Week 40

[cactuswatcher]

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.

Comments

[atpo_onm]

Interesting. So is the idea to translate it pretty much verbatim, or edit it down into something more concise?

Only this week for robocalls? Mine never end, I've gotten anywhere from 10 to 50 in any given week for the last several years. I'd go mad without caller ID and call blocking when I can. Number/ID spoofing is the norm, so blocking isn't 100% effective, but it helps.

[cactuswatcher]

The idea is to make a 'literary' translation, changing as little as possible, but changing enough to make it readable. Word-for-word is pointless, since Russian is enough different from English that it would simply be gobbledygook in places. I do edit some sentences a bit for totally unnecessary verbiage and can't resist cleaning up the prose once in a while. But generally I don't edit whole scenes, so the author's storytelling, good or bad, is what's there. I write many footnotes in case one of my relatives finds it some day and starts reading it out of curiosity without understanding the Soviet system and its quirks.

Actually the past few months my phone has been quiet. This last week, I've been getting ten calls a day. I've got a land line with caller ID and an answering machine so I only pick up if it's someone I know. Mostly I just hear my message and then clicks, which maybe from businesses. Only the scammers leave recorded messages. I realized that spoofing was a thing when one day a few years ago, my caller ID informed me I was trying to call myself.