Movements of translation

"Translating is writing"

Marguerite Yourcenar, writer (1903-1987)

Big up to my friend Seb who posted this on Facebook to mark what could be a big step in my life as a writer, and not only as a translator.

Translating a novel is an arduous job, and like writing it requires a healthy lifestyle, diligence and, more often than not, having to force oneself to settle to the desk and down to the task. About one fifth of the book is done so far, but the amount of work has been tenfold as I had to research a part of history and of the world I had only dim knowledge about: Persia in the eleventh century. I read roughly a hundred articles on different topics, people, regions, battles, events. It connected with what I already knew and this is perhaps what I like best in my job: connecting things. Because everything is connected. Even picking up a German-made map of Persia in the fourteenth century (in order to find the old names of the cities, burgs and rivers, which change through the centuries, of course) can make you connect what you know with what you learn. Knowledge is like a multi-layered spider's web, only way more intricately woven, and not plane, but three-dimensional, for the webs criss-cross. So is history, and the world.