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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
by 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 agoOf 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 agohttps://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 agoEven Ulysses has this problem, there's so much wordplay based off of how things sound when spoken
- jgwil2 2y agoI 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.