Augustine's description of Ambrose's silent reading (including the remark that he never read aloud) is the first definite instance recorded in Wester… - Alberto Manguel

Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.

A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.

It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.