Collected Fictions.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges. Trans., Andrew Hurley. New York: Viking, 1999.

Like Collected Non-Fictions, reviewed in the last issue, Collected Fictions brings together new translations of a significant body of the work of Latin America's most innovative writer, Jorge Luis Borges. However, unlike its companion volume, this book entirely comprises material that has been translated before. Andrew Hurley says in his "Note on the Translation" that at least seventeen translators have preceded him. Why, then, embark on a new version of Borges's stories?

Borges himself provides the answer when he writes that there is no such thing as a "definitive translation" of a work. Every translation brings a new voice; every translation is a new version. Hurley has made some conscious choices that set him apart from his predecessors. For example, Borges sometimes uses words in unfamiliar ways, assigning to an adjective its etymological value rather than its conventional meaning. These adjectives sound odd in English, so translators routinely discard or change them. However, points out Hurley, Borges's lexis sounds odd in Spanish as well. In order to preserve the uniqueness of the original prose, Hurley retains these adjectives, thereby creating a new version of Borges's fiction in which language is used as the author originally intended.

However, insists Hurley, he is not translating "against" his predecessors. Borges, himself a translator of English and German literature, warns that translation is not warfare; a translator is not required to "conquer" those who have gone before. Rather, he is simply embarking on a new enterprise. Hurley writes, "I--like the translators who have preceded me--have rendered Borges in the style that I hear when I listen to him." In other words, every conscientious rendering of the "fictions" is valid because the translator inevitably brings to it his or her "hearing" of the material.

Hurley is indeed a...