I've always loved his short stories and it sounds like he was a wonderful man. I really liked the conclusion of the piece, the best is your favorite, and thinking otherwise would be...
I've always loved his short stories and it sounds like he was a wonderful man. I really liked the conclusion of the piece, the best is your favorite, and thinking otherwise would be misunderstanding Borges. What a lovely read. Thank you.
I have to say, I disagree with this kind of language mysticism. I don't have any particular personal skin in the game, so to speak, since English isn't my native language. But it hasn't been my...
Exemplary
I have to say, I disagree with this kind of language mysticism. I don't have any particular personal skin in the game, so to speak, since English isn't my native language. But it hasn't been my experience, learning English over the course of many years, that the language requires some special kind of specificity. English has an insanely large vocabulary owing to it being a global language that borrows liberally from other languages, but most people's working vocabulary is much smaller.
It's a bit too much in the realm of linguistic determinism for me to propose that something like the genre of magical realism is born out of the language itself, rather than the culture. Magic realism is associated with Latin America, not Spain. And there are many examples of works that fit the theme and techniques that originate from elsewhere. The most prominent, which Gabriel Garcia Marquez cited as a formative influence, is Kafka's Metamorphosis. Kafka wrote in German - a language stereotyped for its rigidity and lack of imagination. And sure enough, people are still debating how to translate that famous first line.
I think, rather, it's a common experience that writing in a foreign language makes us think harder about exactly what it is we want to say. Because we can't just express ourselves in the way we find most natural, that prompts us to examine our thoughts more deeply - but it can also cause us to simplify complex things, because we can't figure out how to say them in the foreign language, so it's not exactly a lifehack for writing better essays. I've often found when learning foreign languages that they make odd distinctions that my language does not - but also that they fail to make distinctions that mine does. They're both more and less precise. Russian, for instance, makes a distinction between one-way and multi-directional movement: different verbs. And yet it fails to make a grammatical distinction between definite and indefinite. It's (to a foreigner) absurdly precise in some ways and absurdly imprecise in others.
It wasn't intended as a personal insult. You could respond to the substance of the comment, which wasn't bound up in the choice of one word, or leave it be.
It wasn't intended as a personal insult. You could respond to the substance of the comment, which wasn't bound up in the choice of one word, or leave it be.
I've always loved his short stories and it sounds like he was a wonderful man. I really liked the conclusion of the piece, the best is your favorite, and thinking otherwise would be misunderstanding Borges. What a lovely read. Thank you.
An informative and entertaining read, from the year 2018 by Medium, about translation efforts on Borges' writing.
I have to say, I disagree with this kind of language mysticism. I don't have any particular personal skin in the game, so to speak, since English isn't my native language. But it hasn't been my experience, learning English over the course of many years, that the language requires some special kind of specificity. English has an insanely large vocabulary owing to it being a global language that borrows liberally from other languages, but most people's working vocabulary is much smaller.
It's a bit too much in the realm of linguistic determinism for me to propose that something like the genre of magical realism is born out of the language itself, rather than the culture. Magic realism is associated with Latin America, not Spain. And there are many examples of works that fit the theme and techniques that originate from elsewhere. The most prominent, which Gabriel Garcia Marquez cited as a formative influence, is Kafka's Metamorphosis. Kafka wrote in German - a language stereotyped for its rigidity and lack of imagination. And sure enough, people are still debating how to translate that famous first line.
I think, rather, it's a common experience that writing in a foreign language makes us think harder about exactly what it is we want to say. Because we can't just express ourselves in the way we find most natural, that prompts us to examine our thoughts more deeply - but it can also cause us to simplify complex things, because we can't figure out how to say them in the foreign language, so it's not exactly a lifehack for writing better essays. I've often found when learning foreign languages that they make odd distinctions that my language does not - but also that they fail to make distinctions that mine does. They're both more and less precise. Russian, for instance, makes a distinction between one-way and multi-directional movement: different verbs. And yet it fails to make a grammatical distinction between definite and indefinite. It's (to a foreigner) absurdly precise in some ways and absurdly imprecise in others.
It wasn't intended as a personal insult. You could respond to the substance of the comment, which wasn't bound up in the choice of one word, or leave it be.