The Choices I Made

Translating spiritual texts is choosing, and every choice closes doors. These are the ones I consider debatable; in this English edition, the terms from Ra and Bashar appear in their own words, and the choices concerning them were made in the Portuguese original:

• Distortion, in the Ra material, became distorção in Portuguese. I preferred to keep the strangeness rather than soften it into "deviation" or "imperfection". The word needs to sound like what it is: an angle, not a defect.
• Social memory complex became complexo de memória social, word for word. No more elegant solution preserved the three ideas the term carries at the same time.
• Excitement, in Bashar, became entusiasmo ("enthusiasm"). It is the most debatable choice in the Portuguese edition of this book. The current Portuguese translation is "excitação", literal and widely used in the Brazilian material; I preferred "entusiasmo" because, in Portuguese, "excitação" drags along a sense of nervous agitation and another of sexual arousal that the English does not have there. If you compare with other Portuguese editions, you will find "excitação" — and you will not be looking at a mistake, but at another choice.
• The Seer, in the Yoga Sutras, is kept here; in Portuguese it became o Observador ("the Observer"). "Vidente", the literal Portuguese, would mislead, suggesting someone who sees the future instead of someone who simply sees.
• Nirodha became cessation. It is the most difficult term in Patanjali's text, and in the available editions it receives solutions ranging from "suppression" to "restraint" and "stilling". None of them is wrong.

Some terms I decided not to translate, and I explain in the body of the text what they mean: Atma, Brahman, purusha, prakriti, avidya, klesha, kaivalya, samadhi, Soham. Rendering each one with a single English word would give the false impression that an equivalence exists. It does not. I preferred to present them as what they are: concepts from a system of thought that never needed English to stand on its own.