Literature as an Infinite Library: Interpretation and Translation

Picture a hallway lined with mirrors leading to a strange hexagonal room filled with books. Another mirrored hallway leads to a room exactly like the first, and then another and another. Every room has the same number of shelves, books, and pages, but every book is unique. Somewhere in the stacks are Pedro Páramo and the Spice Girls memoirs. Most of the books, however, look like gibberish. What is going on?

Who decides what a book means: the writer, literary scholars, or the translator? Many people participate in the experience of reading. Their choices shape our understanding, as do the experiences and assumptions we bring to a book. If two interpretations differ, how do we know which one is right?

This library comes from Jorge Luis Borges’s 1941 short story “The Library of Babel.” Borges imagines the universe as a limitless library containing every possible combination of the alphabet, periods, commas, and spaces. It contains every book that has existed or could exist, but it also contains enormous amounts of nonsense. Once the inhabitants realize that every possible book exists, they are thrilled. Somewhere in the library, they believe, there must be an eloquent solution to every personal or global problem. Perhaps one book can even predict the future or explain all the others.

That tempting idea causes chaos. Some inhabitants believe that books that appear to be gibberish should be destroyed so that the important books will be easier to find. This raises an important question: if a book has no meaning for us, is it meaningless? The narrator rejects that conclusion. No combination of characters exists that the divine library has not anticipated and that does not hide a terrible significance in one or more of its secret languages. Not understanding a text does not prove that it is meaningless.

The story may confuse, amaze, or frighten us, much as the universe itself does. It is also an example of metaliterature: writing that reflects on writing and on literature’s possibilities. Literature is not a stale, lifeless object. It is an encounter that generates possibilities, and those possibilities continue as long as words remain on a page and people continue to read them.

Borges is not the only writer to explore these possibilities. Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s 1998 novel The Savage Detectives is told through diary entries and interviews. It combines elements of a detective story and an adventure story. Young poets travel internationally in search of the elusive founder of an obscure poetry movement called visceral realism, a movement invented for the novel.

The visceral realists have almost vanished. Most of their poems were never published, and the poems that were published have largely disappeared. The movement’s founder, Cesárea Tinajero, has also disappeared; she was last seen somewhere in the Sonoran Desert. All that remains of her is a poem without words, made only of squiggles on a page. The poem is completely open to interpretation. It may cause confusion, dread, or even a sense of freedom.

We may wish that literature would simply tell us what it means. However, literature may not be limited to one meaning. Readers are still debating what Borges’s infinite library means decades after the story was written. The writer does not have the final word about the words. Readers can approach literature through different lenses, considering both the historical influences surrounding a work when it was written and the influences readers bring to it today.

The mysterious visual poem at the end of The Savage Detectives may invite readers to become detectives themselves. Bolaño died in 2003 at the age of fifty, but his work continues partly because of his English translators, Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer. Translators make it possible for people around the world to read Latin American literature. Without translation, readers who do not speak Spanish would be unable to understand these works.

Translation has played an important role in Latin America since the 1500s, when religious texts were adapted into Indigenous languages. Those translations were often intended to convert Indigenous people to Catholicism rather than to share literature. During the nineteenth century, translations of French political thinkers helped inspire Latin American independence movements. In the 1960s, translation helped introduce Latin American writers to readers around the world. Latin American authors have also worked as translators: Julio Cortázar translated Edgar Allan Poe into Spanish, and Borges translated English writers such as Walt Whitman and Virginia Woolf for Spanish-speaking readers.

Translation requires much more care than replacing words mechanically. A word can have different connotations in different languages, and a literal translation may fail. The Spanish expression “el mundo es un pañuelo,” for example, has a meaning similar to the English expression “it’s a small world,” although it literally means “the world is a handkerchief.” Translating a poem or novel that already plays with meaning and rhythm requires finding a way to convey its spirit in another language. Translation is an art.

Edith Grossman, Gabriel García Márquez’s longtime English translator, began working in the 1970s, when translation was not yet widely treated as a serious career or academic field, especially for women. She was among the first translators to demand credit on a book’s cover alongside the author. Grossman challenged the idea that translation happens magically without human intervention. She argued that translators deserve recognition and respect for their creative work. She called translators a living bridge between two realms of discourse, two realms of experience, and two groups of readers.

As interest in Latin American literature has grown, new translators have introduced English readers to writers such as Samantha Schweblin, Alejandro Zambra, and Mariana Enriquez. Some books, including Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo, are being translated again. Because the novel is opaque, translators have struggled to represent it successfully. The first English translator omitted sentences that he did not understand, while the second added embellishments that did not satisfy the Mexican-American author Valeria Luiselli. She praised the newest translation by Douglas J. Weatherford and suggested that the novel may have needed to be translated three times before entering the English-speaking literary world more broadly and permanently.

This returns us to Borges’s infinite library and its endless literary possibilities. Many untranslated Latin American works are waiting to reach new readers. Even readers who are not translators contribute to a book’s meaning. Literature is not a one-way street that ends when a writer puts words on a page. It is a communal act shaped by translators, filmmakers who reimagine stories, authors who draw inspiration from other works, and readers who bring their own perspectives. No one reads a book exactly as another person does.

Latin American literature is now deeply international. Writers from the region are read around the world and inspire new voices. The universe, Borges suggested, is our birthright. Through literature and ideas, communities continue to celebrate their cultures and change the world.