Week 40

I finished another very long personal writing project this week, that I figured I'd never get around to finishing. That's about four this year of the plague.

My next project to get back to is the translation of a very long, typically bad, Soviet era novel from Russian into English. It's a World War II story. When I left off, the excitable, not terribly dependable young hero and his smart, but rather lacking in self-esteem, girl friend have been forced off their train by a German bombing attack and are depending on mysterious and questionable people to keep them from being captured by advancing German ground forces. If it sounds exciting, the book might have been if the Soviet author had been paid for quality rather than by quantity. It contains long passages with historical figures minimally paraphrased (i.e. stolen) from well-known English language non-fiction books I've read. The original parts, including the moon-calf romantic scenes, are repetitive, understandably self-censored, laced with Soviet jargon, and drawn out so much the interesting sections get dull. The book has the scope and size of War and Peace or Quiet Don but there the favorable comparisons end. Why translate it? I own a copy and I'd like to practice my Russian.

I've been bombarded by robocalls this week. I guess boiler rooms are back in business.