Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.

How many wicked intentions climb aboard a pure and innocent phrase, after it is already on its way! It is enough to make one suspect that lying is, many a time, as involuntary as breathing.

A word into the silence thrown always finds its echo somewhere where silence opens hidden lexicons.

A Word is Dead

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.

I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

But a word once spoken who can recapture it?

a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought

Words are animals, alive with a will of their own

A WORD is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol twisted aside, and the lie come to be.

the word wanders freely around the thing, like the soul around an abandoned, but not forgotten body.

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

The point I am trying to make is that words are a mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent, and perfidious phenomenon. They can be rays of light in a realm of darkness. . . . They can equally be lethal arrows. Worst of all, at times they can be one or the other. They can even be both at once!

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.

Words are living things, full of shades of meaning, full of associations; and, what is more, they are apt to change their significance from one generation to the next. The translator who understands his job feels, constantly, like Alice in Wonderland trying to play croquet with flamingoes for mallets and hedgehogs for balls; words are for ever eluding his grasp.