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Monday, January 13, 2003 You know, someone really needs to save me from myself. In class today we're given an assignment in which we have to write a composition. En Español, por supuesto. A composition utilizing certain usages they've been inflicting on us – the subjunctive verb form, conditional sentences. Like that. I spend far too much time writing as it is, and we'd already been given other homework, reasonably painful all by itself. So the idea that I have to take a bunch of time to cobble together a composition over and above everything else got me grumbling just the teeniest bit. And I figured, well, fine -- why not save myself time and heartbreak? I'll just translate a few paragraphs of something I've already written, and what came to mind was a chapter of a recently completed novel. "A brainstorm!" thought my teeny little brain. "Woo-hoo! I've had a bona fide brainstorm!" So that's what I do. I find the text, I begin translating. I'm working away, it's actually feeling kind of exciting. I enjoy this particular piece to begin with – watching it take form in another language is a brand new experience, and I'm liking it. My translation is probably rife with errors, but for a while that doesn't tarnish the experience. What does begin to put a the tiniest of crimps in it is the amount of time it winds up taking. The passage I choose grows longer and longer and longer as it unreels in Spanish, until it's twice the length I need for the assignment, twice the work I needed to be doing. I can't cut the bugger down – it's only four paragraphs in length to begin with. It won't even make sense if it loses any text. Grumble, grumble. The minutes are slipping by, I'm still sweating away at this thing, and when I finally round the last corner and wrap the bugger – 90 minutes later – I am cracking myself up. I've taken WAY more time doing this work than the original assignment would have taken and, as I realize when it's all over, it doesn't incorporate the usages our profesora flogged us with today, which was (please imagine the following being said loudly by Jack Nicholson:) the POINT of the WHOLE GODDAMN THING TO BEGIN WITH. Life. So much entertainment, in so many unlikely forms. So. I now have a version of that chapter's first few paragraphs which I will undoubtedly inflict on this webpage at some point, after I've made sure it doesn't feature too many glaring errors in translation. rws 5:11 PM [+]
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