One who does not know how to translate
They wanted to teach me how to translate, in other words, how to do translations, yesterday and the day before on the beaches of Vitoria-Gasteiz. And I wanted to show the translators how to go back to the beginnings, to the origin of the text, to the abyss of childhood. We walked barefoot and freely deep into the stories, and each sentence prevented us from seeing the wood, from seeing what is hidden in the pillow of a badly used gerund. But the translator cannot throw in the towel in his or her work, he or she has to change the words into the love and sounds of another language, gently, not aggressively, and with ineffable patience. I had a stab at self-translation, which resulted in mouth-ache, and the translators, on the other hand, tried their hand at neighbourhood translation. The two roads led us all to Rome, but not to the Vatican. The Vatican in this license would be perfection, the blue chimera. We did not head for the Vatican, of course, and we did not need to either. What my friends made me understand is that it is possible to love or live in just the same way in another language, if what is said in the original is said correctly, or more than correctly if possible. The flowers were for me, but in the bunch there are flowers for each one of them. There you are, the reddest ones.
