Lives as translation, lives in translation: biographers and translators in search of a total Borges

Abstract

This study portrays translation and biography as analogous mediums of transcreation that confront similar constraints while constructing a representation of a selected source for a certain group of receivers. As points of intersection, it underlines: 1) the questionable authority of the rewriters; 2) the intertextuality of the products; 3) the ‘fluency/vividness’ of the narratives and the ‘(in)visibility’ of the producers (Venuti, 1998; 1994); 4) the concern of image-making through ‘refraction’ (Lefevere, 1992; 2000); 5) the motive of transparency. The English and Spanish language biographies of the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges and their translations into Turkish constitute the corpus of my two-layer setting. In the first context, heading from the above-mentioned points of intersection, I survey the source biographies as the ‘retranslations’ of the author’s life story, with a particular focus on the ‘competition’ among them (Venuti, 2004). Then I embark on two of these ‘alternative translations’ of Borges’ life-story pursuing a macro-to-micro focus; that is, I first explore the agency and publishing contexts of the biographies, then examine their fluency, reliability, accuracy, and their producer’s (in)visibility. The intertextuality and multilingualism of the works are also discussed in line with these matters. Following the analysis of the biographies as translation, the second frame investigates the journey of these works in translation. Pursuing the same macro-to-micro method, I trace how, under comparable constraints brought by rewriting a source, Turkish translators transfer (and/or reproduce) the image of the foreign constructed by the biographers.