It seems I’m not alone.

If you google “Words, words, words, I’m so sick of words,” never so eloquently stated as by Julie Andrews in her incarnation as Eliza Doolittle, you will find a whole stream of bloggers et al. who feel the same. Being sick of words, I did not take the time to explore why they were sick of words; suffice to say, it seems a common enough ailment. It is also why I have not been on this blog for a while. There were just no words left over for self-expression…

At the recent (what, six weeks ago?!) conference of the American Translators’ Association, one of the presenters gave a talk on her profession and confessed she no longer did crossword puzzles. By the end of an entire day spent translating, she couldn’t bear the idea of any more words. It was time to walk the dog, listen to music, watch a film. I listened in dismay: if I am to become a full-time translator, will I lose the pleasure of crosswords? Is it that strenuous a profession?

I adore crossword puzzles; they are a pleasure equaled only by certain types of chocolates, Beethoven sonatas on a rainy afternoon, and other things not mentionable on this blog if I don’t want more spam than I already have. So imagine being a chef and getting sick of profiteroles, or a musician fed up with sonatas, or a …well, we won’t go there.

On second thought, though, it is absolutely true that people can get sick of anything in excess, even the Guardian crossword puzzle. It’s your stomach or your brain that just shuts down, says That’s it, no more, please. It’s the Zorba and the cherries syndrome. Only when I sat in the conference room in dismay, I didn’t think it would hit me quite so soon.

In fact, I too have been gorging myself on cherries, Alexis. I’ve just sent off an 80,000 word manuscript of a translation to the publisher, and for four months it’s been cherries at dawn every day. A book I have loved and whose characters I will miss as if they were friends who had moved too far away. But the stress of keeping up the pace to meet a deadline, not to mention the interruptions from less welcome visitors in the form of other translations of a more pedestrian nature, have ensured that on more than one evening my brain looked and felt like alphabet soup. The other night I began to watch a DVD and discovered with absolute delight that given its vintage (1933) it was virtually silent: what a pleasure to watch a story unfold without using words, just images!

Which led me to wonder in a moment of Sci-Fi abstraction if we are not heading back that way. If a few centuries or even decades from now the written word and printed page will be as obsolete as the papyrus—for sure, people have already talked about the death of the book, but won’t a day come when not only literature will be dead but also any form of writing? We will have icons on our computers that can do everything; our art forms will be visual; everything will be recorded by video, webcams, computers. No more need to translate divorce papers—send the video and a software program will translate and dub the judge’s pronouncement. Of course there will be another form of literacy—computer literacy—but images and speech will replace the records which once were the property of ink and paper. People are lazy; already teenagers hate to read, at least in the industrialized countries; Harry Potter may merely be the swan song of juvenile love for books.

If you read Doris Lessing’s Nobel Acceptance Speech, she refers to “the inanities of the internet”, meaning all the activities that require absolutely no reading. I know what she is referring to, for in my sudden crossword withdrawal seizure, I turned to YouTube (horrors) in search of silly amusement. And there is plenty of that; oddly enough, I ended up in stitches over a pair of elegant tabby cats who were on a bed… conversing in a very civilized manner. Back to words, of a feline variety; my own cat was furious and growled viciously and kept looking behind the computer screen for whatever wizard was responsible for this tomfoolery.

But I’ve gone off track. The thing is, I love words, written and spoken, but mainly written. Each word has its own resonance, history, music, an elegance on the page; putting them together I feel like a toddler with building blocks, endlessly happy and eager, even when they spill. I even succeeded in using the word Brobdingnagian in my translation: take an odd word in French (sidéral) that warrants something equally fantastical in English…It will probably get axed by the editor, but it was worth a shot. There are times when there is an aching gap in a sentence, in a passage, that is nothing if not reminiscent of a crossword puzzle.

My daughter’s favorite cartoon as a child was a collection of little blue people called the Schtroumpfs…still not totally forgotten as Smurfs in English, Puffi in Italian… If you ever read or watch one of the stories, you soon discover that they frequently pepper their speech with their own name, when they don’t know or can’t think of the right word (or it hasn’t been invented yet). A sort of fill in the blank with the blank; when I do a first draft on a translation, those pesky French words that resist translation (like anything self-respectingly French) are rendered in English as “smurf.” (This is an even greater insult to the original text when you remember that the gentleman who invented the Schtroumpfs was Belgian, or should I say Walloon). This gives something like:

“There is Leo snoring away like a smurf in the TV armchair.”

(I’ll send you a free book if you can guess what the smurf became in this sentence).

It has always proved a very effective means of finding the right word in a subsequent rereading. I’m no longer magnetized by the original French, and the word just pops up nine times out of ten—like a crossword puzzle…

So, back to words and cherries: like anything—and this was Zorba’s lesson—they must be consumed in moderation. Will I be able to make a living as a translator if I get sick of words? Will it spoil the thing I hold dearest after family and friends?

Perhaps the trick will be to do the crosswords at dawn, when my mind is rested from the night’s silent film. Otherwise, I might have to teach my cat to go for walks, something I can imagine he will not take terribly kindly to. He’d much rather look for phantom cats behind the computer screen.