The Literal and the Literary

Abstract

says?and Borges as you know is always right.Their mysterious kinship is founded upon an infinity of interand intralingual move ments and mutations: of letter into spirit (and vice versa!) and let ter into letter; of the literal into the figurative; ultimately, of the lit eral into the literary.These transmutations break the bonds of words and things and, sometimes, the bounds of reason.In a mono lingual universe, i.e., one that doesn't know or will not acknowl edge the ubiquity of translation, those bonds are sacred.Violating and vitalizing the continuity of spirit, translation is sacer: at once unholy (or accursed) and?perhaps messianically?holy.1 Despite recent inroads of theory into translation, translators are by nature diehard empiricists, so our work starts with what Fritz Senn calls an "inductive scrutiny" of words?what they mean, what they are made of, and what in turn they make, as they combine with their neighbors into syntactical units larger than the word, or send shoots of association, forming intricate networks.The two key words in my title are almost identical in shape, though seldom in meaning.