Tag: languages

Reflecting superficially on the orthographic reforms that the Portuguese language has gone through, the impression is that the language has become uglier, poorer, and sometimes confusing. It is always a pity for any language when “authorities” sit down to regulate it. It is as if the work of grammarians, who progressively record the mutations that the language undergoes, has no value whatsoever. The pattern, whose evolution is the work of centuries, is suddenly broken: time is scratched, and a “right” and a “wrong” are established, with the naive hope that a living language can be tamed by conventions… The result is something that sounds unnatural. The consolation is to know that, although abounding in defects, Portuguese is strong enough to overcome these deliriums and nonsenses…

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?

I start memorizing Russian declensions and think about Buddha. My mind has always been opposed to deliberate memorization. But it is impossible to assimilate inflected languages without memorizing declinations! What to do? Buddha… Buddha certainly did not handle any of these languages, except for Pali—but when meditating, I doubt that he thought about their declinations. Although I do not know the path to nirvana, I know like no one else a path that makes nirvana impossible, that expels the being from any imaginary nirvana… Prove to me, Buddha, your superiority! Aquila, aquilam, aquilae, aquilae…

Knowing English is a duty of the modern intellectual. In the first place, because English literature is the greatest in the world—that is, it has the largest number of, and has for the longest time consistently produced, first-rate authors;—secondly, because it is the closest to a universal language—that is, the language of the most common interchange and also the language of specialized literature in most areas of knowledge;—and finally, because the English have translated everything: it is often easier to find an English translation than an original French, Italian or Spanish, to say nothing of less popular languages. Knowing English, therefore, is not only to make one’s study life easier, but an obligation since the lack of English deprives the student of much of the best that is available. From all this, the problem. The Portuguese-speaking writer, for example, the more he gorges himself on English, the more he must fight to not, under any circumstances, allow it to penetrate his writing. A language whose strength, simplicity, is also its greatest weakness: syntactically, English is limited; when translated into Portuguese, its poverty is stark. Bad translations from English are intolerable, and even originals should be read with great care, preferably interspersed with vernacular works, and the precaution should be the same as that of the chemist who puts on gloves before working.