A long time ago – so long that he had forgotten the author’s name – he read some memorable lines in a story about a man who is trying to translate another story, by a much more famous author. In these lines – which, my neighbour said, he still remembers to this day – the translator says that a sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal. Those lines concerned the art of writing, but looking around himself in early middle age my
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