I haven’t read Di Giovanni’s translations because, as you point out, there hard to get these days.

I’m not completely sure how good the translations in Labyrinths are, though. I haven’t gone through them closely, but I do distinctly remember the reference to the story of the race between the tortoise and Achilles in Lottery in Babylon, which is used to illustrate the peculiarities of infinity, was translated as the race between the tortoise and the hare!

The Labyrinths translation is beautiful for many of Borges’ best works. People read Borges now and take Hurley’s translation as definitive, or the only one. For example, this quarter (4th, 2011) Lapham’s Quarterly used a Hurley translation of The Lottery, hopefully they were unaware of better options but nevertheless it makes you call in to question their research methods. Amazon reviews of Hurley’s translation are universally excellent. Just imagine what people would say if they had the opportunity to read Kerrigan, Labyrinths or Di Giovanni in comparison! Here’s a quote from Di Giovanni about what happened:
“Behind my back, I was being ushered out of the door (if such a mixed metaphor is permissable) and at the same time was being airbrushed out of history, out of Borges’s existence. All of my volumes of his work – work to which he contributed and gave a unique voice – were deliberately allowed to go out of print. No publisher, no editor, no agent, no executor of any estate ever wrote to me to explain any of this. New translations appeared. Viking-Penguin had bought up E.P. Dutton, and unilaterally, without a single word to me, they nullified my contracts, an act which experts in the law have told me was illegal. So ruthless was Viking that they even commissioned a new edition of Borges’s poems, stealing from my edition, without permission, without payment, a considerable body of my work.”

Huck Finn and Me sounds right, but I’m not so sure Borges and Me does.

And what I liked about “cede” in English, and the reason I used that verb, is that it conveys a formal and distant transfer from one to the other, as if an inevitable legal process has taken place that is out of any one person’s explicit control. Hurley’s “turning everything over” makes it sound that Borges is actively giving everything over to the other, which is definitely not the case!

Throughout the story, Borges is alluding to larger processes that happen in which he’s but a small part. I thought “cede” was a better verb to convey that larger process that Borges is a part of and simultaneously alienated from because he has no control over it.

And I agree: “I continue ceding everything to him” sounds more natural in English than “I continue ceding to him everything”, but in the second phrase, the “everything” has been emphasised because it’s at the end. When reading the second phrase, it becomes almost “I continue ceding to him everything” and there’s a larger pause between this clause and the one that follows. It sounds more dramatic that way, has more sway, so I went with it because I thought it suited the text better.

Also, dictionary.com says falsify and magnify can both be intransitive.

Take a look:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/falsify
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/magnify

No object is necessary for either of those verbs.

And finally, English doesn’t always need the subject of a sentence to be repeated before a verb. Take, for instance, this sentence: “He walked to school, took his bag out and sat down”. Three verbs, only one explicit subject.

I’ll give you an example of how you’re sticking too closely to the text:
“Little by little, I continue ceding to him everything, even though I am aware of his perverse tendency to falsify and magnify.”

The verb “to cede” in English is much higher register than “ceder” in Spanish. I assume the reason why he chose “to turn over” is because it sounds much more natural to say that in English than to say “I ceded…” It’s like when you say “obligar” in Spanish. Yes, “obligate” in English means the same thing. But the average English speaker would not say “my parents obligated me to stay home.” We would say “my parents forced me…” It’s a matter of connotation rather than denotation.

Next, let’s continue using “cede” for argument’s sake. In English, it’s much more natural to place “everything” after “ceding” and not “him.” “I continued ceding everything to him” sounds better than “I continued ceding to him everything.”

Finally, the words “falsify” and “magnify” in English are transitive verbs. That means they have to have a direct object after them, they can’t be used by themselves with no object, because they sound incomplete. That’s probably why Hurley repeated “everything.” To simply end a sentence with “falsify” and “magnify” would cause the average English reader to go: “falsify what?” Yes, it’s implied, but English needs the repetition. The same way it needs to repeat the subject of a sentence because it’s agrammatical to not to do.

The world of literary translation is very tough. I’m a technical translation and I specialize in the legal field, which is obviously very different than something of the caliber of Borges’ work. There’s a lot of debate on the process of literary translation, so I will indeed to remain in respectful disagreement. :-)

What I just can’t see as justifiable, though, is how Hurley’s translations could be considered adequate. On that point, we will have to remain respectfully in disagreement.