It is, however, not the same book. It cannot be. No translation is; no translation approaches that ideal — if you can call it that — of Borges’ fictional translator, who is so concerned with preserving every stylistic nuance and every shade of meaning of Cervantes’ masterpiece Don Quixote, that he ends up ‘translating’ it from Spanish… into Spanish.
Translations are meant to entertain their readers — and that is all, or nearly all, that can be expected of them. They stand or fall on their own strengths, and must be judged as satisfactory, or unsatisfactory, on their own merits alone. In the best possible case, the ‘ideal’ translation will so delight its reader as to motivate him or her to see ‘what’s behind it,’ and learn Czech (in this particular case) so as to read Jan Balabán in his na
