There’s more than one reason why learning multiple languages expands our ability to communicate what we think we need to say, and to understand what is communicated to us.

If I say something in my mother tongue and then say it in another language, It might lose weight; it may come out “wrong” as easily as it could elevate the entirity of the sentence.

Most of the time, when going from a Germanic to a Romance language, the way we build words shifts from a compounded word to a prepositional phrase—which is, quite literally, dismantling one word into several, and therefore into several concepts: more words to express “one thing.” This might seem obvious to some and interesting to others, but for me it has always carried a feeling: that there is almost always a better way to express something with more accuracy and precision—or, when you need to, to be vague and ambiguous. To shape an amorphous feeling into a poem, the intangible anger of an injustice into a letter, or the greatest of sorrows into a wonderful song.

In any case, I do these translations of texts that don’t have one, or when I don’t like the ones I’ve found—sometimes as a way to study them, and most of the time for my own amusement. It could very well be translating an essay from English into Portuguese for a friend of mine, or an excerpt from a book about Christianity written by an atheist historian, which I send to my mother so we can have a conversation about it later—so that someone I think might benefit from reading it can access it.

I’ll start sharing these here. This one is from Italian to English: a wonderful column by Umberto Eco—one that every internet friend of mine should read once in a while.

Why Books Prolong Life

Not long ago I amused myself by imagining those ancestors of ours who spoke about their slaves trained to draw cuneiform characters as if they were modern computers. I was amused—but I wasn’t joking. When today we read articles worried about the future of human intelligence in the face of new machines that are getting ready to replace our memory, we sense a family resemblance. Anyone who understands the subject a little soon recognizes the passage from Plato’s Phaedrus, quoted countless times, in which the Pharaoh anxiously asks the god Thoth, inventor of writing, whether this diabolical device will not make man incapable of remembering and, therefore, of thinking.

The same reaction of terror must have been felt by whoever first saw a wheel. He must have thought we would forget how to walk. Perhaps the men of that time were more gifted than we are at running marathons across deserts and steppes, but they died earlier—and today they would be discharged at the first military district. By this I do not mean that, for that reason, we should stop worrying about anything and that we will have a fine, healthy humanity accustomed to having its snack on the grass in Chernobyl; if anything, writing has made us more skillful at understanding when we ought to stop—and whoever does not know how to stop is illiterate, even if he rides on four wheels.

The uneasiness produced by new ways of capturing memory has always existed.

Faced with books printed on poor paper—which gave the impression they would not last more than five or six hundred years—and with the idea that such books could already be in everyone’s hands, like Luther’s Bible, the first buyers spent a fortune having the initials illuminated by hand so that, thanks to that, they could feel they still possessed parchment manuscripts. Today those illuminated incunabula cost an arm and a leg, but the truth is that printed books no longer needed to be illuminated. What have we gained? What has humanity gained from the invention of writing, of the printing press, of electronic memory?

On one occasion, Valentino Bompiani circulated a phrase: “A man who reads is worth two.” Said by a publisher, it could be understood merely as a happy slogan, but I think it means that writing (language in general) prolongs life. From the time our species began to utter its first meaningful sounds, families and tribes needed the old. Perhaps at first they were of no use and were cast aside once they were no longer effective at hunting. But with language, the old became the memory of the species: they sat in the cave, around the fire, and told what had happened (or what was said to have happened—this is the function of myths) before the young had been born. Before this social memory began to be cultivated, man was born without experience, had no time to forge it, and died. Afterwards, a twenty-year-old was as if he had lived five thousand years. Events that occurred before he was born, and what the elders had learned, became part of his memory.

Today books are our elders. We do not realize it, but our wealth compared to the illiterate person (or to the person who can read but does not) lies in the fact that he is living and will live only his own life, while we have lived very many. We remember, alongside our childhood games, Proust’s; we suffer for our love, but also for that of Pyramus and Thisbe; we absorb something of Solon’s wisdom; certain windy nights on Saint Helena have shaken us; and together with the fable our grandmother told us, we repeat the one Scheherazade told.

This may give someone the impression that as soon as we are born we are already unbearably old. But more decrepit is the illiterate

person (by origin or by relapse) who suffers from arteriosclerosis since childhood and does not remember (because he does not know) what happened on the Ides of March. Naturally, we might also remember lies, but reading also helps us to distinguish. Not knowing the faults of others, the illiterate person does not even know his own rights.

A book is life insurance, a small anticipation of immortality—backward (alas!) rather than forward. But you can’t have everything instantly.

(This translation was produced without the use of AI.)

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There are moments when writing becomes an impossible burden, when attempting to distill a torrent of thoughts onto paper feels suffocating.

This, I hope, is something some of us can recognize. It is not merely the difficulty of choosing the right words, but the overwhelming sensation of wrestling with an entire stream of consciousness—too vast, too chaotic to be confined by ink and page, keyboard and the monotonous concept of the #hashtag.

But the moment one begins to think, truly think—which is a rarer occurrence than we like to admit—one finds that it is not the passive act of shutting one’s eyes and letting the mind wander.

No, real thinking is something else entirely. It is an act of focus, a deliberate gathering of scattered thoughts, a battle against distraction. One must resist the temptation of easy indulgences, the hollow accolades, and sharpen the mind like a blade—to anyone that has ever had one, is to do it permanently while being used—and settle, deliberately, on a single idea worth exploring, unraveling, perhaps even dissecting from every conceivable vantage point. If, that is, one has the stomach for such writing.

And when I speak of thinking, I do not mean the mind alone. No, thought is not confined to the gray labyrinth of the brain—it pulses through every nerve, every cell, through the ceaselessly vigilant sentinels of our senses, absorbing the world even when we are unaware of it. The noise of existence is relentless, inescapable. It seeps into us in countless forms, whether we acknowledge it or not.

About these distractions—sometimes forced upon us, flung in our faces, wrapped in the deceptive guise of a ‘desired affliction’ (Aflicción Deseada), the insidious pull of a digital ad, cunningly crafted to infiltrate our desires. Other times, they simply are—the sunset light piercing through a cloud, a pelican diving and swallowing a fish whole or my grandmother and the quiet persistence with which she tended her roses.

Of course, the latter are, in my humble opinion, delights of their own. But right now, we are speaking of the precise moment when one wishes to sit and write.

And so, the question remains: what is to be done with this? If the world invades us whether we welcome it or not, if our senses absorb every whisper of existence, if thought itself is a force we can neither tame nor silence—what then?

To grasp this inevitability is, at first, unsettling—terrifying even. And yet, in that very terror, there lies a strange and unexpected solace and opportunity.

Perhaps this is why we write. Not to capture the stream, for that is impossible, but to reach into it, to extract something, however small, however fragile, and set it trembling upon the page. A futile act, maybe. But then again, what other choice do we have?

Time will pass you by anyway.

Make no mistake, I have always believed that not everything must be shared. Not everything should be spoken, nor heard. Words, once released, take on lives of their own, as has been made abundantly clear to all of us. They wander beyond us, unmoored from our intent. And if we must write, if we must commit a thought to the permanence of language, let it be only for the things we love, for the virtues that bind us, for what is most intimate to our nature.

Everything else—the excess, the noise—should remain where it belongs: elsewhere.

For not all things are meant for the world. Some belong only to the sacred silence between kindred spirits.

To camp is to come and leave.

To prepare, to count the days,

to believe in return.

To hold inside you the promise of departure.

To sleep knowing the world holds firm outside your walls.

A safe adventure.

But I could never,

not after her.

I prefer shipwreck.

I prefer the chaos we choose over the order we inherit.

Not the kind given as punishment,

not the accident,

not the storm.

No—mine is a shipwreck of will.

A decision made in silence.

What need have I for sustenance?

What is hunger, now?

I could survive on her gaze alone.

And die just as easily from its absence.

There is no horizon for me to watch.

No rescue worth wanting.

I do not want saving.

The shore calls,

it always calls—

with its safety, its salvation, its dry and quiet hope.

I turn away.

I go deeper.

Let me vanish there.

Let me sink.

Let me be lost,

or worse—let me be found exactly where I meant to disappear.

I do not count the days.

I do not wait for tomorrow.

There is only the wreck.

The wreck, and the quiet.

I do not have everything.

But everything has her.

My dearest,

I beg of you, have a creative outlet—not for glory, not for vanity, but to save yourself. Build something with your hands or shape something with your words. Let your mind wander beyond the demands of the day, beyond the obligations and the weight of expectation.

Without creation, the spirit festers. Those without expression find their own hearts turning against themselves, devoured by silence, reduced to mere storage.

Your hand will tremble. Your mind will falter. The weight of the world will press down upon you and demand that you cease this foolishness.

But I implore you—do not yield.

Write, paint, compose—bring into existence what, without you, would remain forever unwritten, unseen, unsung. If we do not create, we become only consumption. Create not for recognition, not for praise, but for the simple, irreplaceable feeling of witnessing something come to life that did not exist before you.

Let your sorrow, your feats, your love, and your fear be transformed into something beyond you—something that, if only for a moment, justifies your existence, if only to yourself.

Let your heart spill onto pages and buildings, into threads and needles—embellish this life as you have mine.

Create with abandon. Create without permission. Let your hands move before your mind has a chance to second-guess. Do it in the quiet hours, when no one is watching, when the world is still and only your thoughts remain.

I do not ask for masterpieces or the cruel illusion of perfection—I ask only for movement and intention. For you to find joy in the process of replicating yourself, to see your heart and mind at war and reconcile, I only wish to sit and watch.

Always eager to participate.

So, my dearest, find the time—steal it if you must. Let creation be your quiet rebellion against the fleeting nature of things. To create is to leave small echoes of yourself in the world, to multiply yourself in subtle, indelible ways. I cannot bear to let you vanish into the passing days. So shape something in your image, even if only in fragments, and let it bear witness that you were here.