Samantha DeStefano
on translating Jorge Luis Borges
I translated Jorge Luis Borges’ double sonnet into blank verse to preserve the poem’s original rhythm and to avoid distorting its syntax or meaning to fit the confines of sonnets’ strict rhyme schemes. I translated lines literally wherever possible and usually chose words whose pattern of stressed syllables and number of total syllables best fit iambic pentameter. I also used rhythm to create emphasis, especially when I added “yes” before “life is short” (la vida es corta) to keep the meter.
I used some secondary meanings to keep the rhythm, such as when I translated diverso as “varied” rather than “diverse.” I sometimes included both meanings of a word to fit the meter and to enrich the images. Clara means “clear; bright,” so I rendered "clara luna" as “clear bright moon.” Acechar means “to lie in ambush; to stalk,” so I translated "nos acecha" as “lies in ambush, stalking us” to vividly depict how death seems distant yet inexorably sneaks up on people.
I translated other phrases more freely, such as "un instante cualquiera," where I used its implied meaning of “a random instant” instead of the literal “any instant.” While “y te puede matar una guitarra” means “and a guitar can kill you,” I rendered it as “what’s more, you can be killed by a guitar” to add the number of syllables required for iambic pentameter. Ending the line with “guitar” also creates a slant rhyme with “heart” at the end of the previous line. As in the original, the first sonnet now concludes with an emphasis on its subject, the reminiscing lover’s pained susceptibility to beauty, instead of “oblivion,” the subject of the second sonnet.
"No basta ser valiente / Para aprender el arte del olvido" means “But being brave is not enough / To learn the art of forgetting.” I changed the enjambment and idiomatically translated "el arte del olvido" (“the art of forgetting”), then added olvido’s literal meaning (“oblivion”). Instead of having two too-short lines, I created one in perfect iambic pentameter followed by one with near-perfect meter. However, I translated the poem’s penultimate line literally, sacrificing rhythm for meaning to avoid making the syntax awkward.
about the author
Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he grew up bilingual in English and Spanish and read widely in European literature. As an adolescent, he spent seven years with his family in Europe, where he learned French, German, and Latin. When they returned to Buenos Aires in 1921, he began his literary career as a poet and translator of poetry. For most of his life, he was known mainly in Latin America for his poetry. He developed an international reputation as a fiction writ- er after receiving the Prix Formentor International Publishers Prize in 1961, which spurred the translation of his best-known short story and essay collections, Ficciones (Fictions, 1944) and Labyrinths (1962), into English and other languages. His blend of genres and use of metafiction in his fantastical postmodern stories about the nature of time and reality strongly influenced the development of magic realism. His writings and sudden fame also helped catalyze the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the books of young experimental and political novelists such as Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa began to reach a global audience. Borges died in Geneva, Switzerland.
about the translator
Samantha DeStefano graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s in English, a concentration in medieval and Renaissance literature, and minors in both Classical studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. At Penn, she studied Latin, Old English, and Middle English. She has published academic research in Transcription Collection and Journal of the Penn Manuscript Collective on a manuscript of Poems, 1805 —1818 by John Syng Dorsey, the author of the first American textbook of surgery, for which she translated quotations from Latin poetry. She published translations of David Diop’s French poems “To My Mother” and “He Who Lost Everything” in the Spring 2020 issue of DoubleSpeak, of “To a Black Dancer” in the Spring 2021 issue, and of “The Vultures” in the Spring 2022 issue. She has near-native knowledge of Spanish and is fluent in French.
