audacious recreation of her controversial ‘obscene’ passages. According to Suzanne Jill Levine ‘[Borges gets] closer to the breathless ecstatic language of the original than any of the subsequent versions’.72 The prior versions to which Levine is referring here are, of course, the complete translations by Salas Subirat and Valverde, both of which diminished the erotic significance of the episode.73 Levine’s emphasis on the inadequacy of these two versions, cannot but emphasize the fact that Borges’s pioneering 1925 translation, produced at a time when the Joyce critical industry was almost non-existent and the obscenity of Ulysses remained a subject of controversial debate, did not fail to recreate the erotic impulses of Joyce’s text. Borges’s translation not only preserved Molly’s sexual references, but also enhanced Joyce’s version by introducing a further sexual duplicity. He rendered Molly’s idiom: ‘I wouldn’t give a snap of my two fingers’ (U 18.1564) with the brief vernacular expression ‘me importa un pito’ (TR1 201) which not only functions as a valid equivalent to the English, but also carries sexual undertones due to the polysemy of the word ‘pito’ in Spanish, which means ‘whistle’ but is also a vulgar word for penis. Another noteworthy aspect of Borges’s translation of ‘Penelope’ is his rendering of Leopold Bloom’s romantic appellation to Molly as ‘mountain flower’ (a phrase that is repeatedly evoked in Molly’s erotic ruminations) into the idiosyncratic expression ‘flor serrana’, that contrasts with the four-worded, ‘flor de la montaña’ employed by Salas Subirat, Valverde, and more recently, by García Tortosa.74 Not only has Borges convincingly rendered the iterative phrase into a suitable two-worded epithet, but in doing so, he is then able to provide a fitting translation to Joyce’s deliberate variation of the expression as ‘Flower of the mountain’, which signals a typographical (capital letter) and grammatical (added preposition and article) alteration. Joyce introduced this variant of the phrase in order to specifically refer to Molly’s upbringing in Gibraltar, a place of both nature and nurture that contributed to her Spanish distinctiveness:

  and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls

  (U 18.1599–1603).

  For comparative purposes Borges’s translation of this excerpt goes thus:

  y los ocasos brillantes y las higueras en la Alameda sí y las callecitas rarísimas y las casas rosadas y amarillas y azules, y los rosales y jazmines y geranios y tunas y Gibraltar de jovencita cuando yo era una Flor de la Montaña sí cuando me até la rosa en el pelo como las chicas andaluzas

  (TR1 202).

  Andrew Gibson has persuasively argued that Joyce may have borrowed Molly Bloom’s distinctive designation Flower of the mountain from ‘the literature of Gibraltar [which] refers to a botanical specimen, the flora calpensis (“f lower of Calpe”, the ancient name for Gibraltar). Joyce would have known of it. “Flora Calpensis” was also the pen name of the au
thoress of Reminiscences of Gibraltar (1880) and The Life of a Rock Scorpion (1881)’.75 If Joyce conflated a whole set of historical, literary, and botanical references in the seemingly romantic appellation ‘mountain flower’ or ‘flower of the mountain’, Borges succeeded not only in providing a suitable rendition for the two- and four-worded variations of Joyce’s epithet, but also went to greater lengths by adding a further significance to the Spanish translation. In his usage of the word serrana, Borges brings into the text the fifteenth-century Spanish popular lyric known in Spanish literature as serrana or serranilla. These pastoral compositions after the Provençal manner typically narrate the amorous encounter between a gentleman [caballero] and a mountain girl [serrana] in the rural setting of the sierras, hence its literary denomination.76 Whilst the development of the serranilla produced significant variations in the tone and denouement of the composition, the type of serranillas that Borges would have had in mind while translating Molly, are the delicate lyric poems written by the Medieval poet, Íñigo López de Mendoza, famously known as the Marquis of Santillana. In Santillana’s serranillas the caballero tries to obtain the sexual favours of the serrana by means of a flattering sensual discourse. In some versions the rural maiden readily submits, while in others she preserves her dignity and condemns the illicit proposals of the ‘gentleman’. Borges would have recognized the sexually charged discourse, and closing orgasmic ‘Yes’ of Molly Bloom, as conforming to the category of erotic serranilla in which the serrana submits to the proposal of the caballero. Indeed, Waisman has convincingly suggested that Borges would have also been aware that: ‘ “yes I will Yes” sounds even more sexually explicit in Borges’s Spanish: “sí quiero Sí’’’ [yes, I want, yes].77 For instance, Santillana’s ‘Serranilla IX’, concludes with the sexual fulfilment between the gentleman and the rural lady, who seek refuge for their erotic pleasures in the hospitable mountain flowers of Espinama: ‘E fueron las flores / de cabe Espinama / los encobridores’ [The flowers of Espinama / were our secrecy].78

  The allusion to the traditional Spanish lyric that Borges laces into the complex cultural fabric of ‘Penelope’ is not the only Iberian element he reinforces in his Argentine-speaking version of Molly. His choice to preserve most — but by no means all — of Joyce’s textual references to places in both Gibraltar and the nearby Andalusia is emphasized through his curious decision to omit other Hibernian topographical and nominal details. It is as if Borges was aware of what Bonnie Kime Scott has referred to as ‘the complicated Jewish-Spanish-Gibraltar backgrounds that affect Molly’s validity as a mimetic character’,79 and decided to accentuate the composite aspect of Molly’s identity. But this crucial decision brought together a fundamental problem: how can an Argentine-speaking Molly Bloom position herself in relation to Joyce’s Jewish, Hibernian, and Gibraltarian Molly? Confronted with this further dilemma, Borges opted for exploiting the imperialist ambivalence already implicit in the text, and added a further conflictual element, Argentina, in the already loaded context of Gibraltar. Joyce presented a nostalgic Molly who remembers her Gibraltarian alter ego and wonders whether she may still be able to regain her supposed Spanish fluency, this is, to un-translate her Irish self into her former Spanish self. Borges, thus, perceived these various levels at play in Joyce’s text and stripped Molly of her Irish guise to disclose her former Spanish layer, only to translate her again into Argentine, achieving a rich version of Molly that, like a palimpsest, is able to reveal its various superimposed scripts at once. This complex act of translation offers a River Plate-speaking Molly Bloom who is able to present, simultaneously, subtle hints of an Irish identity within the colourful, exotic backdrops of Buenos Aires, Gibraltar, and Andalusia. The astute Borges preserved most of the topoi related to Gibraltarian and Moorish geography and culture, as well as nearby places in Andalusia. He retained, thus, historical references to ‘the old castle thousands of years old’ (U 18.1592) and translated it into the more compact, fairy tale quality of ‘el castillo de miles de años’ (TR1 202) alluding to the longevity of the Moorish building that as Gifford informs: ‘was built by Abu-Abul-Hajez in ad 725’.80 He also kept topographical information about the mountainous town of ‘Ronda’ in Andalusian Spain, the port town of Algeciras located in the province of Cadiz, as well as the ‘Alameda gardens’ and the ‘Moorish wall’ in Gibraltar. He omitted, however, the reference to Duke Street in Gibraltar as well as the specific allusion to a certain ‘Larby Sharons’. Interestingly, Gifford informs us that ‘we find no evidence of a Duke Street in Gibraltar’ and that Larby Sharons ‘does not appear in Thom’s 1904 or in any of the Gibraltar Directory and Guidebook(s).81 Borges also takes further liberties with the original by rendering Joyce’s idiom ‘the devil knows who else’ into the standard ‘hombres’.

  At the other extreme, Borges reiterated the use of the term ‘castanets’ (castañuelas), a musical instrument that plays a vital role in Andalusian folklore, by employing it as an anaphoric device in the build up of Molly’s sexual climax. So, whereas Joyce employs the term only once — ‘and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras’ (U 18.1596–97) — Borges utilizes it twice: ‘y las castañuelas y aquella noche en Algeciras cuando perdimos el vapor las castañuelas’ (TR1 202). These translation strategies serve to reinforce the crucial fact that Borges sought to create a polyvalent image of Molly, a hybrid version that fused Irish, Jewish, Spanish, and Argentine identities. Borges was aware of the hybrid aspect of ‘Penelope’ which, especially in its final pages, offered a version of Gibraltar as the rich confluence of several languages and cultures:

  and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop [...]

  (U 18.1586–94)

  y las chicas españolas riéndose con sus mantones y peinas y los remates de mañana los griegos y los judíos y los árabes y hombres de todos los rincones de Europa y el Mercado cloqueando y los pobres burritos cayéndose de sueño y los tipos cualquiera dormidos en la sombra de los portales y las ruedas grandotas de las carretas de bueyes y el castillo de miles de años sí y esos moros buenos mozos todos de blanco y con turbantes como reyes haciéndola sentar a uno en su tendencia [...]

  (TR1 202).

  Significantly, Andrew Gibson stresses this socio-historical aspect of Gibraltar: ‘Above all, however, Joyce emphasizes Gibraltar’s racial mix. Historically, it was striking how far, for all the restrictive, colonial legislation, Gibraltar was a melting-pot [...]. Joyce and Molly celebrate the Gibraltarian conflux of peoples’.82 Just as Joyce immersed Molly in the intricately woven tapestry of Gibraltar that embraced both social mix and a long imperialist history, so Borges extended Joyce’s project by incorporating into the text the looming spectre of his native and peripheral Argentina. This allowed him to foster a version of Molly Bloom, or ‘Molly Blooms’ — as Richard Pearce has recently suggested83 — whereby several narratives are able to coexist, in a dual consciousness that endows Molly with a renewed, ever-recurring afterlife.