involved with translations. To put Kundera’s views in perspective, let me show some ways other authors who care view the translation of their writing. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges was as powerful and insistent an author as Milan Kundera. But he also did a good bit of translation. Here’s Ben Belitt on Borges’ ideas about being translated into his grandmother tongue, English: “If Borges had had his way— and he generally did—all polysyllables would have been replaced [in English translation] by monosyllables . . . People concerned about the legitimacy of the literal might well be scandalized by his mania for dehispanization. ‘Simplify me. Modify me. Make me stark. My language often embarrasses me. It’s too youthful, too Latinate. . . . I want the power of Cynewulf, Beowulf, Bede. Make me macho and gaucho and skinny.’”*
Borges was the opposite of Kundera: he insisted on having things his way, but his way was not to respect all of his quirks, but rather to respect the quirks of the English language, a language he loved as much, or more, than Spanish. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who translated a good deal himself, often from English as well, went a step further in talking to his translator Alastair Reid: “Once, in Paris, while I was explaining some liberty I had taken, [Neruda] stopped me and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Alastair, don’t just translate my poems. I want you to improve them.’”*
Pablo Neruda wrote about why he felt this way: “English and French . . . do not correspond to Spanish—neither in vocalization, nor in the placement, color, or weight of the words. This means that the equilibrium of a Spanish poem . . . can find no equivalent in French or English. It’s not a question of interpretive equivalents. No, the sense may be correct; indeed the accuracy of the translation itself, of the meaning, may be what destroys the poem.”*
Since Ben Belitt is not only a translator of Borges and Pablo Neruda, but also a poet whose work has been translated, he can see the other side of the equation: “It is very enlightening for translators to be translated in kind . . . There’s nothing more depressing than an over-awed literalist at work on your own poetry. Whenever my verse is translated by others, I leave a long, loose rein, and urge translators to follow some powerful lead of their own . . . to find a brio that guarantees a continuum for them as well as for me. . . .
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