[Through the front door, February 4 2012]

Last week I watched one of the longest tennis matches in history – the longest Grand Slam, the longest in Australian Open history. You feel pleased with yourself after something like that – I was there, I remember that match, it was epic. Then it fades from the news and your sense of belonging to something extraordinary fades even more quickly.

This week, I’m experiencing along with all of Europe what must be the longest cold spell in decades, in my life anyway. After a very mild winter with the thermometer only going below freezing perhaps once, we are suddenly picked up and moved to Russia, with temperatures a balmy minus six during the day and minus twelve at night. Add some native Swiss wind, the dreaded Bise, which is anything but a kiss, rather a cause of headaches, dry eyes and bad temper, and your ambient outdoor temperature is more like minus nineteen. All night long the shutters rattled - something they never do - and the atmosphere was definitely Gothic.

I try to recall other cold winters - did I experience this same feeling of helplessness and defeat? Places I’ve been: Russia in 1969 but when you’re young you’re less sensitive to the cold; you remember the people swimming at the open air pool in Moscow, the clouds of steam. Norway off and on in the 70s and 80s: they’re equipped, it’s a way of life there. But there was one day that it got so cold that a Coca-Cola bottle exploded, and even the locals were surprised. Bulgaria too; a freezing New Year’s Eve where the power went out and it must have been somewhere between five and ten Celsius in the bedroom, not more. But there was champagne, and snow, and friendship; people didn’t need blogs and Facebook in those days to comment on the weather.

My oleander will probably not make it this year, despite being wrapped by two somewhat clueless Albanian gardeners who may not have such cruel winters where they come from (although this year, anything’s possible). There is ice – indoors –  around the edges of my skylight. The cat licks the condensation from the wall in the niche by my bed. The front door sticks and I worry about it freezing to the frame altogether. Or maybe I won’t be able to turn the key to let myself out, and will be stuck here until the thaw. I cannot see (through the binoculars) whether the lake has begun to freeze yet, but I worry about the ducks and swans.

These are perfectly ordinary things for many people around the world; they are used to it and know how to deal with it, for the most part. Vodka in the radiators and that sort of thing. I suppose if it goes on long enough I will deal with it in my fashion too, although mopping up the condensation is a major inconvenience, and I suspect that is the architect’s fault, not the weather’s. What is strange and new is the feeling of powerlessness, of looking at the forecast every day and seeing that nothing is about to change, because of a huge high pressure zone:  relentless sun with a bit of cloud, temperatures minus thirteen to minus six. Wind 25km an hour. People have it far worse in Ukraine and Poland, in Serbia and Bulgaria. Cut off from the rest of the world, buried under huge drifts of snow. Living in a place like California you become accustomed to a predictable, benign climate. Those summer winds in the Bay Area are nothing in comparison to this, even if they do mean you don’t have any summer to speak of. Earthquakes have no forecast (tomorrow’s outlook on the Richter scale, 4.3, with a balmy 3.2 forecast for Wednesday); they happen and then they’re done and you deal with the aftermath. This cold wave is incremental, and you don’t really know what you can do other than try to stay warm in the present moment and try not to obsess about how much warmer it is in Paris (minus five). The sun is warming my back through the window. I suppose that compensates for wind chill factor when you’re indoors: sun warmth factor?

Last month I was re-reading Dr Zhivago and the most beautiful and moving passages are the chapters set in wintry Yuryatin and Varykino. Poetic and evocative, lovely to read about from your warm bed, your mild winter; be careful what you wish for, poetry notwithstanding. Now I’m translating a book set in the Pyrenees in the middle of winter, a grisly murder mystery with snow and ice everywhere, including on the corpses. And appropriately titled: “Iced.”

I had my groceries delivered two days ago, something I only do in extremes of weather. They made a mistake and brought me five litres of milk! I think the message is: drink lots of hot chocolate.

Wherever you are, keep warm.

Or, Them Ole Translation Blues

No, you can’t start singing, “Oh, I got them ole translation blues…” First of all, because you don’t have time to sing, and secondly, there’s no such thing as “ole translation blues.” It’s not like love, or life, or being poor or getting old or one of those shared human experiences that we can all confess, at some point or another, to having felt blue about. No, translation blues are pretty rare and I defy you to find anything (else) about them on the internet. They’re not even ole by my standards, since this is actually the first time I’ve ever had them. (more…)

I’ve been long absent from this blog, off fighting on those various battlefields that stretch endlessly into the distance as I seek to keep a roof over my head. Increasingly difficult, as my source of income—literary translation—is paid in dollars, euros, and pounds, all of which are falling against the Swiss franc, the price of my roof and rösti. Is it time to switch and go to work for a prestigious watchmaker? (Maybe they’d give me free photographs of Roger Federer.) But I love my work, and am prepared to take a hit or two for the sake of art and its ultimate triumph, but it might be time to confer with my generals and see what can be done.

Swiss franc notwithstanding, there have been a few small victories over the past few months:

This month Words Without Borders is devoted to the Arab Spring, and I am pleased to contribute to that ongoing and far more important struggle, with the translation of a story by Leila Marouane, Is This How Women Grow Up? Leila writes eloquently and harrowingly of another, more pervasive battle, that of women’s rights, and while her story is set primarily in Algeria, it is hard not to read it and recognize a certain universal disillusionment shared by many women.

On a lighter note, my translation of Anna Gavalda’s novel French Leave (Breaking Away in the UK) has been getting good reviews and even a mention in that bastion of anti-translation book reviewing, The New York Times. It’s a perfect summer read, short and sweet, like a literary basket of strawberries. Although you might find yourself headed for the corner store to buy some pet food at the end. You can read an excerpt here. (more…)

Some years ago—many years ago—I traveled with my daughter and then husband  to Turkey. I remembered it, for years—or chose not to remember it—as a trip that was fraught with problems—the car breaking down, horrible intestinal infections, petty thefts, and worst of all, marital strife in the form of raging arguments in the most gorgeous places or stubborn silences that lasted for days. It should have been the trip of a lifetime. Not the usual tourist circuit down the Aegean coast, but a month-long drive that took us all through Anatolia to the Iranian border, and the Soviet border, and all along the fog-shrouded Black Sea. I remember waking in some town, it could have been Trabzun, or Giresun, I don’t recall, and realizing that I was a married woman, and had been married for only four months, and was deeply unhappy. Was it my expectations that had been too high? Was I clinically depressed for some reason—the strangeness of the country, the constant moving, the uncertainty of the future?

For my most recent birthday I was given a magic box that converts old slides and negatives to digital photographs. For the last four months I have been patiently traveling back through time and revisiting my school years, my first boyfriends, my grown niece and nephews as children, countries as diverse as Norway and Greece and Russia. Today I came upon a box of slides:  Anatolia 1986.

Of all the photos I have seen over these months, and there have been hundreds, none have been so strangely moving and beautiful as these shots of Turkey. Granted, the country is beautiful, and I found the people, especially the children, extraordinarily photogenic. But I did not expect to find so many pictures, nearly an entire roll, of near-perfect shots, at least for an amateur like myself, speaking so eloquently of some strange process that was going on despite my anger and sadness and depression. Perhaps I channeled all my unhappiness into my camera lens. I am glad I have been able to preserve something, for otherwise I might have felt there was a hole in my life. Instead, it was a shutter that took twenty-five years to close.

I’ve never been one for pilgrimages, or trips organized around a certain goal, or travelling for the sake of getting somewhere; I’ve always been, rather, something of a drifter, choosing my restaurants and lodgings and sometimes even villages or islands on a whim, an instinct, a desire to flee the crowds and insinuate myself into a landscape not as a tourist, but as a visitor or traveller.

For the first time in many years at the end of May I broke my own self-imposed travel formula by joining a tour of Crimea that focused on the life of Anton Chekhov and the years he spent in Yalta and its surroundings, led by a congenial Chekhov scholar and followed by an equally congenial mixture of people of all ages and backgrounds who had one thing in common:  a love of Chekhov’s work and a curiosity about the world he lived in, some of which, we discovered, is still very much alive in its way. The tour came about as part of a campaign to save Chekhov’s “White Dacha” in Yalta, where he lived the last years of his life, and which has been  suffering from a severe lack of funding since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The campaign, based in Great Britain with both Chekhov scholars and admirers and theatre people behind it, is raising funds for vital repair and maintenance on the Dacha (see Yalta Chekhov  Campaign.)  (My fellow participants from the tour know who they are and I won’t go into a lengthy description of this part of the trip here but, rather, also provide  other readers with the link to the excellent agency in Britain that organized the tour and encourage anyone who’s interested to write and enquire about subsequent tours…) What I did promise however to my fellow travellers was a description of the trip that I went on after I left them, where I journeyed by rail overnight across nearly all of Ukraine from the south due north to the town of Sumy, where Chekhov spent two summers as a young man, before he became the famous playwright we all know from the portraits with his pince-nez… (more…)

I live under the flight path for Geneva airport. Planes coming from the west fly as far as the beacon in the lake that sits a short ways offshore from the village of St-Prex, an ugly white cylinder in the idyllic lakeside scenery; I hear the shift in the sound of the jet engines as they make their turn, almost above my head. It’s not too loud, they’re still ten minutes away from landing, but with binoculars you can identify the type of plane, the carrier. It’s a regular, rhythmic, almost reassuring sound to everyday life:  planes in the sky, all is as it should be.

I came home from lunch with a friend today to find my neighbors sitting on the lawn; spring weather seems to be here at last after bitter cold winds and cloudy skies for days and days. I joined them; a bottle of wine and three glasses appeared, and we all commented how peaceful it was without the planes, how nature was forcing us to appreciate a different rhythm.

From time to time a small biplane flew overhead, almost defiantly, even though Swiss airspace is closed; he was small and surely below the infamous cloud of ash; the plane was red, and my neighbor called him the Red Baron.

I have a plane ticket to London, due to depart in two days’ time. When I booked it I regretted it was so much cheaper than the train, because I was very curious to take the famous Eurostar from Paris that goes under the English channel in virtually no time at all; but the train ticket was nearly three times the cost of the budget carrier flying to Luton airport. How do “they” want us to be ecologically correct when the train is so prohibitively expensive and the plane so dirt cheap?

On Thursday when the volcanic ash cloud shut down British airspace I quickly realized I might not be able to take my flight; professional reasons propelled me to spring for a refundable train ticket when I saw how quickly the seats were going up in price on the website. I knew everyone must be thinking like me, and that it was only a question of time before there would only be First Class seats left. So now I have a train ticket, and a plane ticket, and I am waiting to see what the volcanic ash cloud will be doing on Monday morning. I almost hope it sticks around, even if it means I’m going to lose a lot of money on that train ticket, and will find myself amidst a huge crowd of travelers, all the way to London. Maybe it will feel festive, or maybe it will just be crowded and hot and unpleasant.

But I like the fact that nature at last has managed to do what, dare I say it, only terrorists have ever succeeded in doing until now. And no one has been hurt, and there are even lots of stories coming out of people who are delighted to be stuck where they are stuck. There are opportunities for encounters, for new experiences. When was the last time you spoke to your neighbor on one of those boringly predictable budget flights?

I’ll remember this afternoon for a long time; I will put it together with the carless Sundays of the early 1970s, when you could suddenly hear the birds on silent avenues, or ride a bicycle around the coliseum in Rome with no other traffic than pedestrians. The quiet sky, the incredible wash of blue haze and sunlight, the three glasses of wine, conversation. A tortoise chasing a cat. The Red Baron defying our silence. I really don’t care how I get to London. I like the idea that a volcano has come all the way to me.

Something here for everyone…I’m proud to announce for 2010 three new publications! As different as any translations could ever be:  one is by a woman (the fat one) two by a man (one man, two skinny books). One is bright red and is a book you can lose yourself in, all four hundred plus pages; the other two are discreet little “lyric essays” to be read like poems, in moments of bright, floating contemplation…whatever! And one (the fat one) is only available in the UK, so you’ll have to go here to order it, and the other two are available only in the US, so go here.

Anna Gavalda:  Consolation

Consolation is as I said a book to get lost in, and I did for weeks and months, translating it with the echo of Leonard Cohen’s famous blue raincoat in my head…it’s a love story with a twist (aren’t they all?), where a lost love leads to a found love…and there are lots of children and donkeys and music and drunken Russians and bratty Parisian teenagers and a burnt-out architect… Anna Gavalda is one of France’s most beloved and popular authors, and she has yet to become known to the benighted Anglo-Saxon world, but she deserves to be read and beloved  for her humor and her warm take on life. I know I enjoyed reading it over and over, despite all the vicious puns I had to translate (she has told me she puts them there on purpose! Just joking) and I hope I’ve done justice to the rich “Gavaldian” world she creates.

Christian Bobin:  A Little Party Dress and I Never Dared Hope for You

Christian Bobin is one my favorite authors of all time. I am particularly proud of these two translations because I struggled for years to find a publisher, and at last they have been published by Autumn Hill Books, an independent small press in Iowa City, Iowa, specializing in translation. Christian Bobin is as different from Anna Gavalda as can be, but he is also a creator of worlds. Above all, he shows us how to see the intimate details of life that are there before our eyes and that we’ve never really seen or understood. His lyric essays read like a mixture of poetry and a short story; above all, the language fractures light, rearranges your emotional perception. For me these are little legible jewels, to be read again and again, just for the pleasure of the fusion between language and vision… I hope I’ve done them justice because they are indescribably beautiful texts in French, and it’s easy to curse English for being unpoetic and utilitarian, a language of shopkeepers…still, I hope something has come through of the light and the music.

Every so often you find yourself somewhere and you think you are dreaming. Or that you’ve died and gone to heaven. Or that suddenly the human race has reformed, and put aside war and despoliation of the planet to turn to culture and human friendship. The feeling often coincides with a visit to a place like Italy, because despite its sizeable contribution to war and despoliation (not to mention the idiozia of its current head of state), it has also contributed perhaps more than its fair share to culture, perhaps human friendship, too.

The little town of Mantova, or Mantua in English, that I have only ever known through Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet (“to Mantua; /Where thou shalt live, till we can find a time / To blaze your marriage…”), has for 13 years been hosting a literary festival for four days at the end of the summer. It is the perfect venue, with its wide squares and palazzos and parks, its cobbled car-free streets, its mild climate, its medieval/Renaissance atmosphere. It is not overwhelming with other things to do or see, the way nearby Verona or Venice would be; and it has just enough cafés and restaurants to keep everyone in macchiati and agnolini. (more…)

Who would have thought the little beast would still be scuffling along so vigorously a year later? “The Elegance of the Hedgehog”: Number 12 on the New York Times Trade paperback bestseller list, number 5 on the Indie Bestseller list, Sales Rank 31 on Amazon (and 632 in the Francophobe UK, pas mal). It seems that such hedgehogly vigor calls for some reflections on the part of the breeder (if a translator can be termed the person who facilitated the creature’s conception and birth into another language…)

Muriel Barbery wrote a great book. Simple as that. Not everyone likes it; my own sister couldn’t finish it. That is the prerogative, and the duty, of Great Books, to be disliked, or misunderstood as much as they are loved and praised. The simplicity of bad books is clear to all; good books provoke controversy and debate. I can still recall the thrill I had after reading a dozen pages or so in the original French; I knew I was on to something that might be great. If the book kept its promise, I told myself, I would like nothing better than to translate it. (more…)

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY JON MACDONALD!

Today marks the anniversary of my residency in the little village of Buchillon, between Lausanne and Geneva, on the shore of Lac Léman. I could go on about how time has flown, and how incredible it is to think that a year ago I was a confused immigrant uncertain of her future, and now I’m a villageoise who treks through the vineyards to go for a dip in the lake. (more…)

Time to blow the horn on behalf of a lovely book I translated last year and which is now in print with Europa Editions. Amélie Nothomb, for those who don’t yet know her, is a well-known Belgian author with a quirky sense of humour and an inimitable style…She will be presenting this English translation of Ni d’Eve ni d’Adam in the weeks ahead on the East Coast and in Canada…read the book and climb Mount Fuji with her, eat Swiss cheese fondue, get lost in a snowstorm…it’s evocative and light-hearted, a lovely cross-cultural escape.

Programme in the United States: click here.

I admit, like many of my fellow translators of foreign literature who work into English, that I have often had doubts. Felt that my efforts were in vain; that apart from a few benighted yet god-sent editors and publishers, no one was reading the books I had translated. They were printed, looked lovely and readable, and then gathered dust on the shelf. Americans are fearful of foreign languages, fearful of subtitles, fearful of translations. Are they afraid to admit their own ignorance? And is it a question of their ignorance, or that of the publishers who presume American readers are resistant to translations? Are they so proud of their own authors (Roth, Oates, Pynchon, Updike, etc etc) that they don’t have time anymore for the successors to Tolstoy and Camus, who, it seems, used to be read, at least… (more…)

It’s usually a vacation thing. You go to Florence (duh), Siena, Athens, Paris, Salzburg, wherever, and you hope, pray, pay for a view. There’s something about that elusive, exclusive view (as Forster and Merchant-Ivory so pointedly showed us) that makes the time special, that makes you feel life is smiling upon you, that you are absolutely where you were meant to be in that moment. That something magical might happen, because a few Renaissance architects conspired to leave before your eyes a harmony, a serenity, a perfect proportion that your everyday life has always denied you. (more…)

A little less than two years ago, a title caught my eye in a list of newly published novels in France. L’Elégance du hérisson. Hérisson meaning hedgehog. I’ve always had a soft spot for hedgehogs, ever since visiting my friend Christina in a remote village in Bulgaria in 1974; they had adopted a stray hedgehog. Yesh, in Bulgarian. I learned a word and an affection for an oddly repellent little animal–they prickle, and smell, and have lots of bugs; they shuffle and sniffle–and yet they are in some way tender in their awkwardness. They are fragile, vulnerable little creatures, as anyone who has driven down country roads in Britain or Turkey can attest; they are secretive, and Beatrix Potter made them lovable in The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.

Bref, I have a thing about hedgehogs. I have hedgehog stuffed animals, a keychain, a charm, a wax candle, coasters, and most recently, a hedgehog toy for my cat (he doesn’t like it that much). My daughter drew me a little hedgehog when she was a child, a tiny picture I carried in my wallet until it became too fragile and now it is framed and hangs above my bed. When I moved into my new little house in Switzerland, a hedgehog foot-wipe brush was waiting outside the front door.

So this novel intrigued me by its title. I finally got hold of a copy a few months later, and within twenty pages knew this would be, for me, the translation of a career, of a lifetime. Even if the word hedgehog only comes up once, and the book has nothing to do with hedgehogs…ostensibly. But the humor, the humanity, the quirkiness, all evoke the tenderness that the little Bulgarian yesh did so many years ago.

Read this book. Read my translation. I dare not say more, for fear of overkill, hype. Avoid the Amazon reviews, avoid any review. Please just read it. Send me your comments — on the book, on the translation. On hedgehogs.

Here is the link to the publisher’s site, for more information.

Europa Editions

Switzerland, technically, does not belong to the European Union, although they share some interesting agreements, like the one which allows me, finally, to live and work here. Nor do they belong to NATO, and they only very recently joined the United Nations. They go it alone, do things their way, don’t want to be dictated to by Brussels, let alone Washington.

So on first glance there might seem to be a slight irony to the fact that they’re hosting, together with Austria (an EU member) this year’s Euro 2008, the European football (or soccer if you prefer) championship held every four years. But then of course all these categorizations and groupings are as arbitrary and fundamentally meaningless as many words in the dictionary. Turkey is participating in the championship and may well win it, although we know that many EU members are opposed to Turkey joining the EU, and many people would argue that Turkey is not Europe. But that is matter for another debate; you could also argue that Russia is as European, or not, as Turkey…

I have been watching many of the games over the last two weeks. It feels like a civic duty: streets, supermarkets, shops, cars, houses are all festooned with flags not only from Switzerland, but also Italy, Spain, Turkey, Portugal, representing large and influential immigrant communities. Whenever a team scores a goal, you can hear horns blowing, sometimes in the house next door (at least they don’t shoot, like in Croatia). After the decisive victory, supporters of the winning teams drive around town honking. Apparently they are allowed by law to half an hour, but after Spain’s victory last night I was hearing honking well into the night. It’s only once every four years (two if you count the World Cup), so the police tend to be indulgent. They may even be out honking themselves, if they’re second generation immigrants…

Four years ago I was in Greece when the Greek team won the championship. It was wild, unheard of, one of Europe’s dark horses, little Greece beating host country Portugal in the final. I was on the staid, religious island of Tinos and even the priests were shouting and screaming. Fireworks outside the churches; honking all night long. Friends in Athens said they did not sleep.

What is it about this football fever that makes everyone go wild? Why do I, a perfectly sedate and graying woman, sit all alone in front of the television screaming “Allez Ribé!” or “Ajde Hrvatska!” or “Elate paidia!” Is it memories of the 1998 World Cup final when Croatia lost to France, but not before scoring a goal that showed me briefly, in the café on Hvar where I sat watching the game surrounded by Croatian nationalists, how a collective fever can blind you, intoxicate you, make you do ridiculous and dangerous things you would never do otherwise? Football is a tremendous safety valve; but it is also a fervent way of feeling human, of sharing with strangers, of knowing what it is to be together on this tiny planet and having to get along. Friends who were in Paris in 1998 or Rome in 2006 say how unforgettable the experience was—as was my time on Tinos. I am deeply sorry the Swiss team have not made it to the final: their generosity, their hospitality, surely makes them as deserving as Greece, or any host country in the end. But especially one that is more truly European than most.

But then, the Swiss have Roger Federer. And Wimbledon has just started…

Flag photo courtesy Getty images

Someday I’ll look back on these days with a sort of rueful sadness, thinking, Remember how awful that time was, how you thought it would never end? Because end it will, sooner or later, for better or worse, but a page will be turned, or even a chapter, and the story will continue.

For now I am in a strange limboland of not there and not here. I left there, California, a week ago to start a new life in Switzerland, but I’m not here yet. I’m in a sad and horrible place of looking after my sick cat, who clearly did not want to leave California. (more…)

It was one of those phone calls when you know there’s something not right. This person shouldn’t be calling you at this time of day, or on your cell phone. You answer, and to make things worse, it’s your landlady, and after a moment of annoyance that she is calling you at work, you hear her saying right up front that she has bad news.

Pick one, goes your catastrophe-panicked brain:

a) The house has burnt down.

b) She has to raise the rent, or sell, and who knows who your landlord will be then.

c) She found your kitty run over in the street. (more…)

Last week I was in my favorite bookstore, Stacey’s, on Market Street in San Francisco, trying to buy a copy of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Why I was looking for Tom Jones is a long story which I won’t go into. What I will mention is that, first of all, Stacey’s is an endangered species. It is one of the last independent bookstores in San Francisco. Since I began working here, I have seen half a dozen independent bookstores close, most recently Cody’s and Clean Well Lighted Place, within a few weeks of each other. When I go into a place like Stacey’s I almost feel endangered myself: there are fewer and fewer customers, and seemingly endless piles of shiny, alluring books that no one has time to read anymore. As an (erstwhile) writer in a place like that, I feel both the awed reverence that a worshipper can feel in a temple, and the vague unease that I am on a leaky ship without lifeboats. There is a sadness about the place, now. (more…)

January 3, 2008

Today we had the first of our “winter storms.” Read—where California is concerned—heavy, relentless rain, and wild winds, up to 80 miles an hour. Trees across the road. Surges of waves in the normally tranquil bay. Power outages for sure, up to a million homes, from Santa Rosa to San Jose. Traffic disrupted, accidents, freeway closures.
All of these things have happened. Hurricane force winds, said the radio.

At 8:00 a.m. I decided—unilaterally—to stay home. It’s a Friday, and I should have been at work, on a quiet, end of holiday season day; but when I looked out the window and saw the madness—tree branches and debris on my patio, my little cottage vibrating like a sailboat at its moorings, and just my imagination telling me what crossing the Golden Gate Bridge in a rickety, American public transit bus would be like—I took the decision. (See the photo of my usual number 4 commuter bus below…) Don’t think I had a free day, an enjoyable day off similar to a holiday. I was unspeakably bored. Because the power went out at 4 a.m. and has still not returned sixteen hours later; the light from outdoors was dim and uncooperative: Thou shalt not read, sayeth the Lord. Candles are of little use when you have a 530 page novel to plough through; and this blog is being written on precious battery time (3:31 at the moment, and I also have a film to watch). (more…)

I recently flew from San Francisco to Dallas on my way to visit a friend in the Deep South. Ever mindful of finding a reasonably priced flight, given the recent hikes in air fare, I capitulated to the worst case scenario: a red eye for my outbound flight, a return on Christmas day. You gets what you pays for.

We took off at one o’clock in the morning: the plane was full, long gone the days of having three seats to oneself on such a flight (my last full row to myself flight was on a red-eye a year before 9/11…) I was trapped moreover in a middle seat, but my neighbors on either side were quiet and slim and like me, wanted only to grab three hours’ sleep before landing in Dallas. (more…)

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? (more…)

Every year I would think to myself, who would I like to win the Nobel prize for literature? And most of my own personal nominees were either dead or not quite of the stature of a Nobel prizewinner, and very often not male enough. Or they’d won it already. But I would often think, quite wistfully, of Doris Lessing, that if she were awarded the prize, that would be a worthy recognition by my own Nobel standards (Steinbeck, Pasternak, Seamus Heaney). But she was passed over so often, and was getting on, and it seemed as if she were going to get it, she would have got it by now. I assumed those gentlemen in Stockholm found her too little of a lady to their liking: too feisty and feminist, her work most definitely not male enough. (more…)