[Carl Copeland]

Hi, Glenn. This is a tough one for me to critique, but I looked at the articles and the other translations and have a few tentative thoughts:

I wonder if you aren’t being too literal with the second sentence:

… de Borges tengo noticias por el correo y veo su nombre en una terna de profesores o en un diccionario bibliográfico.

• “I get news reports about Borges from the mail” gives me the idea that he reads about himself in newspapers delivered by mail. Maybe that’s the case, but other translators have given it a more general sense: “news of Borges reaches me by mail” (Hurley), “I know of Borges from the mail” (Irby), “I hear about Borges in letters” (Krabbenhoft) and DeRobertis’s awkward “of Borges I get news over the mail.”

• Google Translate is unhelpful with “terna,” but most translators have rendered it simply as “list.” A “short list” makes me wonder what they’re shortlisted for.

• For some reason all translators have rendered “diccionario bibliográfico” as “biographical dictionary.” Could they know something I don’t?

As a native speaker, DeRobertis hears the Spanish as we never will, but I find her article quirky and nitpicky and her translation useful, at best, as a crib. Curious that she has “I allow myself to be lived.” Is that a possible understanding of “yo me dejo vivir”? Why wouldn’t she mention such an important possibility in her article?

Hurley translates “magnificar” as “magnifying,” and I suspect it’s one of those words whose oddness he feels should be respected in translation. (Note that you’ve already used “exaggeration.”)

DeRobertis makes a big deal about how others have mistranslated the second to last sentence:

Así mi vida es una fuga y todo lo pierdo y todo es de olvido, o del otro.

But is “todo lo pierdo” a relative clause, as she translates it (“everything I lose belongs to oblivion”), or does it mean “I lose everything,” as Irby and others have it? Your “everything I’m losing” also sounds like a relative clause and a complement of “is”: my life is 1) an escaping and 2) everything that I am losing.

That’s all for now. I hope Julie will check in; she’s done some beautiful translations from the Spanish.