I have never written a line in English, among the hundreds of thousands that have come out of my head, that was not a translation of a thought conceived in Portuguese. Not even in an email. And to imagine the battle fought by so many writers of the last century, who voluntarily adopted a new language to create literature… A writer for whom language is limited to a vehicle of expression is inconceivable. Language is ingrained in thought itself, which is constructed through it. The logical structure of thought is based only on the syntactic structure of the language in which it is shaped; the two are inseparable, and the former cannot flourish without the latter. Words in different languages follow one another and are organized in different ways; this is evidence not of a formal difference, but of a distinction between the genius of the men who develop them. Changing it, when one is already old, seems like a shock of tremendous proportions.