Perilous peripheries: the place of translation in Jorge Luis Borges (1).(translation as a literary device in Borges's short story El evangelio segun Marcos)(Critical essay)

Translation in Latin America, since the colonial enterprise, has been one of the preeminent strategies for defining the region's independent cultural identity and its relation to world cultures. Often writing and translating have been simultaneous practices in Latin America, where giving a voice to foreign language authors and producing one's own creative work mutually nurture a dialogue with the test of the world. Many Latin American writers such as Haroldo de Campos, Jose Maria Arguedas, Julio Cortazar, Octavio Paz, and Jorge Luis Borges also worked as translators, to the extent that translation became integrated into these writers' intellectual practice and reflection on translation fueled their own creative work. Through his role as a practitioner and editor (even promoter) of translations, Jorge Luis Borges is recognized as a catalyzing force behind literary development in Argentina. The intertwined functions of writing and translation for Borges "become nearly interchangeable practices of creation" (Waisman 88). While many critics have considered Borges a "cosmopolitan" intellectual disassociated from his national and regional surroundings, his interest in translation actually grows out of an intensely local preoccupation with belonging and place in a heterogeneous, postcolonial society (see Sarlo, Balderston, Rosman and Molloy). (2) Waisman's study of Borges and translation elaborates the Argentine writer's identification with the periphery. According to Waisman, Borges uses translation as a means of "rewriting the foreign in an Argentine context" (35). He even values the translated text over the original, such as in his famous essay on Beckford's Vathek (1943), where he complains that "el original es infiel a la traduccion" (Borges 732). (3) Borges's writing questions the primacy of the "original" in order to privilege translations as sites of transnational nexus between the periphery and the "center."

The role of translation in Borges's work stretches beyond his own translations from English and infiltrates his essays and fiction (see Kristal). Translation forms part of his narrative strategies that present the narrator as a recorder or commentator on other cultures' writings. He teasingly obscures his role as author through the invention of scribes, translators, ethnographers and scholars who work from the sidelines. Andrew Hurley calls many of Borges's stories "found fictions," "edited fictions" or "pseudo-translations" (298). According to him, "they are stories that masquerade as documents discovered by a person who then publishes them, or, if the case demands, translates and publishes them" (298).

Borges's efforts to expose the mastery of the translator divert attention from the main textual event. This peripheral, or displaced, perspective in his writing parallels the cultural politics of his self-declared marginality as an Argentine intellectual who confronts world literature as a critic, translator, poet and fiction writer. As Beatriz Sarlo states in her book, Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge, "To read all world literature in Buenos Aires, to rewrite some of its texts, is an experience which cannot be compared to that of the writer who works on the secure terrain of a homeland that offers him or her an untroubled cultural tradition" (36).

Continually undermining the cosmopolitan nods to Western thought and tradition, Borges implicates his own, and Argentina's, marginality in his textual maneuvers. His references to, and work in, translation explore the issues of sacred and secular, local and foreign, verbal and non-verbal communication, the literary canon and its periphery. The insistence on translation in his essays and fiction questions those very categories and reasserts the periphery over the center. (4)

While many of Borges's stories hint at or toy with translation ("Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote," "El etnografo"), and still others pretend to be translations ("El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan," "El inmortal," "Un problema," "El informe de Brodie," "La secta de los 30" and "Undr" (5)), his story "El evangelio segun Marcos" from the collection El informe de Brodie (1970) makes translation the center of its plot. The story borrows and transposes Bible stories, embedding them within dramatic reenactments, to reveal both the power and the peril of translating the sacred canon. This story is emblematic in its use of intertextual narrative games for the purpose of Borges's complex positioning within world literature. Antoine Berman considers Luther's translation of the Bible as the pivotal event that launched the tradition of translation for German letters. With his typical irreverence, Borges continues the drama of Biblical translation in the Americas by problematizing the categories of the sacred and the profane, the oral and the written, and the original and the imitation in the context of Argentine lettered ground. As Sylvia Molloy notes, this story's cultural binarisms are "compromised, contaminated, always already mixedo Borges destabilizes both sides ... problematizes clean-cut divisions, univocal formulations of difference" ("Lost" 11). "El evangelio segun Marcos" maps Borges's geocultural perspective by means of fictionalized Biblical translation. …