tlön, uqbar, orbis tertius
the approach to almotasim
pierre menard, author of don quixote
the circular ruins
the lottery in babylon
examination of the work of herbert quain
the library of babel
the garden of forking paths
i translated the circular ruins with a lot of help from a bot talking to particular web translation services. i never went back to reach the level of sophistication with the bot i would have liked.
the library of babel is the next most recent and more human translation.
tlön, uqbar, orbis tertius is the first story from borges' the garden of footpaths that are branching off, otherwise known as labyrinths. this is the completed version of the translation.
pierre menard was the best-known to me; did i read a barthes dissassembly of it once? i decided to stick with the anglicised "Quixote", rather than the literal spanish spelling; contextual rightness. that set me off on reading the original, in a dubiously uncredited late 18C translation, bargain-bin edition.
i have a strategy now of translating the words i know, marking the unknown ones in square brackets for perl to process afterwards, placement in the context and my vague knowledge about babelfish's returns making it a fairly reliable process with a little tweaking. there arent all that many words i dont know although it can be very different depending on the story-telling style, the domain.
amanda advised me to be reading borges in the original. the translations, even some recent ambitious american ones, are supposed to be not good. i picked a couple of books up when i was in spain recently. i translated a couple of the poems, playing as a source for some more stupid generative poetry.
of varying quality, and intentionally naive are the translations :) i have also been advised to read hofstadter's 'le ton beau de marot', and i will sometime.
i came across a couple of short borges essays about john wilkins and his 'essay towards a real character and philosophical language', which i wrote a paper on in finals. dreams of rescuing it from the british library and implementing it. that's another story.
language loops, discursive communities and boundaries. i wonder.