To Travel

Guerson over at Our Big European Adventure posted excerpts from Javier Reverte's Vagabundo en Africa in a post titled To Travel.

I can't help but post a quick translation of a few lines. Here's Javier Reverte, on travel:

Travelling extends your life, fills it with faces and scenery..... When you travel, your convictions fall as easily as eyeglasses; it's just that it's harder to put them back in their place.

Wait, it gets even better:

And travelling is also a way of creating, because you retain all that you see and all that you hear, in the memory and in the retina, in order to later try to interpret it, as if you were an artist, a painter facing the palette, facing the faces and the shapes, a musician open to sound, to voices and rhythms, and perhaps in the end, a poet. Travel converts us into free beings; allows us to see ourselves paused in time while the world runs along beside us.

Makes you want to walk through your own house as though you were "travelling", doesn't he?

I've yet to read an entire book by Reverte, although El Río de la Desolación is sitting right beside me as I type this post, patiently waiting its turn in the reading line. Javier Reverte is one of few writers that makes language-loving me see languages as a barrier for just a moment -- as I wistfully regret not being able to share him with friends I know would be swept away in just a few paragraphs.

So you'll excuse the amateur translation.

If you've yet to discover guerson, she was born and raised in Brazil, is married to a Canadian, and is working on her PhD at the University of Toronto. She's in Barcelona doing a year's research right now (nice work if you can get it, huh?) and writes up her adventures on her blog.