Born Matilde Zagalsky, she was an Argentine translator best known by her married name, Horne. She once explained her choice of signature by saying: “I sign with the last name of my children, Martín and Virginia, because I felt I had to leave them the work—the authorship—of their mother, and also the memory of the father who was no longer there.”
Over the course of her career, she produced more than seventy translations. Among them is her renowned Spanish translation of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien for Ediciones Minotauro. She also translated numerous English language authors into Spanish, including Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stanisław Lem, and James Baldwin.
Despite such an extensive body of work, Horne spent her last years in extremely precarious conditions. She fought until the end for the copyrights to her translations—works that had generated millions in profits for the publishing house.
Are you familiar with her translations?
