The Aleph is one of the more celebrated among Borges' fictions; and the translation of the story by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, which was prepared in collaboration with the author himself, has every claim to being regarded as the approved version in English. But set beside the Spanish of the original the translation displays curious discrepancies.  At the very beginning, for instance, one finds  “las carteleras de fierro de la Plaza Constitucion habían renovado no sé que aviso de cigarrillos rubios“  rendered as   “the sidewalk billboards around Constitution Plaza were advertising some new brand or other of American cigarettes” ― while  “the iron hoardings of the Plaza Constitucion had renewed I do not know what advertisement for blonde cigarettes”  is the literal transcription  ―  such as a machine might produce, at least, using a standard grammar and any dictionary in common use when the translation was being done.

The word “rubios” is commonly used for the ‘fairness’ of blonde hair; and is an extravagant epithet for a cigarette. The narrator sees his hoardings in 1929; and American cigarettes may have been luxuries in the Buenos Aires of the time, advertised in ways that make “rubios” somehow apt. But the word makes of the narrator someone far from plain in his speech: which is a considerable circumstance, surely, considering his antagonist in the story: and it is precisely the speaking presence the narrator possesses in the original, as its protagonist, that the redactions of di Giovanni substantially recast.

This  ‘speaking presence’  is not a  ‘character’  in the ordinary sense, whose  ‘psychology’  will be displayed through what befalls him; and there would have been very good and very many reasons to recast the protagonist as the approved version does, a quarter of a century or so after the original appeared, for contemporary American and English readers. The translation offered here attempts, on the other hand, to recover the speaking presence the narrator would have been for the first readers of the story; and attempts, as well, all the extravagance of his antagonist's speech, risibly pitched as that almost always is. Here is an instructive example:  “todo espíritu sensible a los desenfadados envites de la facecia”. Di Giovanni has rendered this with  “all minds sensitive to the pleasures of sheer fun” ;  a more direct transcription would be  “each spirit sensitive to the unabashed sallies of facetiousness”.  The word  “facecia”  would have sounded precious to the first readers of The Aleph;  and, as such, entirely to be expected from a poet manque whose name contracts  “Dante Alighieri”  to its first and last three letters. But di Giovanni may not have expected his intended readers to keep that circumstance always before them. (And it seems pertinent, now, to note that he substitutes  “age of fifty”  for  “forty years”  in rendering   “Ya cumplido los cuarenta años, todo cambio es un símbolo detestable del pasaje del tiempo”  with  “After the age of fifty, all change becomes a hateful symbol for the passing of time”.)