Hey, it worked!

Well, Sandy came in. And left again. Left quite the wide swath of destruction behind her. I'm one of the lucky ones. We're high and dry in an inland suburb of NJ, on a hill. No flooding. Also, no downed trees, which were the big worry, with the giant pines in the backyard.

We still have no power, but we have running water. Running hot water. Oh glory hallelujah. Seriously. And gas, too. We've cooked at least one hot meal a day so far. And, there's a fireplace, where we've had a roaring fire for the last two nights. Power and internet are starting to be found, and cafes and the library. Life is actually pretty good.

AND! Here's the other thing! My goal to do more work, more uninterrupted work, has actually been achieved! I've finished the first draft of a big project, most of which was using pen and paper. I've fleshed out much more of a second project. And I've even done a lot of research on pirates -- I had borrowed some library books over a month ago, lugged them places with the intention to read them, and never had. And now, I'm done with an entire book, and halfway through the next, with rich new treasure troves of vocabulary and linguistic ideas to show for it.

Life is really good.

Sandy offers peace and quiet, if you know where to look...

Some eagle-eyed readers will know that I live on the Eastern Seaboard of the US, just a few short miles away from where the exact center of Hurricane Sandy is scheduled to pass over within the next day or two. I was trained well for emergency situations, and I was in NYC during Hurricane Irene last year, so my preparations for this storm have entailed checking the stock of flashlights and batteries (fine), non-perishable food (one more tin of nuts would be nice, but otherwise fine), water (another couple of gallons bought), and figuring out the safest place to be in the house if trees start coming down (the basement -- no other rooms of this house are windowless). Now, I get to sit back and enjoy the storm.

I would actually be okay if the power went out, which is a pretty likely situation. All the loose ends on my computer have been tied up as of an hour ago. While it would pretty much suck to be without electricity and Internet for a while, not only am I prepared to deal with it, but that kind of situation would greatly diminish the amount of distractions during the workday.

Call it a house-arrest/forced writer's retreat. I could sit down with a good, ol'-fashioned pen and notebook, and really concentrate hard on translating. On the voice, and the rhythm, and the word choice, finding things from my own brain, instead of relying on the crutch of online dictionaries and thesauruses (thesauri? whatever).

Maybe it's nostalgia for a simpler time that never existed; maybe it's a burning curiosity to see if I really can be persuaded to work without the onslaught of my usual tools; maybe it's just wishful thinking. Here's the thing -- everyone will be staying home from work tomorrow. Everyone will be here. And bored.

Distractions galore.

Oh well. Maybe I can retreat to a dark corner of the house and blow out my candle. No one will find me then!

(This only works if you're in the Northern Hemisphere. Replace "north" with "south" for Australia and those parts of Africa and South America below the Equator.)

We have so much power. Climb into a car, a simple piece of machinery, really, it's been around for decades going on centuries, everyone has one. Slide a tiny strip of metal into a specific slot, tweak it a bit, and start flying across the ground. Drive north. We hold the power of time in our hands, and feet. The ability to fast forward through the seasons. Dry heat sinks give way to muggy swamps, buzzing with life, which cede to warm sun and cool breezes blowing through red and golden leaves, which melt away into chilly air and bare branches.

No longer at the mercy of the skies are we. Watch the colors change, from green to brown, and fade away. Feel the power under our palms, coursing through the gas tank, tires gripping miles and miles of ribbony tarmac.

Seriously. Guys. Technology is SO COOL. Planes, trains, automobiles. All this fancy mechanical stuff can even help us appreciate nature more. I always request a window seat on an airplane, to watch the sunrise or the cloud-sea or the patchwork quilt of farms. I'd prefer to be a passenger on a roadtrip, not because I don't like driving, but to revel in the trees or the snow or the setting harvest crescent moon.

(Should I try to tie this into translation as a profession? Planes are awesome because you can visit anywhere you want to in the world. New cultures, new people, new food, new sights, new nature. The world is an amazing place. I learned French, and I translate, and I'm working on learning Arabic, because I'm trying to satiate my curiosity for everything that's out there, all the beautiful wonderful things, and share those things with everyone. Complete satisfaction is never going to happen, though. And that's almost as cool as all the cool things out there.)

P.S. Kayaks are also time-travel machines. Thanks, xkcd.

Frustrations

At the recent ALTA conference, many people were griping about rights. And it makes sense. It can be the hardest part about being a literary translator. Trying to work through the system to find out if anyone is allowed to translate this story, let alone if you personally can get permission. One publisher talked about their encyclopedia-esque phone book of foreign rights departments, full of tiny, out-dated information that you could only read with a magnifying glass. Another publisher said that tracking down proper rights was akin to (pardon our language) a "f***ing goat rodeo." Apt.

So, I suppose it really shouldn't be surprising that two months after first reaching out to a small French publishing house, after filling out their website's contact page and emailing their general address and emailing their rights address and sending their foreign rights manager a message through LinkedIn, I still haven't heard a thing. I'll be calling them today.

If there's still no response, well, I'll be in France early next year. Maybe I should just go knock on their door.

I'm blogging today, just not here...

I'm here! Lisa Carter over at Intralingo was wonderful enough to invite me to guest post about my experience at ALTA. It's a different and expanded take from what I wrote here last week, and her blog is just marvelous, anyway. Get thee hence!

Everyone Is Just Like You – A Report from the 2012 Annual Conference of ALTA

I’m showing my age, and not in the way it’s normally meant. Lunch on Saturday, with a group of literary translators, was punctuated by that song from Barney and Friends: “You are special! Special! Everyone is special, everyone in his or her own way!” (Yes, the exclamation points belong there. Kids’ songs buzz with energy.)

But one thing I learned at the American Literary Translators Association conference, to my delighted relief, was that everyone is not, in fact special and individual and completely different from everyone else. Everyone is, in fact, just like you. Everyone thinks just like you. Everyone has the same fears, the same dreams, the same uncertainties, the same wishes.

• Everyone wants to be published and widely read.
• Everyone wants to get paid for their work.
• Everyone dreams of having the latter two wishes intersect in every job.
• Everyone has had to deal with that editor who insisted on a long-winded, frankly boring introduction.
• In a bookstore, everyone bemoans a lack of money for books. And then buys books anyway.
• While dealing with a particularly tricky passage, everyone has been smothered by the sense that they can’t translate, can’t speak French, can’t even speak English properly.
• Everyone struggles with procrastination, or not dedicating enough time to their passions, or the overwhelming guilt when procrastinating gets in the way of passion.

So yes, everyone is just like you. At least among literary translators, that is.

Happy International Translators Day!

From Saint Jerome to Chris Durban and all translators in between, thanks for everything you do to bridge cultural gaps, further our noble profession, and bring the corners of the globe a little closer together. (No corners on a round object, I KNOW. Just go with it. It's poetic.)

Behind the Scenes of Walking the Walk

Setting:  Doing a translation of a French cantata libretto for a chorus' December concert, for program insert and possible supertitles.

What they see:

After a conversation in which I try convince them that a more complex (read: not as literal) translation is preferable, citing poetic flow and the like, I offer to do a sample of the well-known lullaby-like section to prove my point, that the rhyme scheme can kept intact without sounding forced.

They receive the sample shortly thereafter, and see that yes, indeed, the rhyme scheme makes it easier to read, without sounding disjointed.

What actually happens between the two events:

Oh FRACK rhyming is hard, I mean I knew this already but it's still hard, where's that rhyming dictionary gone to, oh FINE now which of these rhyming websites works best, WHY isn't there a rhyme for "angel" besides "archangel" because that just defeats the purpose, this doesn't make any sense anymore, I've completely lost the original meaning, well crap, start over, okay, now here's a list of all the words that could possibly be at the end of this line so do ANY of them match up with ANY other words that could possible be at the end of the NEXT line? no? okay, square one, right then, time to MAKE UP WORDS, English is stupid anyway, it's so freaking hard to rhyme in English, I mean, mother and father are fine feminine rhymes but that sounds so WEAK and the original libretto is so simple here so why is it so HARD in another language? oh right. translation. hard. fun, yes? fun? I guess, sometimes, maybe, so wait, can you make "lowly" rhyme with "woe" and "grow," maybe if it's at the end of the first line which runs into the second so you can fudge a bit and say that the second syllable really belongs to the second line not the first because that obviously makes TOTAL SENSE (sarcasm) (but maybe not, because Shakespeare did that, or did he only do that with different words of the same sentence, not different syllables of the same word) oooooh, hey, "abhorred" is a good word, but maybe it doesn't work in context, maybe it's too complex of a word, but WHY is it too complex? the "b" next to the "h" is unusual? it doesn't look English? or just that no one uses it ever, even though it's only two syllables, so maybe it's not that complex after all...hmm, I wish I knew more about linguistics, because there must be a way to quantify if a word is complex or not, and I wonder how many variables there would be, and if they take its usage in common speech into account -- STOPIT. you're rhyming, not leading a research on word complexity, you chose THIS field, not computational linguistics. okay. translation. ooooh, "Lord" rhymes with "sword," and "abhorred" actually DOES work in context, this could be kinda cool.........

That happens.

On a loop.

For three days straight.

I love my job. :-)

Pirates!

Pirates are infinitely more interesting than common sailors. Society supports this as fact. We have "Talk Like a Pirate Day" (last Wednesday, for those playing at home), not "Talk Like a Sailor Day."

Random?

Not really. You see, I'm doing research on 18th century nautical terms, in both French and English. There are a few glossaries and dictionaries out there, as well as meticulously labeled diagrams, but it's easier to learn and understand the terms in a context.

Looking for such historical context, one can turn to a few different places. Textbooks (can be dull), ship's logs from the era and other primary sources (excellent, but the old-style spelling can be hard to wade through), or historical fiction and non-fiction stories. Interest-peaking AND historically accurate!

After all, pirates sailed on the same ships as everyone else.

Real Life Gets in the Way

It does. It's not "if," it's "when." Life interferes with EVERYTHING from time to time.

For example, I was planning on writing so many things on this blog for the past month. And then we had to move, kind of suddenly, to a temporary apartment on the third floor of a friend's parents' house in the suburbs, and the two-day move stretched into five days, and Mr. S got an interview in Rhode Island, and Labor Day weekend family visits happened, and now here we are, just over two weeks from the ALTA Conference in Rochester, and I've just finished my to-do list to prepare for the conference, and we're trying to figure out which boxes we should be unpacking so we can actually live a normal life and which we should just leave in storage. And yet, through all of that, I've been working. I've taken my paying jobs, and I've done some volunteer work for my favorite NGO in Switzerland, and I've even started a new pet project (it's a French comic book about an awesome cross-dressing heroine who can win knife and gun fights on a merchant ship in the late 18th century, thank you for asking). The conference is coming up so quickly, and I'm so excited about it -- I've even got a meeting lined up with the adviser for the University of Rochester's MA in Literary Translation program, which may be my next destination.

Life gets in the way, and pushes you forward at the same time. But only if you work at it.