— Adam Donaldson Powell
Between Sister Languages
The Illusion of Transparency and the Poetics of Recreation between Portuguese and Spanish
Opening (Ouverture)
When resemblance is deceiving
A Brazilian reader opens an Argentinian novel. In the first few pages, they feel a pleasant familiarity. Many words seem familiar; the sentence structure is recognizable; the narrative flows naturally. Perhaps they imagine that the reading will be simple because Portuguese and Spanish are sister languages.
Elsewhere in South America, an Argentinian reader begins a Brazilian novel. The feeling is similar. He recognizes words, follows the rhythm of the narrative, and perceives a closeness that seems to promise immediate understanding.
However, as the reading progresses, something begins to elude them.
It’s not the words.
It is the memories they carry.
An apparently equivalent expression can evoke a different emotion. An image can conjure up a different cultural landscape. Silence can carry a different weight. The reader understands the text, but realizes that they do not yet fully inhabit the world that the text seeks to reveal.
It is in this space between familiarity and estrangement that one of the most fascinating questions of literary translation between Portuguese and Spanish arises.
The difficulty doesn’t stem solely from the difference between languages.
It is born, paradoxically, from what they share.
The closer two languages appear, the greater the illusion may be that they organize reality in the same way.
Perhaps they won’t organize it.
They may share an origin, but have developed their own distinct memories.
A language is not merely an instrument of communication.
It records it.
It is a living archive.
It preserves it.
It forgets.
It transforms.
It transmits it.
Each generation deposits much more than words into language. It deposits experiences, affections, conflicts, landscapes, beliefs, rhythms, and particular ways of understanding the world.
Therefore, translating between sister languages is not just about finding linguistic equivalences. It’s about interpreting a collective memory inscribed in the language so that it can be reborn in another community of readers.
This task requires more than just grammatical mastery.
It requires a hermeneutics of translation.
And perhaps even more profoundly, a poetics of recreation.
First Movement (Allegro)
The illusion of transparency
Every translation begins with an encounter.
When two languages are very different, the difference is evident. A student of a foreign language knows that they have entered another universe and accepts that they will need to reconstruct their way of perceiving.
Between Portuguese and Spanish, however, the experience is different.
Proximity builds trust.
Everyday communication often happens before deep understanding develops. This initial ease is real, but it can mask essential differences. Similarity creates a sense of mastery before the true learning process has begun.
The biggest difficulty between sister languages is not distance.
It’s the similarity.
Portuguese and Spanish share historical roots, but each followed its own path. The same origins produced different histories. The trunk may be common; the fruits are never identical.
A similar word can carry a different emotional charge. An expression can possess a different symbolic value. A metaphor can arise from distinct historical experiences.
The translator, therefore, needs to listen beyond the immediate meaning.
You need to ask:
What world does this word represent?
This shift in perspective transforms the act of translation. Translation ceases to be a search for replacements and becomes an investigation into human experiences.
The translator doesn’t just transport words.
It conveys ways of remembering.
That is why literary translation demands attention to rhythms, registers, humor, irony, and silences. The most important differences often don’t appear in the dictionary; they appear in the way a community feels and interprets what it says.
Portuguese and Spanish are not different versions of the same language.
These are different responses to a common heritage.
And it is precisely this unique personality that the translation needs to recognize.
Before asking how a word can be translated, we should ask where it comes from.
Because no word arrives in a text on its own.
Every word arrives accompanied by its memory.
Second Movement (Andante)
Collective memory inscribed in language
A language is not an empty vessel into which pre-existing thoughts are placed.
It participates in the very formation of these thoughts.
Before we even utter a word, we’ve already entered a story that began before us. Every language is a collective construction made of experiences, cultural encounters, conflicts, affections, and transformations.
A word is a small time capsule.
It bears traces of those who used it before us.
It carries ways of naming the world.
Upload images.
It carries values.
It carries memories.
Therefore, a language is a living archive of collective memory.
But memory also involves transformation. No language remains static. Each generation receives an inheritance and modifies it. New words emerge; old meanings disappear; expressions change their meaning.
Language remains alive because it is never a perfect reproduction of the past.
It is continuity in motion.
This idea is fundamental to understanding literary translation.
When a text crosses a linguistic boundary, we are not merely transporting sentences. We are transporting a particular way of interpreting human experience.
The translator needs to allow this memory to find a new community without erasing its origin.
Translation is not a mechanical transfer.
It’s an encounter between memories.
Brazilian Portuguese and American Spanish clearly demonstrate this. Both have an Iberian heritage, but have been transformed by different historical experiences, including indigenous, African, European, and migratory ones.
They are sister languages.
But siblings are not copies.
Each one has their own story.
The essential question ceases to be:
“Which word corresponds to this word?”
And it becomes:
What human experience is present in this word?
At this point, translation approaches art.
It demands knowledge and precision, but also sensitivity to that which cannot be measured: the rhythm of a sentence, the atmosphere of an image, the emotion hidden between two words.
To translate is to listen to a voice that was born elsewhere and help it find a new way to exist.
Recreation is born precisely in that space between permanence and change.
Third Movement (Scherzo)
Between sister languages
Related languages share a curious characteristic: they invite closeness and, at the same time, demand respect for the distance that remains.
Linguistic kinship is a bridge.
But a bridge doesn’t eliminate the river.
It only allows you to pass through it.
Between Portuguese and Spanish, this transition creates the illusion of transparency. We recognize words and structures, but we don’t always realize that each language retains its own way of organizing experience.
So-called false friends reveal this phenomenon. Similar words can follow different paths and accumulate new meanings over time.
But the problem of false friends is not merely lexical.
They reveal something deeper:
A language is not just a system of signs.
It’s one way of understanding.
Great writers demonstrate this by transforming their own languages. João Guimarães Rosa reinvented possibilities of Brazilian Portuguese. Jorge Luis Borges explored new dimensions of Spanish.
They didn’t simply write within a language.
They wrote through her.
Similarly, a translator does not copy a work.
It allows her to dance in another space.
This is why dance is such a fitting metaphor for translation. Two partners don’t repeat identical movements. They respond to each other.
There is structure.
There is eavesdropping.
Adaptation is possible.
A good translation does not eliminate the difference.
It dances with it.
Fourth Movement (Adagio)
The hermeneutics of translation
All deep translation begins with listening.
Before choosing words, the translator needs to interpret a presence.
A literary text presents more than just information. It presents a worldview.
To translate, therefore, is to understand.
But understanding doesn’t mean reducing the other to what is familiar.
True interpretation preserves otherness.
The translator inhabits a border: between the original work and the new reader, between two cultural memories.
This was the question we encountered in Marcel Proust when reflecting on his work with John Ruskin.
Proust received linguistic assistance to understand aspects of Ruskin’s English, but the essential work was not merely in understanding the words. It lay in transforming the ideas within his own literary sensibility.
He didn’t just ask:
How do you say this in French?
He asked:
“How can this experience exist in French?”
That is the difference between mechanical translation and poetic recreation.
Translation seeks equivalence.
Recreation seeks life.
Writers often find their own voice through encountering other voices. Pastiche, imitation, and writing “in the style of” are not minor exercises; they are forms of creative learning.
Before creating, the artist learns to recreate.
Finale (Finale)
Recreate to remember
Translation and creation cease to seem like separate movements when we understand that both participate in the same process: transforming an experience so that it continues to live on.
A literary work is not composed solely of words.
It is composed of memories, rhythms, images, and ways of understanding the world.
By crossing a linguistic border, it enters another collective memory.
It is in this encounter that recreation is born.
Recreating doesn’t mean replacing.
It means allowing an experience to find a new form of existence.
A translator is not merely someone who transports words.
It is the one that creates a relationship between two communities of memory.
Therefore, translation requires balance:
preserve without freezing;
Transform without betraying;
Approach without erasing.
All art faces this same challenge.
The musician interprets a composition without simply repeating sounds.
The actor embodies an imagined existence.
The dancer transforms movement into presence.
The translator does the same with language.
He interprets.
He recreates.
It gives new life.
Latin America offers a privileged space for understanding this process because its cultures were born from constant encounters and transformations. No identity remains static. No language remains pure.
Every culture is, in a way, a continuous recreation.
We translate not because the languages are the same.
We translated because they are different and yet they want to meet.
A bridge doesn’t exist to erase the banks.
It exists to allow them to meet.
We then return to the initial image:
A language is not merely an instrument of communication.
It is a living archive.
It records it.
It preserves it.
It forgets.
It transforms.
It transmits it.
To translate is to open that file and allow one memory to dialogue with another.
Ultimately, translation is a way of remembering.
And recreating is a way of allowing what we remember to continue to live on.
Every language is a way of remembering the world.
—Adam Donaldson Powell, 2026
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