Town of Banff, from Sleeping Buffalo Mountain

After a long day that a resourceful weather-forecaster might summarise as wet and irritating, my attention depleted by sleeplessness – mood, to continue the meteorological analogy, middling to crabby –  I am due to give a presentation on the topic that brought me here to Banff: my translations of the Colombian poet Darío Jaramillo. This goes OK, although as it is a pretty informal affair I feel I am underprepared (if it were a formal affair, I would no doubt feel the same, or else the opposite). I talk about Darío’s work, how it is themed around Paradox, The Double, Loss, and Time (safe enough ground: who can contradict any of these things?) and I read a couple of his poems. My sleeplessness roars in the recesses of consciousness like a turbulent sea crashing on distant rocks. I stumble and sway between the uncertain home comforts of English and the rusty ambivalence of my Spanish. Someone points out what might be an instance of mistranslation in one of the poems, and of course I forget, while answering her, that I have already addressed and twice changed my mind about this line, as well as questioned the poet himself; someone else asks me a very good question that I can’t think of an answer to straightaway so I tell him that it’s a very good question and that I will think about it. I try to wind up within the allotted time, and then I remember that I forgot a quotation I like, about the occasion when Darío was selected by his High School to be one of the two students to meet Borges, on the latter’s visit to Bogotá in 1962. He was 15 at the time (Darío is on the right in the photo).

‘La única vez que hablé con Borges yo tenía unos impertinentes quince o diez y seis años y le pregunté por qué afirmaba tal cosa en una parte y exactamente lo contrario en otra. Borges me contestó que estaba claro que yo había leído sus textos más veces que las que él las había escrito.’

(The only time I spoke with Borges I was an impertinent 15- or 16-year old and I asked him why he had affirmed such-and-such a thing in one part  and exactly the opposite in another. Borges replied that clearly I had read his texts more times that he had written them.)

The quotation neatly illustrates a point I was trying to make in my talk, but I forget which.

Of course, it is unlikely, in reality, that anyone would read the texts of a writer as many times as the writer herself, unless of course, it were the translator. Borges’ answer was a classic instance of authorial evasion, of which he was a master. His standard response to any interlocutor offering an ‘interpretation’ or critique of his work has been set down by one of his English translators, Norman di Giovanni, as follows:

On numerous occasions I heard his stock reply to anyone who laid it on the line and told him what some piece of work of his was really all about. Borges always smiled, humbly, and sweetly, and ‘Ah, thank you!’ would come his ambiguous put-down. ‘You have enriched my work!’

And this notion of doubleness, of being (at least) two different people depending on the occasion, reminds me of something that came up in conversation with Alastair Reid, when I visited him in south-west Scotland and which I recorded, thankfully, as he died only two months later. Reid was a friend as well as an excellent translator of Borges, and accompanied him on tour occasionally. He was aware, more than most, how Borges could be a different person, depending on whether he was speaking English or Spanish, a state of duality in which I often find myself. I will finish with this, as it is a theme which, finding myself amongst so many translators, may be of interest:

‘there was one time when we were at the PEN club in New York, Borges had agreed to give a talk, and as always he said ‘will you come and help me with la charla’ and he always said the same thing [to the audience]: ‘I would prefer if you could write your questions on pieces of paper’, and so we would have a little thing with scraps of paper, which we never bothered about, because I knew the things, the temas that would really get Borges talking fluently so I would make up the questions, [and] he’d say (secretive voice) ‘don’t bother about the questions – look at them and see if they’re interesting’ anyway at one point Borges said, [he] was talking about some poet or other . . . and he said ‘I too have written a poem, at least I refer to it as a poem’, and he said ‘and I will read some lines from my feeble effort’ . . . and I said to Borges: ‘you refer to your own poetry in a phrase that . . . you talk about mis pobres versos – that’s what critics say, you’re not really entitled to refer to your poems as your ‘pobres versos’’, and I said ‘sometimes, Borges, you use modesty like a club’, because that’s what he did, Borges was always apologizing . . . ‘and I have written two or three sketchy lines’ and then he would read . . . and it really was a tic that he had about apologizing . . . he was, as we might say, ‘well brought up’, extremely respectful, and then if he reverted to Spanish, and if Bioy was there, or some people he knew he would be very bawdy and nasty and jocular . . . he was gossipy in Spanish, but never in English . . .’

A dichotomy of deer, Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity.