It shouldn´t, on my behalf, make a translation but in the languages in which we have lived in. I mean, it´s not enough to know them. Essential is to have been or being in them. Those languages in which we have happened, those in which time bring us its bliss and sorrows, and in which expressing ourselves was vitally crucial, are those, along with our literary calling, the ones that find us better prepared to face a translation. I did occur in Portuguese, if a may say it that way, in critical years of my life. I stop, in some way, following and feeling it as a foreign language. Who can open mind to the secret of a language, catch and get the spirit of what is said but also the cadency of what is written, and is this well preserved breath that makes an unmistakable version. By other side, it is easy to discard it when it´s chosen the literal way. Way that is revealed dead when, what is looked for, is the access to the personal accent of the writer. The best approximation to a translated text demands imagination, aptitude for alternative ways and detours, as well as to know how to use analogies or the implicit content, as far as it does not affect the purpose neither the tone of the author. I´m sure of it, same for the prose and verse, because the prose, when it really is, does not go back from poetry, nor in success neither in requirements. It´s obvious that the joy of translating comes from, in a big way, from being assure of serving to the diffusion of whom, on our behalf, deserve it, encouraging the recognition. But, besides, how not to think that, proceeding that way, we left behind, the Babel curse, that force the scatter beyond recognition, of whom that must be gathered, just to force them to communicate from their differences?