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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Borges shines, translations are uneven,
By Stephen Taylor (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Borges: Selected Poems (Paperback)
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.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
dreamtigers on catnip,
This review is from: Selected Poems (Hardcover)
i got this wonderful book as a very unexpected christmas gift. i don't speak spanish, so can't address the claims that the translations are inadequate.what is here in english, taken on those terms alone, is till great. recurring themes of tigers, mirrors, his beloved hometown, the history of literature, the bible, memory, distortions in time & space, heaven and hell weave themselves through over six decades of dazzling images and heartbreaking tenderness. it's also playful- filled with bits from imagined histories and books which i almost find myself wanting to locate, as these little bits are too beautiful to be unreal.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant translations of a brilliant poet.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Selected Poems (Hardcover)
The Selected Poems of Jorges Luis Borges presents both a significant contribution to the world of poetry, and strong achievement in and of itself. With translations by major poets of our time, from W.S. Merwin to John Updike to Mark Strand, the reader will witness, possibly for the first time, the poems of Borges, rendered in English, as he had intended them in his own native tongue. Despite the apparent ease of the Latin tongue to the English ear, Borges' poems, like those of Neruda and Lorca, are difficult to render in the English language. English, spoken in a twentieth century style, is unlike Spanish (or Italian) in that it can not easily maintain a rhythm consistent with smooth rhyme and still avoid the appearance of decadence or sentimentality. To complicate matters further, Borges poems are of a complex nature that use subtle ironies and twists within his own language (not to mention the frequent colloquialisms that appear in his earlier work). Borges, a precurser of the "Magical Realists" (such as Fernado Pessoa and Eugenio Montale, and as well, possibibly, Umberto Eco) weaves often unlikely images and situations together into a richly complex tapestry that arouses questions of identity and the self, of reality and the possibilty for dreams. All the translators of this collection skillfully rework and adapt Borges deeply personal mythic style poems in an English that is at once accessible, and overwhelming. A superb project!
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