Borges and Venuti situation many concerns of translation with in literary categories.

Notions of cano as part of national identity and therefore an underying, perhaps

unconscious repertoire of literary production is essential for Venuti. This necessary
dimension of a translators identity foregrounds translation as a kind of literary
prodcution, and thus gestures to familiarize a text by, for instance, Americanizing
the Italian ricotta into cream cheese serves as a nationalizing tendency, as it
reinforces familiar Americanisms while blurring a forgein texts cultural and
linguistic particularities.
Borges similarly expounds on the way the translation of 1001 Nights is
marked by similar elisions, alterations, and omissions which seem more inevitable
for Borges than politically prblematic as they appear in Venutis framing. Borges
emphasizes the moralizing tendencies in some of the translations In any case, he
explains these tendencies which Venuti deems unconscious as part of the same
literary structure of a culture, for a variety of a texts translation versions can only
arise after a literature (86).
This is definitely a curious formulation, for while this emphasizes the
literaryness of a translation that is fraught with interests over an imagined
national readership, and therefore a readership familiar with a certain lexicon and
set of cultural values, Venuti also reminds us that there are limits to a translations
reception, for the arbiters of a national culture, even the theorists who articulate

the very idea of a nation, may well belong to an elite minority (178). Venuti adds
that translations must be acepted by a mass audience to be effective in
constructing national languages, cultures, identities (178).
This begs several important questions. For instance, to what extent can
translation be posited as a kind of ltierature? Is it even worthwhile to ask this
question in this broad way? Venuti highlights the disparate reasons motivating why
a certain translation might be called for or needed, and while these are framed
through the nationalist implications he is exploring in his argument, some of these
imply aesthetic and other less situated reasons as well. For instance, these reasons
for choosing a foreign text for translation can include a percieved similarity of social
situation between the original and the contemporary society, or because a foreign
theme or formal style is seen as analogous to that of the translating culture (180).
At the same time, Venuti offers that the irreducible foreignness of these materials
may actually result in an intensification of national desire (180). Surely, his
situating of these seemingly disparate forces desire, aesthetics, and, perhaps, the
commercialization of culture are importantly interwoven with his examination of
nationalism as both essential yet unconscious. At the same time, one wonders if
these categories are always inevitably mobilized towards nationalism. In other
words, if we remember that an interpretation of anyones statements or actions is
always a limited kind of access to an ultimately impermeable interiority, to what

extent is the translational or otherwise literary life a figure acessible as

unconscious?
In this sense, Borges seems relatively forgiving while not hesitating to point
out his disappointment with renderings that efface the originals cultural sharpness.
His opinion over the translations of Mardus, for instance, cause Borges both
admiration even while they trouble [him] (82). Mardruss rendition is for Borges
the most readable, and yet it is as if Mardus translated not the words but the
pictures of the book (84). Borges concludes his section on Mardrus by declaring
that his intention not to demolish that admiration [for Mardurss translation], but to
document it. To celebrate the fidelity of Mardrus is to omit the soul of Mardrus, it is
not even to allude to Mardrus. His infidelity, his happy, creative infidelity, is what
should matter to us (84). With respect to the translation of Gustave Weil, Borges
similarly balances a sympathetic understanding with the translations failings, for
Weil is at once always lucid, readable, mediocre, later lamenting that the
intercourse between the nights and Germany should have produced something
more (86).
Borges therefore accepts the literary, a category very much at work in the
way Venuti details, as nevertheless inevitable aspect of translational production.
With respect to which is the true man and which his idols, Borges claims that
nothing of that matters in the chaotic interplay of influence and literary

expression that translation helps highlight (86).Yet surely in these moments one
could accuse Borges of as much apolitical as much as , for it is in and through his
awareness of German literaruture that his expectation for the German translation is
based.