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Unread 10-09-2013, 02:18 AM
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Eric Chevlen Eric Chevlen is offline
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This translation is lovely to the ear, but I think that at critical junctures it does more than exercise poetic license, it mistranslates. Spanish is not my first language, so some of my remarks might be askew. I hope that someone for whom it is a mother tongue will weigh in here.

A key point is that "del idioma" is not "of a language," but "of the language." Borges is describing the language in which the din of All is recorded. If "él" in line 5 is translated as "he," the reader is left to wonder who that he is. But note that "idioma" is the only masculine noun preceding the word "él." Borges was famously intrigued with the concept of recursion. If "él" is translated as "it," referring to the language, the meaning of the poem is clarified: in the throng of things recorded in that language, we find Carthage, Rome, you, me, that language itself, etc.

This approach helps clarify "Detrás del nombre hay lo que no se nombra" too. "Nombre" also means noun. Behind all the nouns, the things named in the language, lies the ineffable or unspoken.

"Esta aguja azul" is the object of the verb phrase "gravitar en," not the place where it occurs. "Sombra" is the subject of that verb phrase. Thus, the meaning of the poem is clarified by translating that phrase in the sense "I felt its shadow tug this blue needle..."

Thus, the ocean's shoreline is not the force tugging the compass needle. Rather, the shadow tugs at the blue, clear, light needle which (otherwise) points to the (distant) seashore.

"With something of a clock" is so literal that it loses its original meaning. First of all, I think that "watch" is a better translation of "reloj" than clock, since a watch is similar in size to a compass, and it's sweep second hand resembles the needle of a compass.

The phrase means that the slight movement of the compass needle, drawn by the shadow, is somewhat like the movement of (a sweep second hand of ) a watch in a dream.
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