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That guy had a lot of interesting thoughts. It's ironic that of all the writers who I've tried to read in the original, Borges is the only one which comes to mi

That guy had a lot of interesting thoughts. It's ironic that of all the writers who I've tried to read in the original, Borges is the only one which comes to mind.

keiferski 2y ago
Yeah I agree, somehow Borges's Spanish seems more accessible to English speakers, maybe because he was fluent in English as well. But my Spanish isn't good enough to tell if his writing is significantly different from other Spanish language writers.
- pchangr 2y ago
  As a Spanish native speaker, I would say he’s quite accessible. Most of the references he does are universal classics and he uses a pretty modern language most of the time. And he doesn’t do much playing with metalanguage. I’d say.. the hardest to translate and read would probably be the most experimental just because there’s a lot of meta-references.. kind of like Joyce in Finnegans Wake.
  - darby_nine 2y ago
    Of course I understand the impulse, but translating Finnegans Wake strikes me as nearly impossible and worth only questionable effort. Even beyond the fact that it's often expressing non-analytic semantics that are extremely difficult to pin down, it's not even entirely English and there's a lot of cross-language wordplay.
    - kreyenborgi 2y ago
      https://www.nrk.no/kultur/xl/han-oversetter-verdens-vanskeligste-bok-1.15957023 https://www.nrk.no/kultur/xl/han-oversetter-verdens-vanskeli... ( The Swedes used 66 years, but according to the Norwegian translator, it is no harder than Shakespeare's sonettes. Begun 2016, ETA 2030. )
  - matrix87 2y ago
    Even Ulysses has this problem, there's so much wordplay based off of how things sound when spoken
  - jgwil2 2y ago
    I would add that a lot of Borges' work is written in an academic style that is highly translatable, but he also wrote a lot about the criminal underworld in Buenos Aires and those works are, unsurprisingly, full of slang and local references that are much more opaque to outsiders.

That guy had a lot of interesting thoughts. It's ironic that of all the writers who I've tried to read in the original, Borges is the only one which comes to mind.

keiferski 2y ago

Yeah I agree, somehow Borges's Spanish seems more accessible to English speakers, maybe because he was fluent in English as well. But my Spanish isn't good enough to tell if his writing is significantly different from other Spanish language writers.

pchangr 2y ago
As a Spanish native speaker, I would say he’s quite accessible. Most of the references he does are universal classics and he uses a pretty modern language most of the time. And he doesn’t do much playing with metalanguage. I’d say.. the hardest to translate and read would probably be the most experimental just because there’s a lot of meta-references.. kind of like Joyce in Finnegans Wake.
- darby_nine 2y ago
  Of course I understand the impulse, but translating Finnegans Wake strikes me as nearly impossible and worth only questionable effort. Even beyond the fact that it's often expressing non-analytic semantics that are extremely difficult to pin down, it's not even entirely English and there's a lot of cross-language wordplay.
  - kreyenborgi 2y ago
    https://www.nrk.no/kultur/xl/han-oversetter-verdens-vanskeligste-bok-1.15957023 https://www.nrk.no/kultur/xl/han-oversetter-verdens-vanskeli... ( The Swedes used 66 years, but according to the Norwegian translator, it is no harder than Shakespeare's sonettes. Begun 2016, ETA 2030. )
- matrix87 2y ago
  Even Ulysses has this problem, there's so much wordplay based off of how things sound when spoken
- jgwil2 2y ago
  I would add that a lot of Borges' work is written in an academic style that is highly translatable, but he also wrote a lot about the criminal underworld in Buenos Aires and those works are, unsurprisingly, full of slang and local references that are much more opaque to outsiders.