After Paulo Freire’s funeral mass, on 3 May 1997, a close friend of mine who was engaged in making a film about Paulo’s work came up to me and said, “It’s up to us now. We must carry the torch that he has handed to us.”
Paulo has been and remains a light in the darkness—the darkness of ideological determinism, fatalism, and organized hopelessness. It is a light that neither persecution, exile, nor unjust criticism has been able to extinguish.
The modest contribution that I am able to make toward keeping the flame alive through this translation came to me unexpectedly—a phone call from Paulo in November 1996, asking if I would do the job. I accepted under protest, first, because translation is not really my field and second, because, in my opinion, there were many people around more qualified to do justice to this work than I myself His insistence prevailed because, as he said, “you know not only my thought but the soul of the language in which I write.” A singular compliment that supplied whatever motivation might have been lacking hitherto.
Indeed, I had been a disciple of Paulo’s before I met him, or even knew of him, something to do, perhaps, with having come myself from the ranks of an oppressed people. That discipleship took on a more intensely focused perspective after we met in Paris in 1974, while he was still in exile, and later on his return to Brazil in 1980.
By the time Paulo died, the translation had been two-thirds completed. We had looked at the first third together and he was happy with it. And the last time we spoke, on 30 April 1997, we were making plans to look at the remainder. But that was not to be.
Though I have often wished I could ask him questions or consult him about this or that, I have since relied on his own words, spoken when he asked me to accept a task that I did not really want. Since then I have “labored,” trying to reproduce his thought with all the poetic force of enthusiasm, wonder, adventure, and indignation that it possesses as best as I could. In this I feel I have been a faithful and grateful disciple.
As regards the translation of the title, I have opted, after much reflection, for “Pedagogy of Freedom,” which seems to possess the resonance required by the text itself. In addition, it haply completes the trilogy of pedagogies, beginning with the “Oppressed” and moving through “Hope” to that place that Paulo so struggled for and desired for everyone he met and that he now enjoys to the full: Freedom. This book is a fitting testament to a noble and ennobling adventure.
Paulo is no longer with us in the way he used to be. And it is hard to become accustomed to his absence. But there is a sense in which he has never gone away. I imagine him sitting quietly, nearby, with a twinkle in his eye, now no longer knowing only “a dim reflection in a mirror,” and making his own the words of Joseph Campbell, as he urges us to
say yes to life
yea to it all
and to participate with joy, humility, indignation, and gratitude in the adventurous struggle to remake the world each and every day.
Patrick Clarke
October 1997