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So there is life after Monday
Jun. 1st, 2010 08:35 amNo opera yesterday.
And -- gasp! -- no gym yesterday.
Went home by taxi, collapsed on couch, ate something shortly after 5, threw it up right away, had a small medicinal whisky. Fell asleep around 6, woke up at 11, watched TV till 1 a.m., went to bed, slept till 5.30.
Much better today.
Not going to the opera was evidently the right decision (not much of a decision, really, more like giving in to the inevitable), because it lasted till midnight. Irene told me they had to have long intermissions between each act in order to change the scenery. o_O 4 hours for Aida! Thanks, but no thanks.
I'd ordered Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy from Amazon and started reading it yesterday. Due to tiredness I didn't read much more than 60 pages, but the hype seems entirely justified. It's been some time since last I read anything crime-related (last one was a Rebus novel I think), and I'm quite picky when it comes to that genre. I don't like superman-detectives, I don't like too much blood and gore, I don't like too much action. That's why I'm so fond of rebus and Wallander, but Lisbeth Salander and Carl Blomkvist are shaping up to be the kind of detectives I like. And the books are huuuge! I love huge books. (Except for Infinite Jest, which is more of a hate-love, but I'm going to tackle that one, yes I am. Just give me time.)
Weather has gone awful again. The air is clean and smells wonderful, but that's cold comfort if what you really want to do is play tennis, and there are no covered courts. Bummer, because Valentina had finally succeeded in booking the sand court at ABC club for Thursday morning (holiday), but if it's wet there's no way you can play. Synthetic dries more quickly, but unless it's completely dry it's slippery as hell. Well, there's still the gym. And running in between rain showers -- along the river, not on the Vodno, because wet tarmac is also slippery.
Dalibor, my Macedonian teacher, has caught the flu and had to cancel today's lesson. Egoistically speaking, it's not such a bad thing, because I still have to catch up on studying. I did homework last weekend, but instead of being a good girl and going over my -- now quite voluminous -- vocabulary book, I started translating Terry Pratchett's "Mort". So I'm learning a lot of useful words like turtle (morska schelka) and shell (slupka) and so on, and it's really improving my skills, but as I'm also supposed to talk about things like constitutional reforms, interethnic relations and the Name Issue with Greece, the politics-related vocabulary mustn't be neglected either. Anyway, I don't envy the person who has to translate Pratchett into Macedonian.
I've never been much into theory of translation, but of course doing it myself, even on a very unprofessional level, provides lots of food for thought. Like for example the fundamental choice whether to translate names, toponyms etc. or use the original. That one's really tricky. I remember seeing a German trailer for the Lord of the Rings movies and being appalled at the German translations of toponyms (Auenland, honestly!) and names. On the other hand, if the names have a meaning, like e.g. Discworld, can the translator really rely on the readers getting it if he doesn't translate them? Discworld would be easy, but what about the Ramtops? What about Djelibebi? Even people who speak decent English might not know what a ram is. So, even though my translation isn't likely ever to be read by anybody but Dalibor, I chose to create Macedonian names, which is a challenge in itself. (Apart from the fact that translating from a foreign language into another foreign language is an act of hubris, but I'm not aiming at perfection here)
And, merely to show that I'm definitely not a modest person -- just in case anyboy had any such illusions -- may I say that I'm insanely proud of being able, after 10 months of learning Macedonian, to translate newspaper articles (ínto German of course) and producing far better results than our professional translator? OK, that's Pride done. Now I think I'll dedicate myself to Sloth.
And -- gasp! -- no gym yesterday.
Went home by taxi, collapsed on couch, ate something shortly after 5, threw it up right away, had a small medicinal whisky. Fell asleep around 6, woke up at 11, watched TV till 1 a.m., went to bed, slept till 5.30.
Much better today.
Not going to the opera was evidently the right decision (not much of a decision, really, more like giving in to the inevitable), because it lasted till midnight. Irene told me they had to have long intermissions between each act in order to change the scenery. o_O 4 hours for Aida! Thanks, but no thanks.
I'd ordered Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy from Amazon and started reading it yesterday. Due to tiredness I didn't read much more than 60 pages, but the hype seems entirely justified. It's been some time since last I read anything crime-related (last one was a Rebus novel I think), and I'm quite picky when it comes to that genre. I don't like superman-detectives, I don't like too much blood and gore, I don't like too much action. That's why I'm so fond of rebus and Wallander, but Lisbeth Salander and Carl Blomkvist are shaping up to be the kind of detectives I like. And the books are huuuge! I love huge books. (Except for Infinite Jest, which is more of a hate-love, but I'm going to tackle that one, yes I am. Just give me time.)
Weather has gone awful again. The air is clean and smells wonderful, but that's cold comfort if what you really want to do is play tennis, and there are no covered courts. Bummer, because Valentina had finally succeeded in booking the sand court at ABC club for Thursday morning (holiday), but if it's wet there's no way you can play. Synthetic dries more quickly, but unless it's completely dry it's slippery as hell. Well, there's still the gym. And running in between rain showers -- along the river, not on the Vodno, because wet tarmac is also slippery.
Dalibor, my Macedonian teacher, has caught the flu and had to cancel today's lesson. Egoistically speaking, it's not such a bad thing, because I still have to catch up on studying. I did homework last weekend, but instead of being a good girl and going over my -- now quite voluminous -- vocabulary book, I started translating Terry Pratchett's "Mort". So I'm learning a lot of useful words like turtle (morska schelka) and shell (slupka) and so on, and it's really improving my skills, but as I'm also supposed to talk about things like constitutional reforms, interethnic relations and the Name Issue with Greece, the politics-related vocabulary mustn't be neglected either. Anyway, I don't envy the person who has to translate Pratchett into Macedonian.
I've never been much into theory of translation, but of course doing it myself, even on a very unprofessional level, provides lots of food for thought. Like for example the fundamental choice whether to translate names, toponyms etc. or use the original. That one's really tricky. I remember seeing a German trailer for the Lord of the Rings movies and being appalled at the German translations of toponyms (Auenland, honestly!) and names. On the other hand, if the names have a meaning, like e.g. Discworld, can the translator really rely on the readers getting it if he doesn't translate them? Discworld would be easy, but what about the Ramtops? What about Djelibebi? Even people who speak decent English might not know what a ram is. So, even though my translation isn't likely ever to be read by anybody but Dalibor, I chose to create Macedonian names, which is a challenge in itself. (Apart from the fact that translating from a foreign language into another foreign language is an act of hubris, but I'm not aiming at perfection here)
And, merely to show that I'm definitely not a modest person -- just in case anyboy had any such illusions -- may I say that I'm insanely proud of being able, after 10 months of learning Macedonian, to translate newspaper articles (ínto German of course) and producing far better results than our professional translator? OK, that's Pride done. Now I think I'll dedicate myself to Sloth.
