Debates and even reactions from other writers is what has generated the announcement by the English publisher Puffin Books (Penguin’s children’s label) to modify some words – such as “fat”, “ugly” and the gender of some characters – in the books of Ronald Dahl, late author of children’s classics such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory y Matildaamong others.
The announcement generated a lot of controversy in the UK, where many complained that this action was altering the original intention of the author, that it would be a form of censorship, and that removing certain words will not change the original intention of the author. Finally, the publisher had to back down and announce that it will edit and launch the original version of Dahl’s books and the version with the alterations.
The publisher that publishes the author’s books in Spanish, Santillana, immediately ruled out applying the same criteria and clarified that it will keep the translations as they are.
However, it is not the first time that translation and changes in book publishing processes have generated controversy.
The conservative style and the macho and homophobic prejudices of the author – also typical of his time – would have ended up modifying the meaning of one of Woolf’s most important works.
A few days ago, on social networks the booktoker mexicana @nenamounstro recalled one of the most controversial translations from English into Spanish of a writer that only in recent years have academics dared to criticize: the translation of Orlando, a biography by the author Virginia Woolf, made by Jorge Luis Borges.
And although there has been talk in the media that Dahl would be the victim of extreme “political correctness” in the face of terms that at the time they were written did not seem to be offensive, Borges would err on the contrary. The conservative style and the macho and homophobic prejudices of the author – also typical of her time – would have ended up modifying the meaning of one of Woolf’s most important works.
The translation of Orlando a Borges was commissioned by the writer and intellectual Victoria Ocampo and was produced by the writer in 1937, nine years following it was originally published.
The book deals with Orlando and his life of more than 500 years, and is a critique and parody by the author of the biography formats, very fashionable in those years, but also of English society and its history. At the same time, the work was transgressive due to its gender theme and as one of the titles that are considered one of the first feminist novels, and even, queer, by questioning all gender roles. This, because Orlando not only goes from one country to another and seeks to develop his literary ingenuity, but also because he goes from being a man to a woman. So, naturally, one day she wakes up as a woman and Orlando doesn’t seem at all impressed. What does shock him is that the treatment of him changes: he would no longer have the right to own property and his romantic interests would be questioned, as well as his intellectual capacity.
Woolf dedicated this book to his lover, the aristocratic poet Vita Sackville-West, who used to dress as a man and with whom he had an intense relationship.
Although there are studies from the early 1990s that were already carrying out this critique of Orlando’s translation, the one who developed it in depth was the academic Leah Leone, in a published essay for the magazine Borges Variationsfrom the University of Pittsburgh in 2008.
The author of the text begins by explaining that Borges’s translation was essential to promote the subsequent scene of Latin American writers who adopted magical realism and fantastic narrative. The translation was praised for years, since as Borges himself explained, he carried a lot of the pen of his translator. But the author affirms that Woolf’s intention to criticize patriarchal society and gender roles takes second place with Borges’s translation.
“Throughout the translation, we find the privilege of the masculine, the attenuation of shocking passages and some radical changes that seem to be concrete manifestations of Borges’s own opinion”, comments Leone.
“The popularity of Borges’s translation is disturbing since analyzing the project reveals the neutralization or even the sabotage, at various textual levels, of precisely those elements of the genre that have made Orlando a fundamental text of feminist studies and queer”, indicates the essay.
Leone indicates that Borges, for example, changed personal and possessive pronouns that were feminine, to make them masculine, and that he favored a masculine narrator in the text, even going so far as to omit complete sentences from the book.
“Throughout the translation, we find the privilege of the masculine, the attenuation of shocking passages and some radical changes that seem to be concrete manifestations of Borges’s own opinion”, comments Leone.
There are several examples of the essayist: the comparison, in the translation of women with boys and not girls; the changes of the pronoun “her” (his, in feminine), for the masculine (“his”), as well as the “she” in English, which often happens to be omitted or changed to “he” (él, in Spanish; plus omissions of words and complete phrases.
The author concludes that the best thing for Woolf’s work and reader would be to apply clarifications at the foot of the page to Borges’s translation that show the original text or an alternative translation, narrower to a more textual one.
“In some instances, the omissions and changes that Borges introduced to the translation formed statements explicitly contrary to Woolf’s. For example, when Orlando wants to get rid of Archduke Henry, she envisions a game that he can annoy her with. When the aristocrat cheats, the Archduke is stunned: “To love a woman who cheated at play was, he said, impossible. Here he broke down completely. Happily, he said, recovering slightly, there were no witnesses. She was, following all, only a woman”. Enrique has compassion for her, the fact that Orlando is only a woman mitigates her disappointment. Since she is nothing more than a big girl, one cannot demand that she play by the rules of the game. By omitting a single word, Borges radically changes the ironic force of the Archduke’s concession: “Impossible, he said, to love a cheat. When she got there she disarmed. Luckily, she said, recovering a bit, there were no witnesses. At last, she was a woman”. With Borges’s translation, it is understood that, being a woman, it is not surprising that Orlando cheated, since it is presumed that all women tend to do so, “explains the essay.
Y Whitman
The author also gives examples that these biases shown by Borges in Woolf’s translation are repeated with respect to the poems she translated by Walt Whitman, who wrote several of his poems regarding his relationships with men. In several cases, Borges simply did not translate some clearly homoerotic poems.
“When he translated the collection of poems, Borges made a limited selection of the poems he wanted to include. From the book Calamus —known for his poems openly dedicated to homosexual love— Borges omits several poems with a homerotic content, for example Of the terrible doubt of appearances, City of orgies, We two boys together clinging o To a stranger. As Balderston points out, Borges does not exclude When I heard at the close of day (“When I knew when the day fell”), an explicitly homoerotic poem. However, as in Orlando’s translation, the translator takes advantage of the synthetic pronouns, this time to never write the word I in association with homoeroticism”, affirms Leone.
The author concludes that the best thing for Woolf’s work and reader would be to apply clarifications at the foot of the page to Borges’s translation that show the original text or an alternative translation, narrower to a more textual one.
In an article by Page 12, The Argentine media highlighted Leone’s analysis of the Borges translation, highlighting Woolf’s feminist impulse in his work Orlando.
In 2011 the academics of the University of Cordoba, Guillermo Badenes and Josefina Coisson reaffirmed Leone’s criticism in an article entitled ‘Borges and Orlando. Manipulation before manipulationism’.
“It is not strange that when reading Borges as a translator, on many occasions only Borges is read. In the case of his translation of the novel Orlando, the Spanish-speaking reader sometimes cannot access the author of the original. Because of her style, because of her personality, because of her person, it might be affirmed that Borges did little to convey Woolf. Her achievements are infinite, as well as the personal character that she gave to the appropriation of her translated work, rewritings biased by her vision of the world that surrounded her, ”the article states.
“So that standardization does not become the main way to silence, translation must be erected as a bridge through which our ideas can cross and not as a weapon to silence the ideas that must be transmitted,” they conclude in the text.
