Translating as vampirism
Enjoyed today Andrew Hurley’s online story, The Zahir and I, a parody of the labyrinthine erudition of Borges’ ficciones. Reality and fantasy mingle seamlessly, confusingly, in this tale of a translator driven mad by such problems as finding “a suitable English word for the Spanish adjective atroz” and “languages that consist of nothing but verbs or nothing but adjectives or nothing but nouns with the vowels removed, like Arabic”. Of course these are but “meta-quests” and “metaphors” for the translator’s own condition. Such is the paradox of intertextuality, and vice versa.
“There is something monstrous about translations,” writes Hurley, “for they multiply the number of books.”
Borges is naturally one of cyberculture’s favourite authors: the inevitable meandering and googling that followed led me to more than a few interesting sites, among them The Second Encyclopedia of Tlon. A good set of Borges links is at Libyrinth.Com.