(via RSB)
Norman Thomas di Giovanni, one of the finest translators of Borges, has posted several translations up on his website. There was some grumbling about the translations in the Borges “Collected and Selected” volumes that came out a few years ago (item: “Funes, His Memory” vs. “Funes the Memorious”). Di Giovanni, whose talent and proximity to the master made him an ideal candidate for Chief Borges Translator, was apparently frozen out by Maria Kodama, a situation I was hipped to in the letter pages of the once-decent Atlantic:
As executor of Borges’s literary estate she has exhibited unparalleled power—power enough to delete an entire decade (1969—1979) from the story of his life.
In this decade the publisher E. P. Dutton published ten books by or about Borges, among them The Aleph and Other Stories 1933—1969. I served throughout this decade as Borges’s editor.
You will find these books, if you find them at all, in secondhand bookshops. Kodama has repeatedly refused to allow reprints of any of them, for the single reason that Norman Thomas di Giovanni had a hand in translating or editing the text. Their feud has its origin in the contract Dutton signed with Di Giovanni in 1969 for his translation of the first book, The Book of Imaginary Beings, and his work as translator for all the books to come. The contract, inexplicably, gave the author a smaller share of the royalties than the translator. Kodama now regards Di Giovanni as a thief who stole thousands of dollars from her estate. No reconciliation is in sight. Meanwhile, any biographical information she gave to Williamson must be regarded as unreliable.
This from one Marian Skedgell of Roxbury, Conn.
More here:
Translators are normally either paid a set, small fee by the publisher for their work, or, less commonly, a very low percentage of royalties. Borges had hit upon a generous and highly unusual agreement with di Giovanni that saw them split royalties equally.
For the Borges estate, this arrangement meant a 50 per cent reduction in its income from English language editions of some of his main works.
In the mid-1990s Kodama had a New York agent negotiate a lucrative new English-language deal, selling the English translation rights to Borges’s complete Spanish works. These would be the official English language editions, authorised by Borges’s estate, rendering the work by Borges and di Giovanni redundant and unpublishable, and giving Maria Kodama full copyright and the Borges estate 100 per cent of English royalties.
Bizarrely, in the name of Borges, this was condemning to obscurity those very works Borges had co-authored in English.
Di Giovanni’s story, which is implicit but never told in this odd volume, is of a loyal friend whose most significant work has been largely lost – hopefully not permanently – due to the woman Borges loved expressing her respect for her dead husband by managing his literary estate with a strong hand. Literature does not lend itself to the pathos of such a story, because love always plays better between the clapboards than friendship.
Perhaps this is why, finally, we recognise Borges less in di Giovanni’s pages than we do in Borges’s own, and why we feel we come closest to Borges in his own writings when he speaks of his love for other writers’ books; not in such works’ triumph over death, but in their transcendence of the individual soul.
Yes indeed. Read the stories:
Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote
-Bill
Tags: books, Borges, di Giovanni, literature, translation
I too was very happy to learn about this site. Think I’m going to seek out the di Giovanni translations (besides the ones he posted on the site) — my copy of Ficciones has a bunch of translators in it but none are as consistent as he. Besides these stories (which I was surprised to find were initially published in a short collection as “The Garden of Forking Paths” before being rolled into the longer “Fictions” years later), there is other Borgesian material and memoir and essays.
di Giovanni is my favorite of the bunch, for sure. I have an old(er) edition of some poems of Borges’ translated primarily by di Giovanni, and his work seems to me to “feel better” than some of the others.
Ficciones in the first American edition is on my acquisitions radar. I myself came to Borges rather late. My first exposure to his short fiction was through the “Collected Fictions”. I almost envy those who got their first taste via “Labyrinths”.
“Labyrinths” is the New Directions book, right? I’m pretty sure that was the first Borges collection I bought. Though I think I read some stories of his in an older edition before that, no clue what translation they were.
A shame about that scuffle; there’s real hate in that story. And we’re all losing out. DiGiovanni is a fantastic translator.
I came into the fold with Doctor Brodie’s Report; I was a teenager, and that book changed the way I read. Think I did The Aleph next, and worked my way backwards. Don’t mean to be a contrarian; I love all of JLB, and I still read him a lot. I’ve been thinking of “Streetcorner Man” and “Rosendo’s Tale” for about two weeks now.
/one vote for Funes The Memorious
Yeah I just looked at my bookshelf; all the Borges books I have are “Ficciones” (various translators), “A Personal Anthology” (various translators mostly named Kerrigan or Reid), “Labyrinths” (JEI and DAY), and “Universal History of Infamy” (di Giovanni). It was just today I learned there was a book called “Doctor Brodie’s Report”, now I’m wanting to know more about it.
Have you guys read “The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis”? Borges’ piece “An Examination of the Works of Herbert Quain” plays a supporting role in that, and it was the book that made me start thinking again about Borges this year.
The only Saramago I’ve read is “Balthasar and Blimunda” and “A History of the Siege of Lisbon”. I enjoyed both. I own “Blindness” and “All the Names” but haven’t cracked them yet.
I’ve heard that Ricardo Reis is his best book and I’m a fan of Pessoa, so I suppose I need to track that one down!
Pale: Yep, Labyrinths is the ND paperback that includes a lot of the stories in Ficciones.
Huh, your Saramago resume is the opposite of mine — I’ve read nearly everything available in English. except “Balthasar and Blimunda” and “Siege of Lisbon” (and, well, “Gospel according to JC”, “All the Names”, “The Double”.)
I’ve heard Ricardo Reis is his best book
Well… hard to compare it with “Blindness” I guess, they are such completely different books. “Blindness” is certainly more spectacular, more gripping; and in combination with its sequel “Seeing” I think it might have more to say about human nature. “Ricardo Reis” has way more interesting stuff going on from a literary viewpoint but I don’t think I would call it better.
uh…….. i’m the guy who has only read the Andrew Hurley translations. Kick me in the groin any time you like.
A Borges discussion on a Borges site. Ahhh, it gets no better than this.
/well you know what I mean
Filling my Saramago gaps is high on my 2009 reading agenda. I’m going to finish 2008 at around 160 volumes consumed, including some big ones (lengthwise). Now imagine me patting myself on the back. Voila!
Badger: tsk tsk.
Man some people got nothing but time. At a guess I’ve read fewer than 70 books this year, probably more than 50. I’ve been taking a pretty in-depth approach to the reading though, with keeping notes and occasionally following references and stuff like that. I summarized the reading from this year that seems most important to me over here.
Nice list! Time time time, yes, but also an obsession that worries me sometimes. I can’t think of much I’d rather do, though.
I’m thinking about doing a year-end post. I think I’ll just hit the highlights, though. My process involves finishing a book and then immediately jotting notes in a notebook. Most of the time the notes are pretty basic. A few sentences full of hollow phrases, and so on. In a few instances my reactions spilled over into a few closely-written pages. In one instance (a Sorrentino novel) I did fairly comprehensive structural recap.
Welcome to the Pamuk fold, btw! What’s your take on his recent decline? I fear he may have peaked at “My Name is Red”. I’m waiting on “The Museum of Innocence” all the same!
What recent decline? I think “Snow” is easily equal to or greater than “My Name is Red” — I loved both these works dearly.* And no, he hasn’t published any novels in a while; but he has had a lot to deal with in terms of prosecution and calumny from nationalists and islamists. I’m hoping that is mostly over and that he can get back into the novel-writing groove; but I’ve been really enjoying the short pieces he’s been publishing. Did you read Other Colors? But WRT to Innocence, me too!
* (And I think I would probably say both of these are head and shoulders above anything he had written before them — much as I love The Black Book and The White Castle they have the feel of a novelist learning his craft.)
I respectfully disagree on “Snow”. I rate it well “My Name is Red” (which I consider his best), and I LIKED it less than “The White Castle” even as I felt that it was a better written novel. Granted, I haven’t reread it yet, but I felt that “The White Castle” benefited from its oblique (almost fable-like) exploration of many of the same themes more explicitly addressed in “Snow”. This (semi) allegorical presentation grounded the text qua text in a way that the more mimetic “Snow” failed to do (and allowed for a tricky Borgesian trade at the end).
Personal preference, yes, but I felt “Snow” was slightly overrated! I suppose I’ll need to reread it soon!
I was clamoring for Pamuk to win the Nobel a year too soon, alas!
Did you read “The New Life”? I upgraded my initially low opinion of it after a reread.
Oh, and “Other Colors” was well worth a read, even if it didn’t satisfy my craving for another Pamuk novel! There was an talk he gave around the time of its US publication at the NYPL. I recommend tracking it down… Hell, I guess I could just link to it if Badger hasn’t already!
(still haven’t gotten back to The New Life. It grated back then. My fave is the Guneli Gun version of The Black Book… right book at the right time.)
Read about half of The New Life and gave it up feeling like I was not getting anywhere. I’ll go back to it sometime I’m sure. Still have the Gün version of The Black Book on my list.
Snow was the first novel of his I read and it just felt like powerful explosives going off in my consciousness. By comparison I thought The White Castle was a bit precious, the author’s desires for how you should be reading it were front and center and did not allow me to breathe (which is, yes, Borgesian, but not in a good way) — Snow was much looser and more relaxed, allowed me to sink into the blizzard and lose myself in identification with the personæ of the novel. (Do you guys have any interest in talking about identification with characters, narrators, authors as a practice of novel reading? I’ve been trying to develop this idea for like a year and a half now, specifically since I read Snow, but haven’t yet found the correct partners with whom to have that conversation.)
I’m all for a good conversation, brother!
Now, when you say “identification with…”, are you referring to the reader’s identification on a conceptual or emotional level, or “identification” as in “to identify” biographical (for example) elements in a given text?
The former — my experience reading Snow, and one which I’ve since been expanding and applying to other books I have loved, and to other art-forms besides the novel, was a strong sense that I was psychologically and physically inhabiting the personae of the characters — Ka, Necip, Fazil, Ipek, Blue — and also of the narrator/author. Where I’m trying to go with this is sort of an instance of the notion that art can create a communal consciousness — I want to say that this novel takes me outside of my head/into these other heads, and if it brings other readers into the same heads, that is a way for us to occupy the same consciousness. Or something, I have trouble making it not sound banal when I put it down on paper. Here is a brief post I wrote about that experience while I was reading Other Colors.
… And thinking more about the comparison to The White Castle and The Black Book: In The White Castle we hear Pamuk telling us about how each of his characters is coming to identify completely with the other — it seemed to me when I was reading like this was a good description of what would happen when you were reading the perfect novel — but this novel was not itself the perfect novel because I could only watch the characters becoming each other, not participate in that process. In The Black Book, I did change into Galip and change with him into Celâl, and found the experience breath-taking; but no other character besides Galip-Celâl rendered with any verisimilitude — Rüya is of course absent and existing only in Galip’s head, and indeed in the first half of the book, Celâl is not fully formed either — you get a fairly consistent voice in his newspaper columns but not an individual.
…Not ignoring this. I think I’ll do a proper post on the front page so we’ll have room to spread out…
I had never before seen Marian Skedgell’s Atlantic letter. I had never before known that Maria Kodama thinks I stole money from Borges or from her. Talk of throwing the stone and hiding the hand. I am sorry to say that Kodama is ignorant of all that took place between others and Borges before she came along. By sheer coincidence, just this morning I came across some old correspondence dealing with the royalty divisions of The Book of Imaginary Beings. Among the vast library of things that Kodama does not know is that I doubled Dutton’s original offer for the book back in 1968. At the time, Borges was so uninterested in money that he did not even bother to tell me what his financial relations were with his co-author Margarita Guerrero. There is far more to tell, all documented, but I have miles to go before I sleep.
Wow