Jorge Luis Borges’s Partial Argentine Ulysses: A Foundational (Mis-)Translation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I first introduce the deconstructionist idea of the error (drawn primarily from Paul de Man) as a potentially productive category, then combine this idea with what I call Borges’s theory of mis-translation, to analyze the foundational role of (mis-)translation in Argentine literature, focusing specifically on Borges’s 1925 version of the last page of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I go on to discuss Borges’s theory of mis-translation and its importance within an Argentine as well as a transnational context. In essays such as “Las versiones homéricas” [The Homeric Versions] and “Los traductores de Las 1001 Noches” [The Translators of The 1001 Nights], Borges posits that translations are not necessarily inferior to originals, and that a translation’s merits may actually reside in its creative infidelities. After delineating Borges’s irreverent position on translation, I carefully analyze Borges’s 1925 translation of the last page of Joyce’s Ulysses, to examine how Borges uses (mis-)translation to create a partial Argentine version of Joyce’s Modernist novel, which serves, among other things, a paradoxical foundational role in Argentine and Latin American literatures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".