Читать книгу Georgie and Elsa: Jorge Luis Borges and His Wife: The Untold Story - Литагент HarperCollins USD, F. M. L. Thompson - Страница 15

I wanted to try an experiment to see if the way Borges and I were going about our poetry translations could also be applied to his prose. I wrote out a rough draft of one of his stories, ‘The Other Death’, then sat down with him and went over it. I read him half a line of the Spanish followed by half a line of my English version. At once we saw the plan worked.

I confess that this involved way of making our translations – both the poetry and the prose – proved the most inefficient and time-consuming possible. But our interest – whatever it took – was in giving our work a painstaking linguistic accuracy that we found absent from most earlier translations of Borges’s stories. We also wished to endow our English versions with the true colour of Borges’s voice.