that the place had once been this shade of red but that ‘to its bene fit the years had softened that vivid colour.’ The colour, I prefer to believe, reflects a fact of daily life on the Argentine pampa – as does the fact that the building needed a coat of paint. On two counts, Borges had accurately depicted the structure. Anything else he would probably have looked on as mere cleverness. For the reader of Borges, there is no need to ignore what is before one’s eyes and look for the far-fetched.
When it becomes difficult to trust that a wall is red because it is red because it is red, we must question the limits of legitimate interpretation. Common sense should apply, just as in rabbinical exegesis, as a safeguard against esoteric and misleading interpretation, the primary meaning of language takes precedence. Writers are admired for pinning down an object, a mood, the ineffable, with precision. Borges’s prose, largely modelled on writers like Stevenson, Wells, and Chesterton, is realistic and as such it is full of sharp definition. Alas, the diction and mistakes of poor translations of Borges into English blur his prose and make it the victim of distortion born of ignorance. A common enough meteorological phenomenon, the red ring around the moon that forecasts rain, comes out in one story as ‘the crimson circle around the moon presaged rain.’ In another, a small kettle used to brew maté – an everyday household utensil on the River Plate – is transmogrified into a ‘soup cauldron’. In another, ‘a growth of tall reeds’, a common detail of the Argentine countryside, is bludgeoned into ‘a field covered in dried-out straw’. (While Borges was fascinated by the exotic in alien cultures, paradoxically he hated exotic descriptions of life in his own country.) In a fourth, the word jineta, which in Spanish means ‘shoulder braid’ or ‘insignia’, is misread for the word jinetes, which means ‘horsemen’ or ‘riders’. In the tale, the hero, a policeman who is about to take the side of the man he is hunting down, is troubled over his rank and uniform – in other words, over his shoulder braid, the emblem of his authority. The translation in question has him troubled about ‘the other cavalry-men’. The wonder was, Borges remarked, that the translator had not taken jinetas for the feminine of jinetes and had the hero troubled about ‘the Amazons’.
Another stock-in-trade of many interpreters has been the clever game of combing words for double meanings. Not satisfied that the Spanish word fuentes means only ‘fountains’ in a particular instance, one study tells us that the word is more helpfully translated into English as ‘sources’, which is a second Spanish meaning of the word. I grow impatient with this. Borges was writing about public fountains in a place like Trafalgar Square. I do not believe we find ‘sources’ in London squares. Fuente in Spanish can also meaning a serving dish. Why hadn’t that been thrown in for good measure? I am reminded of one translator of a Borges poem who went in for such surrealism when, translating the Spanish word cascos, he opted for ‘helmets’ instead of ‘hoofs’. The poem was about horses. Perhaps in Hieronymus Bosch horses have helmets, but in Borges, on the Argentine pampa, they have hoofs. In this case, the translator – a Latin American and at the time a professor at yet another Pennsylvania university – astonished Borges with his arrogance. The man read his version one day to an audience that included Borges. Afterwards, Borges took him aside and said, ‘Look here, cascos is “hoofs”.’ That evening, the man read the poem out again at another public gathering. Of course, the word had not been changed.
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