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Los primerísimos textos de Borges, entre el español y el inglés

Abstract

This paper examines a series of well-known yet little-studied documents: the texts that Jorge Luis Borges wrote as a child, between the ages of six and ten, focusing particularly on his linguistic choices. Borges grew up in a bilingual Spanish-English environment, and his first texts ranged from one to other: a Greek mythology manual written in English -with some interpolated words in Spanish-, a drama, "Bernardo del Carpio", written in an archaizing Spanish, and a translation of "The Happy Prince" from English to Spanish. We will try to show that this translation of Wilde, the first text published by Borges in 1910, can be considered as an arrival point for the archaeological journey we trace here, and, at the same time, it is a starting point for the author's future work. The language chosen will not be English, nor a Spanish with purist intentions, it is rather a Spanish that has gone through English. Thus, Borges’ work precedent lies in the translation he made as a child.