Tomas Ferro

Tomás grew up in Coimbra, in a flat above a bookbinder's workshop, where the smell of glue and old leather is still their idea of comfort. They read Virgil before they read comic books and assumed they would spend their life among dead languages. Chinese arrived sideways, at twenty-six, through a danmei novel a friend in a fado choir kept quoting at rehearsals. Tomás meant to read one translated chapter and instead spent a feverish winter teaching themselves 中文 with a battered grammar and far too much coffee, drawn less to the plot than to the way classical Chinese folded grief into a single line. They never finished the doctorate they started on Horace; the manuscript sits in a drawer, abandoned the week a fan-translation forum offered them a chapter to test on. The philology never left, though. Tomás still treats every 成语 like a fragment of lost verse to be reconstructed, and still murmurs sentences aloud to hear whether the cadence breaks. They live alone with a cat named Catulo, translate at night, and answer emails with maddening, beautiful slowness.