Traduzir é um trabalho fascinante. (...)
É preciso uma imersão. Uma pessoa tem de estar quase possuída por aquelas vozes. Eu andava pela casa a recitar aqueles vozes. É uma forma de possessão. Uma pessoa tem de estar possuída pelo texto original para depois, pouco a pouco, ir construindo o que o texto pode ser noutra língua.
28 November [2007]. R. is reading Brideshead Revisited for the first time, my browning-at-the-edges Penguin that must be fifty years old.
‘Tell me,’ he says plaintively, ‘is it meant to be snobbish or am I missing the point?’
In public, in private and in her academic writing she is sceptical, wary of consensus, the kind of person who will turn any question back on itself and examine it from an unexpected angle. She is not afraid to take apart her own work: at that same conference in the early 1990s, she presented a paper that repudiated one of the scholarly articles that had helped make her name a decade earlier, an influential study of Rome’s Vestal Virgins. It was an extremely unusual thing for a scholar to do. “She doesn’t let herself off – she’s not one of those scholars who is building an unassailable monument of work to leave behind her,” Woolf said. “She is quite happy to go back to her earlier self and say, ‘Nah.’
Why does so much string-instrument teaching focus on playing with a straight, even bow? It's like teaching actors to speak in a monotone. No long note should be played without life. Our bows need constantly to change speed/pressure; they need to dance, laugh, speak – to have fun!
A melancolia assaltava-me, quando, ao entardecer, relembrava as naus em que jamais embarcaria. Não desejava que o meu sossego fosse feito de resignação. Talvez que, um dia, pudesse voltar a partir. Talvez.
Passava os dias na cama lendo, entre golinhos de conhaque, Evelyn Waugh.
1 July [2006]. Watch the commentary and round-ups (they could hardly be called highlights) after the England–Portugal match. One Shakespearean moment at the start when Cristiano Ronaldo comes up behind his Manchester team-mate Rooney and nuzzles him, saying something that seems to be kind but almost certainly isn’t as Rooney then swings round to watch him go. It’s like an impossibly beautiful Iago goading a simple lumbering Othello, an impression confirmed when, after Othello gets the red card, Ronaldo comes away with a tranquil smile.
4 July. Talking to George Fenton about the football and about Ronaldo, George saying that watching the Latin teams in particular you see how these are boys whose mothers have loved and cherished them and who have all the confidence and swank that comes from that.
Todos os lados possuem uma verdade indesmentível. Nada a fazer. Presos na sua certeza absoluta, nenhum admitirá a mentira que edificou para caminhar sem culpa, para conseguir dormir, acordar, comer, trabalhar. Para continuar. Há inocentes-inocentes e inocentes-culpados. Há tantas vítimas entre os inocentes-inocentes como entre os inocentes-culpados. Há vítimas-vítimas e vítimas-culpadas. Entre as vítimas há carrascos.Passa muito tempo até termos a voz, até termos saldado, a bem ou a mal, a dívida que pensámos dever; até cuspirmos no dever e na honra e na fidelidade, essas cordas tão sujas, tão forçadas. Até não nos importarmos de ser apenas umas cabras, párias do sangue e da raça. Até perder a fé e a cortesia. Tudo.
