A life in two languages is a life experienced twice. - Ilan Stavans

Translators have always been agents of change. The Muslim translators of the School in Toledo, in the twelfth century, for example, and later on under Alfonso El Sabio, brought Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Hippocrates into Europe. Or Lucretius’s De rerum natura. Without these translators, there would not be a connection with the classical past.

What I want people to engage in, and people already do so, is not only in what others are telling us and what we're telling the others, but in the music that we engage in when we speak. And where that music comes from, language is character, is individual character, is collective character. Language is history too...When we're listening to somebody who doesn't speak exactly like us, it's easy to demonize them, to think that they are less worthy than us. But in the end, we come from that background. We come from others that didn't have the language that we have today. And if we can see the versions, the iterations of the past, in those words, in that music, I think we're going to be more sensitive, compassionate and humble.

Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, argued that the theme of the twentieth century was the color line. In my view, the theme of the twenty-first century is immigration. Everything rotates around it: climate change, Covid-19, populism from Trump to other “aspirational” dictators, global finance, etc.