The first letter is dated 3 February 1997 and runs to nine handwritten pages. It opens with a complaint about a comma.
Esteban Maldera, then a thirty-one-year-old architect in Rosario, Argentina, had written to Geertruida van Os, a fifty-eight-year-old civil servant in Utrecht, because he had read her unpublished English translation of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius in a small Dutch journal called Raster. He thought she had mistranslated the first sentence. He wanted to say so politely.
She wrote back inside two weeks. She agreed about the comma. She disagreed about three other things and listed them in a numbered column down the left margin of her reply.
They wrote to each other for twenty-seven years. Neither of them ever published a Borges translation in book form. Neither of them ever met. The last letter, from van Os, is dated 11 November 2024, two months before her death.
The full correspondence runs to roughly 1,840 pages, held now at the Borges Project archive at the University of Regina. Maldera donated his half in 2023, after he was diagnosed with the disease that killed him in May 2025. Van Os's estate sent the matching half across the Atlantic the following spring.
What is unusual about the archive is not the volume but the discipline of it. The two correspondents almost never wrote about themselves. There are no photographs of children, no condolences on a parent's death until the third decade, no weather complaints. There are drafts, and arguments about drafts, and very occasionally a postscript about a piece of music.
Maldera's English was good but not native. Van Os's Spanish was good but not native. Borges sat between them, a third language, the language they were both reaching for.
Their working method was austere. One of them would type out a Spanish paragraph, then an English paragraph beneath it, then number every word in both. They would argue about word fourteen.
A representative exchange, from April 2003, runs across four letters and concerns a single phrase from El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan. The phrase is tiempo paralelo. Van Os had rendered it concurrent time. Maldera proposed time alongside itself. They settled, after several months, on time held parallel.
None of these translations were ever published.
The literary scholar Imelda Cawthorn, who is preparing a critical edition of the correspondence, has argued that the archive is best read not as translation studies but as a slow, two-handed close reading. The pair were not, in the end, trying to make a book. They were trying to read Borges with sufficient care.
Cawthorn points out that there are passages in the letters where one of them will spend three pages on a semicolon. There are also long silences, sometimes six months at a time, during which neither writes. The silences, she suggests, are part of the practice.
Maldera was the more impatient of the two. He sent more letters. He wrote longer ones. He occasionally lost his temper, in a courteous Spanish that has resisted easy translation into English even now. Van Os almost never lost hers. When she disagreed, she copied out the disputed phrase and underlined the contested word.
Their correspondence pre-dates email by only a year or two on the Argentine end, and they did try email briefly in 1999. Van Os abandoned it after six months. The letters resumed on paper. She wrote, in a note Maldera quoted back to her often, that she could not think at a screen.
There are odd documents in the archive. A receipt from a Utrecht stationer for a particular weight of paper that van Os had begun to use in 2004 and that Maldera then began to order from a supplier in Buenos Aires. A photograph of a window in Rosario that Maldera sent without explanation in 2011, and that van Os returned to him three years later with a single sentence about its light.
It is tempting to romanticize this. The correspondence resists romance.
When van Os's mother died in 2002, she mentioned it in one sentence and went on to the next paragraph of Funes el memorioso. When Maldera's marriage ended in 2009, he wrote a five-line note acknowledging that his handwriting might be worse than usual for some months. It was. He resumed within the year.
The Regina archive is currently open to scholars by appointment. A reading-room edition of selected letters, edited by Cawthorn, is scheduled for autumn 2026 from a small press in Edmonton. It will run to about 380 pages, which is roughly a fifth of the correspondence.
What it will not contain, because it cannot, is the rhythm of the thing. Twenty-seven years of paragraphs argued about by two people who never met, in a language neither of them wrote in fluently, for no audience at all.
There is something useful in that, for the rest of us, who write mostly for an audience and mostly faster than we should.