[narag]

Agree with easier, disagree with pleasant.

First time I read the whole book, it was an annotated edition with lots of footnotes, explaining all the differences. I was hating the experience. Solution? I stopped reading the footnotes.

After some time, I got much more engaged in the story and got the occasional arcaism right from the context.

The "bad translation" must have been Borges identifying old Spanish as a broken, not idiomatic modern Spanish.