Between the Art of Cartography and Translation in Babel?s Library: a view on cultural and geographical boundaries, from the fiction of J. L. Borges

GERALDINE ROGERS

Filadelfia

Congreso; The 21st Annual SHARP Conference, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing; 2013

University of Pennsylvania

Geraldine Rogers (SHARP Regional Liaison, Argentina) - ABSTRACT: Our thinking about the global book history scholarship might be helped by bringing forward certain ideas by J. L. Borges´s now famous "El rigor de la ciencia" ("On the Exactitude in Science"), Borges refers to a cartography where the map is coextensive with the Empire. In "La busca de Averroes" ("Averroes´s Search"), an Andalusian Muslim polymath, despite enormous erudition and mastery of Aristotelian philosophy, fails to understand the meaning of "tragedy" and "comedy" in the Greek text he translates: an impossible task for the culturally-enclosed Averroe, since theatre does not exist in his world. Beginning with these suggestive fictions of geographical and cultural boundaries, which address valuable (or excessive) ambitions of knowledge, this paper points to items in Borges?s literary work, which may help sharpen the panel?s focus. Such items include projects on the edge of cultures (perhaps SHARP-like) that link "center" to "periphery". They deal with globalization but, at the same time, with divides and with the disparities of our contemporary world. Sometimes, they assume language hierarchies (such as that of the English language in the field of global research); sometimes, they face cultural differences with laudable efforts to produce translations, which mostly imply the wonderful possibility of communication but, quite often, blindness or misunderstanding as well. Beginning with this Argentinean fiction, but thinking about SHARP, this paper will ask ? if we want to be ambitious but successful cartographers and translators of global book history? which overlooked Borgesian aspects to our project should we take into account?