“Writing is translating. It always will be. Even when we are using our own language. We transport what we see and what we feel (assuming that seeing and feeling, as we generally understand them, are something more than the words with which it has been relatively possible for us to express what is seen and what is felt...) into a conventional code of signs , writing, and we leave to the circumstances and accidents of communication the responsibility of conveying to the reader's intelligence, not so much the integrity of the experience that we set out to transmit (inevitably partial in relation to the reality he had been fed), but a shadow , at least, of what deep down in our minds we know to be untranslatable, for example, the pure emotion of an encounter, the wonder of a discovery, that fleeting moment of silence before the word that will remain in our memory like the trail of a dream that time will not completely erase.” J. Saramago