Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Borges imagines that a modern writer rewrites Don Quixote by "immersing himself so thoroughly in the work as to be able to actually re-create it, line for line, in the original 17th-century Spanish".
Based on this conceit Borges then reviews both versions (which remember are identical) and finds the modern version superior.
It's an extended joke and/or thought experiment which is meant to investigate ideas around the extent to which the merit of a work is contained within the work itself vs our knowledge of the conditions in which it was created (especially our knowledge of the intent and situation of the author).
It goes to the heart of a lot of debates around artistic value and the approach to literary criticism.
It's very short and quite funny in a dry, academic way. In general I tend to read Borges as somewhere in between a very concise, elegant philosopher and a stand-up comic.
"Under his grandmother's tutelage, Borges learned to read English before he could read Spanish. [...] In Borges's autobiographical essay, he recalled reading even the great Spanish masterpiece, Cervantes's Don Quixote, in English before reading it in Spanish."
(Now there is at least one Spanish edition with a plain language translation as well, edited by Blackie Books, which as a layman in these things I have found enjoyable).
By the way, this happens also with original literature (I mean, not translations). I find most Spanish literature rather pedantic, there tends to be a huge focus on form over content, using the richest vocabulary, the longest sentences, the most complex subordinates, the most subtle nuances, spending 4 pages on describing the movement of a leaf with the wind, etc. while in English literature actual stuff happens and is told in a nice but practical way. As a native Spanish speaker, I read much more Anglo-Saxon literature than Hispanic one, although I guess it's all a matter of taste, of course.
(PS, since the post talks about Borges: he's an exception. He sounds like an Anglo-Saxon writer writing in Spanish).
That’s an overly broad generalisation.
I can give you a ton of English novels spending pages after pages describing the movement of a leaf in the wind in rather florid language. It’s much more likely that you have been mostly exposed to a lot of old and rather serious novels during your education in Spanish are now mostly consuming novels you find entertaining in English.
It’s the same with the Odyssey which let’s not forget is originally written in ancien Greek verses. The epic has been translated hundreds of times with vastly different goals. Even in the same language, some translations aim to capture the poesy of the original either in its rythme or in its evocative power, some try to stay as close as possible to the Greek text, some just want to be easy to understand.
This is a common theme in Romance language writing, but it's especially so in Spanish. Lots of elliptical sentences longer than most paragraphs in English, requiring extensive effort to parse. Lots of flowery language. A bit of a word game, but usually just dreadful.
> (PS, since the post talks about Borges: he's an exception. He sounds like an Anglo-Saxon writer writing in Spanish).
He learned to read English before Spanish while living in Switzerland as a child. In a way he very much was an English language author writing in Spanish. The result is that his writing is very accessible in the original Spanish and very translatable to English, and his writings have a very unique flavor.
First time I read the whole book, it was an annotated edition with lots of footnotes, explaining all the differences. I was hating the experience. Solution? I stopped reading the footnotes.
After some time, I got much more engaged in the story and got the occasional arcaism right from the context.
The "bad translation" must have been Borges identifying old Spanish as a broken, not idiomatic modern Spanish.
One of my textbooks in high school had a translation of Shakespeare into modern English, alongside the original text in both original and modernized spellings, with glossary and cultural notes. I'm not sure I'd have understood even it half as well without those.
This is dependent on the perception of the source language: For example, Beowulf is often translated into Modern English, even though it is (officially) written in English itself, but even the worst prig will admit that Old English isn't comprehensible to a modern reader who hasn't explicitly learned it as a foreign language.
Shakespeare, on the other hand, is almost never translated, even though his poetic Early Modern English is so distant from our own that Juliet's famous "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" is often performed with Juliet looking for Romeo from her perspective on the balcony. Translating Shakespeare would be admitting defeat, I daresay, so the prigs allow footnotes and no more.
Is Chaucer translated these days? Have the prigs ceded at least that much?
That said, there's No Fear Shakespeare and (probably) some other works aimed at students, which do essay an actual translation:
https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/hamlet/act-1-s...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Spanish/comments/13cg3xv/jorge_luis...
I tend to agree with him. I am not a native English speaker and also find it more expressive than my mother tongue.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges_and_mathem...
So much in the broad culture of the tech world is wrapped up in these, I find, odd and misguided commitments to the idea/fantasy of a pure form of "intelligence," artificial or otherwise. As if the world was literally an RPG game or something.
To me, so many of the more... enthusiastic AI-heads seem to be unwittingly aspiring towards that space Funes is in in the story: all-knowing and in that, totally impotent. Attempting to amass knowledge, but not considering the inflation of meaning such accumulation necessarily entails. Attemping to know everyone, but in that, never being able to be with anyone.