The Original is Unfaithful to the Translation: Towards Recognising Originality in Translation

Abstract

In his “Sobre el Vathek de William Beckford [On William Beckford’s Vathek]” (1943), Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) paradoxically claims ‘[e]l original es infiel a la traducción [the original is unfaithful to the translation]’. With these seven words, Borges disrupts the very core of traditional Anglo-American translation studies: in a context where translations are generally regarded as secondary to their source texts (ST)—temporally, textually, and in status—Borges affirms that a translation can assume an independent existence. A further implication of Borges’s (seemingly illogical) declaration is that, in some ways, the translation may be truer to the fundamental “spirit” of the original than the original itself.
This essay shall thus take Borges’s words as a starting point to investigate the possibility of a translation becoming an “original” against which the ST can be measured for “faithfulness”, with the ultimate aim of recognising the originality in translation.