If the gods do nothing wrong, then they are no longer gods.

This phrase, explosive for the morality of centuries and centuries, revolutionary in the etymological sense, is written by Stéphane Mallarmé, in the least expected place. As a young man, when he made a living as an English teacher and translator, he translated a mythology manual from English to French.

The original version, as is normal, says just the opposite: “If the gods do aught unseemly, then they are not gods at all.” The phrase literally follows Euripides' known fame. So did the French poet want to qualify himself as a god and, with an unpretentious conduct, disrupt the centenary base of Good? For the translator, it is an unbreakable law to keep the original as it was. The well-known adage, which denounces that the translator is a traitor, does not go beyond the small changes of meaning that can occur in the nuances. Only a criminal (or a god, that is, a being that has the property of all creation) would dare to introduce a "no" into a translation.

But it is not clear that, for the gods to exist, they have to do evil if it is intentionally written by Stéphane Mallarmé or later created by a hyper-direct corrector, seeing “if they are dieux font rien d’inconvenant”, and considering that the particle “rien” lacked a “ne”.

Another hypothesis could lead us to think that this anonymous corrector, not knowing that he belonged to Mallarmé, among other things, because he was not from Mallarmé, who had his job of tracking Mallarmé's text in search of errors, considered himself a god and, introducing a no, he himself committed the attack on morality until then, as in the new History of the Lisbon Site of José. The Basque reader, reading the translation of Jon Alonso, will remember that in it the director of an editorial decides in a book of History to deny an affirmation and with it manages to change the history and its own history, the individuals (readers? ). In claiming his capacity to influence and transform in the Great Story, if not in an iconoclast against the figure of the sacralized writer.

The owner of the work is no longer the author. It is known that the writer, like the god, has died, repeated to tiredness. Because anyone can mistranslate anything written (even the biggest poets), because they can correct it wrong (even the most honest and diligent of the texts of Argia) or because any reader can misunderstand it. How do I know, to put it solemnly, that this column that I have built with these words would stand outside my hand?

That is why, even if it is not for that reason, I refuse to apply the word writer to myself. I admit that it can be seen as a sign of humility, as I acknowledge that anything can be interpreted. Someone who writes would have no more to say that he writes. In the novel Martutene, for example, her translator Julia (and her partner) reflects on the writer Martin: “They talk about books [Lynn and Martin]. She thinks she already knows she's a writer. He would like to know how that was said. I write? In any case, he’s convinced he hasn’t told I’m a writer, that’s never.”

In this warm afternoon of July I do not think anything more unpleasant (to recover for a moment the divinity).