 Well, how I got into translating Portuguese is that by accident I got a job in southern Brazil. I got my PhD in the middle of the winter and discovered all of a sudden I had no money in the bank. So I needed a job and you can't really get a teaching job in January or February in the United States. But in the southern hemisphere, February is when the school year begins. So I asked the secretary at Columbia if there were any job offers anywhere in the world. First she laughed and said no and then she laughed and said yes. She pulled out this ad that basically said on an island of lush green rolling hills with 36 spectacular white sand beaches. The Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina is looking for a PhD, a recent PhD in English and American Literature to help us set up a graduate program. So I applied and I got the job and I didn't know a word of Portuguese at the time. And I ended up living there for two and a half years and when I decided to come back to America I didn't want to leave behind the beautiful language that I had learned. So I started translating and that's how it began. I translate because of the great joy of looking for the le mon juste, looking for the best word, the right word, a right word, a right turn of phrase, looking for the rhythm or the sound that will reverberate in consonants with the original that I'm translating. And for me that's just a great pleasure, the aesthetic and intellectual endeavor so that although I think translation should or could serve a moral purpose, for me the immediate reward is more of a kind of aesthetic personal reward for someone who cares about language and the sound of language and the rhythm of language. And there are two rewards of course. One is your absorption in the search for the right translation, the right words, phrases, images, sounds. That absorption in the search is a great joy because hours can go by when you don't look at your watch, you don't know what time it is, you don't care what time it is and what you have done briefly is to escape the self, the ego while you're working. And then there is also the reward of reading the finished product. When you reread the original poem, you reread your own translation and you're satisfied by both of them, equally satisfied by both of them, equally uplifted, that's an awfully good feeling. We understood that all over the world our fellow human beings are actually our neighbors and that they're actually like ourselves inside, in the blood, in the heart, in their hopes and their fears. If we understood that about people all over the world it would be a lot harder to start wars, it would be a lot harder to kill people. It would be a lot easier to do what the Bible told us to do which is to love our neighbors. So translation can serve a moral purpose. But when I'm in the process of translating, when I'm involved in doing it, or when I'm listening to another translator read their translations, in those two cases my ego tends to disappear and that's an awfully good thing for me. So I think that there is inherently a kind of humility that accompanies translation. That's very good for all of us. We're still in the good field toiling away at a good task. We can even be proud of our capacities. But inherently being a translator makes you a kind of a handmaiden, a kind of a steward or a right hand man or a... I don't know what to call it. You are a follower in a way and yet we're very happy followers. So there's something good about that. Our greatest pleasure is when a foreign poet says, which happened to me a couple of years ago, the most difficult Portuguese poet alive read my translations and he said, either he said, this is how I would have written the poems, were I writing in English, or he may even have gone so far as to say, I think these translations are better than the original. Ulta offers you an extended family of people who are related to you by your shared interest, your shared values and even your shared love so that it in many ways is superior to an ordinary family. In Ulta you share something that in a way is more personal and more precious than your blood and that is your loves, your concerns, your inclinations, your taste in a way. What you value in life is what you share with your fellow people in Ulta and I think it's an extremely healthy organization and the four days that we meet every year are the high point of the year for me.