Life & Wisdom Quote by Jorge Luis Borges

Borges flips a pious literary assumption on its back: that translations are dutiful shadows, and originals are the sacred source. By declaring the original "unfaithful" to the translation, he stages a small coup against authorship itself. The joke lands because it’s delivered with clerical seriousness, like a librarian announcing a heresy in a whisper. It also smuggles in Borges’s lifelong obsession: texts don’t stand still; they mutate, multiply, and acquire authority through rereading.

The subtext is ruthless. Fidelity, in art, is often a moral pose masquerading as craft. Borges implies that a translation can expose possibilities the original didn’t yet know it contained. Once language crosses borders, it sheds local inevitabilities and gains new constraints; those constraints can sharpen, clarify, even improve. The "original", seen afterward, starts to look provincial or under-edited, like a first draft embarrassed by its more disciplined revision. That reversal punctures the romantic myth of the solitary genius and replaces it with a networked vision of culture: writers, translators, and readers co-author meaning across time.

Context matters: Borges worked inside libraries, wrote fake reviews of imaginary books, and delighted in the idea that copies can generate realities. Coming from a poet and master of literary labyrinths, the line isn’t just a quip about translation; it’s a thesis about how authority gets made. The "original" is not the beginning. It’s one version among others, retroactively defined by what comes after.