Translating Portuguese into English is a task of destroying syntactic resources. The reverse operation, almost always an expressive annihilation. English into Portuguese is often terrible, and the opposite is more often than not dull. I began these notes willing to translate into English whatever I wrote: it did not take long for me to give up the enterprise and deliberate, on the contrary, not to translate anything, except these notes. We are now two years and tens of thousands of words translated, when this time would be better spent writing more lines in Portuguese. I wonder how much frustration and waste of time I would have faced had I followed the initial plan and translated the other books I published… Glory to God! Hence the doubt: do I avoid this veiled obligation or do I carry to the end what I have started?
Portuguese and English
