Borges loved the sonnet, and I love his All Our Yesterdays (not Todos Nuestros Ayeres — the poem’s title was originally published in English*). And so I thought I’d translate the poem into English much like I did Borges’ Spinoza.

Robert Mezey has already translated All Our Yesterdays, but it doesn’t rhyme. I thought I’d translate the poem and preserve the rhyme, albeit structured differently. The original is rhymed ABBA CDDC EFFE GG. I’ve rhymed the translation in the classic Shakespearean form of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

All Our Yesterdays
I want to know: which who of all the whos
I’ve been is due my past? The boy who traced
out Latin lines hexameter that hues
lustrous of passing years have now effaced?
Perhaps that lad who sought those savage selves —
tigers and panthers — or the curves precise
of maps and charts in father’s library shelves
is he to whom belongs my past concise?
Or he who pushed a door ajar where lay
a dying man in everlasting sleep,
yes he the boy who kissed in the bright of day
the face departing, dead, forsaken deep?
I am all those who are no more. In vain
I am this night those lost to life’s terrain.

All Our Yesterdays*
Quiero saber de quién es mi pasado.
¿De cuál de los que fui? ¿Del ginebrino
que trazó algún hexámetro latino
que los lustrales años han borrado?
¿Es de aquel niño que buscó en la entera
biblioteca del padre las puntuales
curvaturas del mapa y las ferales
formas que son el tigre y la pantera?
¿O de aquel otro que empujó una puerta
detrás de la que un hombre se moría
para siempre, y besó en el blanco día
la cara que se va y la cara muerta?
Soy los que ya no son. Inútilmente
soy en la tarde esa perdida gente.

* the original poem, written in Spanish, was published with the title All Our Yesterdays in English. The title references Macbeth, who said famously:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

I am by no means qualified to translate poetry, but reading Borges’ sonnet Spinoza translated into English unrhymed and unmetered disappointed me so much that I thought an attempt at a rhymed and metered English version of the Spanish original wouldn’t offend too gravely. And because Borges admired Shakespeare so much, I supposed translating Spinoza into the classic Shakespearean sonnet form would be the most appropriate option.

Anyway, here’s Richard Howard and César Rennert’s version; here’s Willis Barnstone’s version (which is rhymed, although the meter is all over the place); here’s a literal version; and below is my own version along with the Spanish original:

Spinoza
The Jew’s translucent hands robustly work
The lenses in the late penumbral dark.
The dying evening cold where terrors lurk,
One evening, every evening always stark.
His hands, his space of hyacinth and blue
That pale within the Ghetto’s borderlines
Hardly exist for him the silent Jew
Who dreams a labyrinth’s lucid, clear designs.
He undisturbed by fame — what comes reflected
From dreams within another mirror’s dreams.
Free from a maiden’s timid love confected
And metaphor and myth’s distracting streams.
He works resistant glass: the endless One
He maps, whose shining stars no skies outrun.

Spinoza
Las traslúcidas manos del judío
labran en la penumbra los cristales
y la tarde que muere es miedo y frío.
(Las tardes a las tardes son iguales.)
Las manos y el espacio de jacinto
que palidece en el confín del Ghetto
casi no existen para el hombre quieto
que está soñando un claro laberinto.
No lo turba la fama, ese reflejo
de sueños en el sueño de otro espejo,
ni el temeroso amor de las doncellas.
Libre de la metáfora y del mito
labra un arduo cristal: el infinito
mapa de Aquel que es todas Sus estrellas.

There’s no English translation of Borges’ El Libro de Arena, or The Book of Sand, available on the web, so I’ve gone and made a translation that I hereby publish forthwith:

The Book of Sand (translated from the Spanish) by Jorge Luis Borges

Lines consist of an infinite number of points; planes an infinite number of lines; volumes an infinite number of planes, hypervolumes an infinite number of volumes… No, this, this more geometrico, is definitely not the best way to begin my tale. Affirming a fantastic tale’s truth is now a story-telling convention; mine, though, is true.

I live alone, in a fourth-floor apartment on Calle Belgrano. One evening a few months ago, I heard a knock on the door. I opened it and in walked someone I had never met before. He was a tall man, of indistinct features. My myopia perhaps made me see him that way. Everything about him spoke of an honest poverty. He was dressed in grey and carried a grey valise. I sensed immediately that he was a foreigner. At first I thought him an old man; later I noticed that what misled me was his sparse hair, an almost-white blond, like a Scandinavian’s. Over the course of our conversation, which would last no longer than an hour, I learnt that he hailed from the Orkneys.

I showed him his seat. The man paused a moment before speaking. He exuded a melancholy air, as do I now.

“I sell Bibles,” he told me.

Not without pedantry I responded:

“In this house there are several English Bibles, including John Wyclif’s, the first of all. I also have Cypriano de Valera’s, Luther’s — which, as a piece of literature, is the worst of the lot — and a copy of the Vulgate in Latin. As you can see, it’s not Bibles I have a need for.”

After a brief silence he responded:

“I don’t sell only Bibles. I can show you a sacred book that might interest you. I aquired it in the outskirts of Bikanir.”

He opened his valise and placed the book on the table. It was a clothbound octavo volume which had undoubtedly passed through many hands. I examined the book; its unexpected heft surprised me. On the spine was printed Holy Writ and below that Bombay.

“From the nineteenth century I’d hazard,” I observed.

“I don’t know. I’ve never known,” was the response.

I opened it at random. The characters were unfamiliar. The pages, which appeared to me worn and of poor typographic quality, were printed in two columns like a Bible. The text was cramped and arranged in versicles. In the upper corner of each page were Arabic numerals. It caught my attention that the even-numbered page bore, let’s say, the number 40,514 and the odd-numbered page that followed 999. I turned the page; the overleaf bore an eight-digit number. Also printed was a small illustration, like those in dictionaries: an anchor drawn in pen and ink, as though by a child’s unskilled hand.

It was then that the stranger told me:

“Study the page well. You will never see it again.”

There was a threat in what he said, but not in his voice.

I took note of the page and shut the volume. I reopened it immediately.

In vain I searched for the figure of the anchor, page after page. To hide my discomfort, I said to him:

“This is a version of the Scripture in some Hindustani language, right?”

“No,” he replied.

Then he lowered his voice as if entrusting me with a secret:

“I acquired the book in a small town on the plains for a few rupees and a Bible. Its owner didn’t know how to read. I suspect that he saw the Book of Books as an amulet. He was of the lowest caste; people couldn’t step on his shadow without contamination. He told me that his book is called the Book of Sand because neither the book nor sand possess a beginning or an end.”

He suggested I try finding the first page.

I placed my left hand on the cover and opened the book with my thumb and forefinger almost touching. All my efforts were useless: several pages always lay between the cover and my hand. It was as though the pages sprouted from within the book.

“Now search for the last page.”

Again I failed; I only managed to stammer in a voice not my own:

“This cannot be.”

Always in a low voice, the Bible seller said:

“It cannot be, yet it is. The number of pages in this book is exactly infinite. No page is the first; none the last. I don’t know why they’re numbered in this arbitrary way. Perhaps it’s to demonstrate that the terms of an infinite series include any number.”

Later, as if he were thinking aloud:

“If space is infinite, we are in no particular point in space. If time is infinite, we are in no particular point in time.”

His musings irritated me. I asked him:

“You’re a religious man, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I’m Presbyterian. My conscience is clear. I’m sure I didn’t cheat the native when I gave him the Lord’s Word in exchange for his diabolical book.”

I assured him that he had no reason to reproach himself, and I asked him if he was just passing through these lands. He replied that he was thinking of returning to his homeland in a few days. It was then that I learnt he was Scotch, from the Orkney Isles. I told him that I had a special affection for Scotland because of my love of Stevenson and Hume.

“And of Robbie Burns,” he corrected.

While we spoke, I continued exploring the infinite book. With a false indifference I asked him:

“Do you intend to offer this curious specimen to the British Museum?”

“No. I offer it to you,” he said, and offered a high price.

I replied, in all honesty, that the price was too high for me and I remained in thought. After a few minutes I had come up with a plan.

“I propose a trade,” I said. “You obtained this volume for a few rupees and the Holy Scripture; I offer you my retirement funds, which I’ve just been paid, and the Wyclif Bible in gothic lettering. I inherited it from my parents.”

“A black-letter Wyclif!” he murmured.

I went to my bedroom and I brought back the money and book. He turned the pages and studied the binding with the fervour of a bibliophile.

“It’s a deal,” he said.

I was astonished that he did not haggle. Only afterwards did I realise that he had entered my house with the intention of selling the book. He didn’t count the bills; he put them away.

We chatted about India, the Orkneys and the Norwegian jarls who had governed them. Night had fallen by the time he had left. I never saw him again, nor do I know his name.

I thought of keeping the Book of Sand in the space left behind by the Wyclif Bible’s absence. In the end I opted to hide it behind several misshapen volumes of Thousand and One Nights.

I went to bed and could not sleep. At around three or four in the morning I turned on the light. I searched for the impossible book and turned its pages. In one of them I saw printed a mask. In the corner the page bore a number — I don’t remember which anymore — that was raised to the ninth power.

I showed my treasure to no one. Against the joy of possessing the book grew the fear that it would be stolen, and later the suspicion that it was not truly infinite. Both these worries aggravated my already long-standing misanthropy.

I had few friends still alive; I stopped seeing them. Prisoner of the Book, I almost never left the house. I examined the worn spine and cover with a magnifying glass, and I discounted the possibility of some kind of artifice. I found that the small illustrations were spaced two thousand pages apart from one to the other. I noted them down in a small alphabetised notebook, which did not take long to fill. They never repeated. At night, in the scarce intervals insomnia withdrew its hold over, I dreamed of the book.

Summer was coming to an end and I realised that the book was monstrous. There was no consolation in the thought that no less monstrous was I, who perceived the book with eyes and touched it with ten nailed fingers. I felt the book to be a nightmarish object, something obscene that slanders and compromises reality.

I thought of fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book would be just as infinite and suffocate the planet with smoke.

I remember having read that the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest. Before retiring I worked in the National Library, which housed nine-hundred thousand books; I know that to the right of the lobby a curved staircase descends to the basement, where the newspapers and maps are stored. I took advantage of the librarians’ inattentiveness for a moment to lose the Book of Sand in one of the humid shelves. I tried not to notice how high or how far from the door.

I feel somewhat relieved now, but I do avoid even passing by Mexico Street.²

Translator’s notes

¹ The quote appears in English in the Spanish original.
² The National Library of Argentina is found on Mexico Street (calle México) in Buenos Aires.

Borges could bon mot as well as anyone. Here’s a favourite that is typical of his inverting the familiar (the translation as superior to the original, the minotaur as the innocent):

He firmado tantos ejemplares de mis libros que el día que me muera va a tener un gran valor uno que no lleve mi firma.

Or in English:

I’ve signed so many copies of my books that any which don’t carry my signature will gain in value the day I die.

And so now I hereby finalise my complaining about Hurley’s translation of Borges’ Borges and I. Here’s my translation of the Borges original in full, here’s part I of my complaining about Hurley’s translation while part II of my complaining is below:

—

Eighth sentence

Borges: Spinoza entendió que todas las cosas quieren perseverar en su ser; la piedra eternamente quiere ser piedra y el tigre un tigre.

Hurley: Spinoza believed that all things wish to go on being what they are — stone wishes eternally to be stone, and tiger, to be tiger.

This is quite a tricky passage to translate because it semi-quotes Spinoza.  In the original Latin, the quote Borges referred to is:

PROPOSITIO VI. Unaquaeque res, quantum in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur.

In English, the translation, at least in this Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy article on Spinoza, is:

IIIP6: Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in being.

In Spanish, the translation, at least in this Miguel de Unamuno essay, is:

Cada cosa, en cuanto es en sí, se esfuerza por perseverar en su ser

Given all that, it’s clear that Hurley’s all things wish to go on being what they are is just too flimsy, too much lacking in gravitas and too far removed from what Borges is saying to be in any way decent a translation.

The translation of entendió as believed is also a mystery: clearly Borges agrees with the sentiment, and understood or knew would have been much more appropriate and direct a translation from the Spanish original, as well as providing a subtle indication that the views of the piece’s author are aligned with Spinoza’s.

The singular stone and tiger without an article is also non-standard English for what is standard Spanish.

Then there’s the howler with stone wishes eternally to be stone. In the original, the stone is not wishing eternally, rather the stone is wishing to be eternally. The adverb applies to the being, not the wishing!

My attempt: Spinoza understood that all things strive to persevere being; the stone wishes to be eternally a stone and the tiger a tiger.

I introduced a paragraph break here because I felt there was enough of a break in the story to warrant one in English even if this is not the case in Spanish, which generally has fewer paragraphs in any given piece of text.

All things strive to persevere being is what I came up with to do justice to Spinoza, the various translations of Spinoza in Spanish and English, Borges, the philosophy, Borges’ Spanish original and the natural flow of English; but one could start a thousand arguments as to how this one phrase should be translated. Persevere in being is perhaps closer to Spinoza if not natural or particularly clear in English, so in the end I went for the simpler persevere being, which is further from Spinoza but closer to standard English.

—

Eleventh sentence

Borges: Así mi vida es una fuga y todo lo pierdo y todo es del olvido, o del otro.

Hurley: So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away — and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.

This is especially bad. Hurley here decided that he was the author, not Borges. This is a short, simple, effective and rhythmic line that Hurley turns into a dog’s breakfast.

I start off pedantically: I feel I need to point out that así is not so here. Así is more demonstrative, more like an in this way and a clarification of what has been said before rather than a conclusion based on what has been said before, which is what the so implies.

The translation of the word fuga is the primary cause of the translation’s mess. Fuga in Spanish is both a flight, as in a running away, and a fugue. Here, though, it takes the sense of a flight and is most definitely not a fugue. In the previous sentence, it states explicitly that Borges is involved in the process of moving on or running away:

Hace años yo traté de librarme de él y pasé de las mitologías del arrabal a los juegos con el tiempo y con lo infinito, pero esos juegos son de Borges ahora y tendré que idear otras cosas.

Years ago I tried to free myself from him by moving on from the mythologies of the slums to games with time and infinity, but those games are now Borges’ and I will have to conceive of other things.  (my translation)

The mistake is remarkable, although fugue perhaps explains why he thought the relationship between this sentence and the previous one required so as a translation of así rather than thus or in this way. Regrettably, though, Hurley then makes the further mistake of assuming that this fugue business requires further explication, so instead of just translating mi vida es una fuga as my life is a fugue, he inserts my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away. How did that get past the editors?

Everything winds up being lost to me is again Hurley inserting himself into the translation. The original, todo lo pierdo, is a simple phrase that should have been translated equally simply as something akin to I lose everything.

More unnecessary extrapolation: into the hands of the other man for del otro. Del otro directly translated is the other’s. Anything much longer than that is superfluous. (Not to mention my other bugbear: Hurley’s continual reference to man even though Borges is not referring to another embodied person.)

My attempt: Thus my life is a running away and I lose everything and everything is turned over to oblivion, or to the other.

—

Twelfth (the last) sentence

Borges: No sé cuál de los dos escribe esta página.

Hurley: I am not sure which of us it is that’s writing this page.

No sé is just I do not know, not I am not sure.

Which of us it is that’s is a clunky version cuál de los dos, and the contraction is just not Borges. Furthermore, Borges does not use which of us but rather which of the two, which implies there are many versions of Borges beyond the two that are described in the piece. At the very least, which of the two implies a third Borges, a further fracture of the standard singular I, which is completely lost in Hurley’s translation.

And page for página is the correct direct translation, but I consider it unnatural to say I wrote a page.

My attempt: I do not know which of the two is writing this piece.