"No problem is so closely related to letters and their humble mystery as the one posed by a translation," wrote Jorge Luis Borges, and the author, essayist, and translator Achilles Kyriakidis, with reference to the work of the great Argentine full of ironic mines, traces the translator's pains. When is a translation faithful? What does translation of spirit or letter mean? Are all texts translatable and translatable? To which literature do translated works belong? In reciprocating the honor of the Ionian University to appoint him an honorary doctor, Kyriakidis, in his thank-you response, speaks, playing and studying, about the enigma of appropriating another language and the translator's personal struggles.

A speech delivered at the Ionian Academy of Corfu on December 4, 2018, after the appointment of Achilles Kyriakidis as Honorary Doctor of the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation, and Interpretation of the Ionian University.