I love translations, and I love translations of translations, and I love translations of translations of nonsense. That makes "Upward, behind the onstreaming, it mooned" from Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius one of my favorite little lines in Borges' work.
The relevant excerpt explaining it is here -- English translation by James Irby (I think) and Spanish is of course by Borges.
There are no nouns in Tlön’s conjectural Ursprache, from which the “present” languages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word “moon,”, but there is a verb which in English would be “to moon” or “to moonate.” “The moon rose above the river” is hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, or literally: “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned.” | No hay sustantivos en la conjetural Ursprache de Tlön, de la que proceden los idiomas "actuales" y los dialectos: hay verbos impersonales, calificados por sufijos (o prefijos) monosilábicos de valor adverbial. Por ejemplo: no hay palabra que corresponda a la palabra luna, pero hay un verbo que sería en español lunecer o lunar. Surgió la luna sobre el río se dice hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö o sea en su orden: hacia arriba (upward) detrás duradero-fluir luneció. (Xul Solar traduce con brevedad: upa tras perfluyue lunó. Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.) |
You may notice some extra stuff at the end there, specifically this part in the Spanish which isn't in the English:
(Xul Solar traduce con brevedad: upa tras perfluyue lunó. Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.
This may perhaps seem, to English speakers, like a neat excising of language that would be repetitive in English. Afaiu, Borges was fluent in both English and Spanish and a bit enamored with English, so the presence of an English "translation" next to a Spanish "translation" in his original Spanish story makes sense. However, to prevent just printing "Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned" twice for both "translations", the second should probably just be removed.
But that's not really the full story of what's happening.
In the English, "to moon" and "to moonate" map roughly to "lunar" and "lunecer"-- verb-ized forms of nouns, in the infinitive form. The -ar ending of "lunar" is a simple 'verbizing' you often see in loanwords-- despite me hating Twitter, "twittear" is one of my favorites (for "to post on twitter/to tweet"). "Lunar" translates to "to moon" quite nicely, and its past tense would be "lunó".
"Lunecer" is weirder for English speakers. According to wiktionary on the -ecer suffix, when -ecer is at the end of a word, it denotes the "process of becoming" that word's meaning. For example, "Triste" (sad) becomes "entristecer" (to sadden, to make sad); "favor" (support, help) becomes "favorecer" (to give support or help). The -ate suffix technically does mean the same thing, but it's not super clear. Maybe a more understandable modern translation would be "to moonify". Its past tense would be "luneció".
In light of this, "hacia arriba detrás duradero-fluir luneció" doesn't appear to perfectly match "Upward, behind the onstreaming, it mooned", despite Irby treating them as equivalent in the text (probably because Borges seemingly provided the translation for him)-- "mooned" should be "lunó", for instance.
That's because what Borges was actually translating was "upa tras perfluyue lunó". The Spanish bit says
(Xul Solar translates it in brief as: "upward behind the onstreaming it mooned".
(Xul Solar was an Argentinian artist and, appropriately, an inventor of imaginary languages.)
That means that "hacia arriba detrás duradero-fluir luneció" is actually the long version of whatever Xul Solar (or Borges' imaginary version of him) translated hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö into. Roughly...
| hacia arriba | upa |
| detrás | tras |
| duradero-fluir | perfluyue |
| luneció | lunó |
Far be it from me to translate Borges' imaginary language better than Borges himself, but I might also have translated this brief version as "Up past the onstreaming it mooned", and the longer version (as Irby elected not to) as "Upward, behind the long-lasting-streaming, it moonified". So maybe a more preserved English translation would be as so:
For example: there is no word corresponding to the word “moon,”, but there is a verb which in English would be “to moon” or “to moonify.” “The moon rose above the river” is hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, or literally: “Upward, behind the long-lasting-streaming, it moonified". (Xul Solar translates it in brief as: "Up past the onstreaming it mooned".
Note that I'm not a fluent Spanish speaker, so feel free to correct me if you are!
