Abstract

Borges seems to have maintained that translations are often better than the originals; however, he himself did as much as he could, such as learning German in his youth to read Kafka, to access literature in the original. Late in life he tried to learn Icelandic to read the sagas directly. His boutade has been taken too literally by criticism and his own translators have been careless in translating his texts, sporting a freedom that does harm to their own texts. By examining three translations (into English, French, and Italian) of a fragment from the story "The Aleph," this essay shows how Borges has been mistranslated in ways that affect the proper interpretation of that canonical story. The mistranslations are of a key term to refer to a trunk that the protagonist finds in a basement and which is an objective correlative representation of the Aleph.

Keywords:
Theory and criticism of translation; Borges translators; “The Aleph”