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Sergio Waisman. Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2005. 207 pp.
Sergio Waisman offers both detailed textual analysis and theoretical elaboration in his comprehensive study of Jorge Luis Borgcs's relationship with translation. According to Waisman, it is through translation that readers may understand Borges's reading, writing, and views on literature. While Borges's own translations are certainly central to this story, his fictionalization of translation and reviews of others' translations in world literature comprise an integrated theory of literature. Waisman eloquently justifies the regional locatedness of Borges's work through translation, as other recent work by Beatrix Sarlo and Daniel Balderston have illuminated. In fact, Waisman's titulary concept of the periphery owes a debt to Sarlo's books on Borges published in the 1990s. Waisman's introduction posits the periphery not only as a geopolitical position but also as "a theoretical space delineated to challenge many of our basic suppositions about translation and literature, and the relationships between them" (13). In dialogue with these contemporary interpretations of Borges's work as extremely engaged with Argentine, and often specifically River Plate, culture, Borges and Translation also identifies in his work the basic tenets of critical approaches such as deconsttuction, Orientalism, and reader response theory well ahead of their time. The book delivers what it promises and makes a major contribution to Argentine literary scholarship as well as to the field of translation studies.
In Waisman's principal argument, stated repeatedly throughout the book, translation is not an isolated activity for Borges, but rather an integrated way of thinking about literature from Argentina. The "creative infidelities" that Borges both launches and celebrates in his fiction, essays, and translations proper rely on and gain their irreverent potential from the marginal location of the Americas. Borges's irreverent position questions the primacy of "original" texts, which for him are no more faithful or sacred than their translations. Mistranslations and fragmentary translations allow for linguistic displacements and regional transpositions that enrich the original rather than...