Of all the languages in the world, English seems to be the most deceptive, since it is learned with an ease that completely falsifies its real dimension. The tourist who has learned to order a coffee at the airport believes he has mastered it; but if, by chance, he tries to read a novel by Dickens, or a poem by Milton, Byron or Chaucer, he realizes in a few lines that he knows nothing about the language he has learned. And the curious thing is that, syntactically, English is always the same: the structure of the periods never complicates understanding too much. But literary English is a dungeon into which the foreigner always enters without a flashlight. The words, the infinite expressions, obscure and untranslatable, are like hauntings. It takes a lot of courage to understand it and face it as a writer.