Paz opens this essay with these words: “when we learn to speak, we are learning to translate; the child who asks his mother the meaning of a word is really asking her to translate the unfamiliar term into the simple words he already knows. In this sense, translation within the same language is not essentially different from translation between two tongues.” Paz carries this idea one step further. Translation takes place between languages and within the same language, but the very medium that makes translation possible – namely language itself – is essentially a translation. In the realm of verbal expressions, Paz delineates the function of words both in a poetic and prose text. Whereas in the prose piece words tend to be “univocal”, they generally retain their multiplicity of meanings in a poetic context. Paz concludes: “a plurality of languages and societies: each language is a view of the world, each civilization is a world.”