Pierre Menard's Translations

For the Borges heads, here comes this interesting piece of trivia from George Steiner's After Babel:

The latter's masterpiece [Menard's], of course, was to consist 'of the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of the first part of Don Quixote and a fragment of chapter twenty-two'. (How many readers of Borges have observed that Chapter IX turns on a translation from Arabic into Castilian, that there is a labyrinth in XXXVIII, and that chapter XXII contains a literalist equivocation, in the purest Kabbalistic vein, on the fact that the word no has the same number of letters as the word sí?)

Translating Borges

It has often been said that Borges's fictions have never been translated into English well. I certainly thought Andrew Hurley's attempts are ordinary, and I'd like to think my translation of Borges Y Yo is better, but this ridiculously good anecdote found in a review of Borges's Collected Fictions tops the lot:

On what was to be our last night in Paris, Borges told me that, a few days earlier, he had attended a staging of Macbeth and that, in spite of the terrible performance, he had left the theatre 'shattered by tragic passion'. 'How curious,' he said, 'that Shakespeare's genius can even overcome the efforts of a bad actor.' Borges's genius will overcome Hurley's version, as it has so many others, and English-speaking readers, while waiting for the inspired translator of Borges, may have to resign themselves to the not impossible task of learning Spanish.

If Only I Could Translate Russian

I'm translating Jorge Luis Borges again, but this time I'm translating one of his pithy quotes about translation:

No sé por qué siempre se piensa mal de los traductores y, sin embargo, todos estamos de acuerdo en que la literatura rusa es admirable...

I don't know why people think badly of translators whilst, nevertheless, everybody is in agreement that Russian literature is to be admired...

From Las palabras son pistolas cargadas.