Translation as a daily, difficult practice often looks like a story of repeated failures, but we should be clear about the sort of failure we have in mind. First, it cannot be absolute or final: many words, images and modes are persuasively translated all the time. Second, even when force or connotation is lost in the passage from one language to another, something may be gained, a glimpse of new meaning, or a resonance in the very gap between idioms. And third, our standard of success cannot be the perfect transmission of all aspects of a text or speech. This would not be a translation at all but an unimaginable replica, rather like the map of an empire in a Borges story which turns out to be as big as the empire itself. Traduttore tradittore, the Italian proverb eagerly says. But the translator is not a traitor, only the orchestrator of a second, different form of life. Or not necessarily a traitor. Treason is possible, even frequent, but not all departures from the original are treasonous.

At the other end of the scale of our received ideas translation appears as a large, loose figure of speech, a synecdoche for reading itself, or for intertextuality, or even for literature. ‘In the end all literature is translation’, writes Novalis, cited by Efraín Kristal. In the end, maybe, but meanwhile there are still distinctions to be made, and although Borges adduces the idea of translation within a single language, thereby diffusing the meaning of the term considerably, he still separates what he calls ‘direct writing’ from ‘imitation’. Translation, he says, helps us to understand the ‘modest mystery’ of literature because it tackles ‘a visible text’, and different versions of that text ‘are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers’ [translated by Eliot Weinberger, in Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, New York, 1999, p. 69]. Borges literally writes of the ‘vicissitudes’ the text suffers, which suggests that translation is a form of trouble as well as a second life. Borges would not, I think, resist the idea that literature itself is a form of trouble; but he would not say it was only that.

Translation is the ‘invisible work’ of Kristal’s title, and he seeks to situate Borges’s writing between its specific and metaphorical applications, between the daily practice and the figure of speech—translation is the ‘process whereby a writer remodels one sequence of words into another’. ‘I see translation’, Kristal writes, ‘as more central to Borges’s literature than the celebrated labyrinths, mirrors, tigers, and encyclopedias that abound in his literary world’. An appealing argument, but the subject remains slippery, and this admirable book develops a curious and instructive stutter in its opening pages, defining its ‘purpose’ in four different ways. ‘The purpose of this book is to demonstrate that translation . . . is central to Borges’s reflections on writing and to his contribution to literature’; ‘The purpose of this book is to make visible Borges’s creativity as translator’; ‘The main purpose of this book is to offer an account of the role translation played in Borges’s creative process’; ‘My purpose is to underscore the significance of translation in Borges’s œuvre’.

All of these purposes are accomplished to varying degrees, and Kristal’s hesitation is understandable, since he has at least three distinct avatars of Borges on his hands: the Borges who thought and wrote about translation; the Borges who translated; and—most interesting and most elusive—the Borges who folded ideas about translation into almost all of his fiction. Kristal devotes separate sections to each of these three figures, and argues, in an afterword, that the complexities of translation should displace those of philosophy in the critical account of the energy driving his work—we must understand Borges’s deep games with philosophy but not mistake him for a philosopher; nor, on the other hand, do we have to accept all his ironies as ultimately sceptical. The role of translation offers Kristal a bridge between the two positions: Borges thinks in versions to avoid any commitment either to first causes or their absence.

The first named purpose (to discuss the centrality of translation in Borges’s work) is the clearest and most fully achieved; the last (regarding its significance to his œuvre) looks like a rephrasing of the first, but invites us to wonder where the œuvre begins and ends. The second purpose is also accomplished, though the result is more disappointing: Borges translated important and interesting writers—Woolf, Faulkner, Emerson, Carlyle, Poe, Stevenson, Kafka, Gide, among many others—into Spanish, and his first published work, printed in a Buenos Aires newspaper in 1910, was a rendering of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince’, written, according to his mother, when Borges was nine.

He ‘felt proud’, according to Kristal, ‘that his first publication was a translation’, and liked to introduce himself as a translator. But this seems to have been a mask rather than a profession; and the actual run of Borges’s work in that line appears to be tuned to the perceived needs of Argentinian culture rather than to any writerly programme. He is credited, among other things, with bringing German Expressionism ‘to the attention of the Spanish-speaking world’; he also translated from English, French, Italian, Anglo-Saxon and even Old Norse (the Prose Edda), which he learned as his eyesight faded in the 1950s. Not that ignorance of a language barred him from rendering it in Spanish: he became fascinated by Chinese literature, and translated fragments from collations of English and German versions. Some of these works were composed in the dark basement of the Municipal Library, where he escaped the ‘solid unhappiness’ of his ‘menial and dismal existence’ as a First Assistant Librarian, a job he took on shortly before his father died to lighten their dependence on his mother’s fortune.

Borges’s creativity as a translator does come across in Kristal’s account, though it seems rather slight on the whole, effectively limited to a few switches and interpolations. Kristal makes heavy weather claiming importance for these moves, and he himself finally backs down. ‘Borges’s most radical engagements with an original’, he says, ‘did not take place in his translations, even in the most daring of them’; and in another context he tells us why: