My book “Solar and Lunar Return: Many Exercises” is now available in six languages, via Kindle Translate: English, Italian, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and German.
It’s a short text of mine, 156 pages in the small 13.5 x 20.5 cm format, which I published, only in English and only in paperback, in 2011.
This might seem like an oversight on my part, if you look at my complete bibliography, which includes many texts as long as 600, 800, or 1,200 pages. But it wasn’t a mistake (sorry for some detractors who jumped on their prey and immediately criticized it…).
No, this book—I dare say—can save your life, and I recommend everyone always carry it on their smartphone or, better yet, as I do, in paperback in the small backpack that accompanies me everywhere in the world. Because, from the title and the photo on the front cover, it helps border agents understand, in a very concise way, why we often travel for just a few hours, even to the other side of the world, as Daniela is doing right now.
I’d like to take this opportunity to inform you about the continuation of the extraordinary program that Amazon Kindle Translate is carrying out regarding what, in my opinion, is the greatest global revolution in the dissemination of knowledge since Gutenberg’s invention of movable type.
About a month ago, if I’m not mistaken with the dates, it was possible to begin translating, starting from English texts, into five languages: French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and German.
And, personally, I’ve taken advantage of this by doing so with many of my books, every day, from mid-August until today.
A new phase began yesterday, which also includes immediate translation between groups of “crossed” languages, following the logic of “n elements to K to K…”, we might say, borrowing a mathematical-statistical language. The first combinations made available are English → Spanish, Spanish → English, and German → English.
From what I understand, this is the process, and the number of languages supported for translation via Kindle Translate will continue to grow month after month.
Perhaps I’m being overly optimistic, but I think that, within a couple of years, it will be possible to translate books into almost all known languages.
So, once again, it occurs to me that we shouldn’t look at progress negatively: it’s true, when Gutenberg invented the way to reproduce the 42-line Bible with movable type, he took thousands of monks out of work, but perhaps they applied themselves in a hundred different ways, and the world, net of bad or very bad people (I’ll leave the compilation of these lists to you), has moved forward and even improved.
