It is a real shame that the average student can only learn a handful of languages in depth, some of which, in truth, he may never learn sufficiently. And then one depends on translations which, as a rule, hide qualities of the original. The most unfortunate thing is that one cannot grasp the beautiful particularities of distant languages, which would completely alter one’s understanding of their works. Sometimes, quite happily, a translation provides glimpses of such particularities; and, having grasped them, we are left with the sad feeling that, in this life, it will not be possible to get to know them better…
Tag: languages
Of All the Languages in the World…
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.
The Phonic and Syntactic Richness of Portuguese
The phonic and syntactic richness of Portuguese, more than the nature of its people or the flair of its authors, places its poetry among the most remarkable in world literature. As a vehicle for expressing the primitive impulse represented by poetry, its possibilities are so varied and its effects so unique that, even when worked on by ordinary hands, it sometimes achieves results worthy of sincere admiration.
The Countless Facilities That Are Available Today…
There is a certain irony in the fact that the countless facilities that are available today for learning every language imaginable are not enough to understand them in depth, since, after a certain level, to understand them is to understand their difficulties. In other words: the countless and valuable incentives for learning hardly allow the student to go beyond the surface of the language studied; if he wants to do so, he has to abandon them and face the difficult, using the most archaic processes, although they are proven to be essential. There is no way out: there comes a time when it is necessary to put aside the jokes and sink into the difficult originals.