About the Author

Efrain Kristal is professor of Spanish and comparative literature at UCLA and author of Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, also published by Vanderbilt University Press.

Reviews

It is no surprise ... that translation figures large in Borges' poetics, and Kristal does an extraordinary job of tracing this trope throughout the blind writer�s long career.
--Virginia Quarterly Review

Invisible Work: Borges and Translation reveals that behind every tale by Borges there pulses a generative translation. Efrain Kristal has brought to light the extent to which Borges's methods as translator--who habitually changes the titles, excises passages, transforms characters, and develops potentialities--intervene in the conception and execution of his fictions. Borges's strategies as translator and creative writer are one and the same.
--Saul Yurkievich

A must-read for all students, scholars, and hedonic readers of the Argentine fabulist, as well as a groundbreaking expansion of the fields of translation studies and comparative literature.
--Suzanne Jill Levine

While Borges's writings have already generated mountains of commentary, his work as a translator has received little more than a passing nod. Efrain Kristal's close and detailed study of Borges's translations makes dramatically clear how they embody his whole view of writing--that all writing is a form of rewriting, that writers are essentially recreators. His translations are much more than linguistic renderings of an original--they are transformations--and Kristal's scrupulous reading of them shows them to be a fundamental part of the Borges canon. As translator, Borges more than fulfills Octavio Paz's claim: 'Everything we do is translation, and all translations are in a way creations.'
--Alastair Reid