the eye of a rich man doesn't pass through my blog anyway

11:26 AM 4/2/11

I was sick at my stomach last night and didn't sleep well. I still haven't eaten anything this morning.

When they woke me up, they gave me a demonstration of the difference between translation and interpretation. RDL says he doesn't want to do translations anymore, but he doesn't mind doing interpretation. I wasn't sure why he would hate doing one thing but not mind the other.

This morning they translated his forum signature joke for me. As soon as I figured out what was going on, I was able to try to help, but it wasn't easy. I noticed that you can translate it in a short, poetic, elegant way with as few words as possible; or you can add lots more words and details to it, which is what I myself am tempted to do - if something uses very few words, I'm tempted to add a few hundred more words to elaborate on it.

You can do a translation that tries to make other symbols that are similar to the symbols used in the original, and substitute one symbol for another, but the symbol in the new language might be different from the symbol in the original language. And I was constrained by the fact that this fantasy involved me saying it in the forum, in front of mixed audiences, so I would not want to use the literal words that the symbols stood for, because it involved body parts. So I tried to find substitute words that worked well enough.

I had several different partial, unpolished, approximate translations that needed more work to make them elegant. They all got the idea across but they needed to be cleaned up.

Then we did an interpretation. Doing that, you don't have to worry about how loyal it is to the original. You can say what you think they MEAN, and it doesn't matter how you change the symbols and metaphors or how poetic the language is or whether it's exactly parallel. You can interpret someone talking in your own language, too, if you help them express what they mean in a different way. Interpreting was much easier and I had a brief, quick, sloppy way of saying the same thing without worrying about how loyal it was to the original way of saying it. I just had to get the meaning across. That is what I would do if we were all standing together and I had to quickly explain the meaning to somebody else who needed to understand it without worrying about preserving the original words. All that matters is getting the meaning across. So I could see how interpretation was much easier.

After messing with this for a while, they finally pointed out to me that 'rich' means Richard. I went, like, the whole hour not even noticing that until the very end.

And there was the observation that the signature should no longer be true now that he is married.

And then I was supposed to create a witty reply to this, and they gave me a sloppy mixed metaphor to work with (as inspiration, but not necessarily the final product), because mixed metaphors sometimes make me laugh until I nearly puke (I commented about it on facebook a while ago when I read 'Robbing Peter to pay the piper' and other jokes - it was uncontrollable hilarity for a while, laughing and screaming and crying and slapping my knee and trying not to puke, and stopping myself from laughing, with great effort).

This mixed metaphor wasn't as funny - it had a purpose. It was something like, a needle can enter the kingdom of heaven, but it can't make it drink - but I had to make it clear that it was about making HEAVEN drink, and not the needle.

(One of my all time favorites, which I have memorized, is 'The vodka is agreeable, but the meat is inferior.')

Well, that is what I woke up to this morning.

So we're wondering when RDL is going to have any children? Julian Simon quoted a Shakespeare sonnet that I remember the beginning of. 'From fairest things we desire increase, that thereby beauty's rose might never die...' He quoted that poem in the book as part of the spirit of the book.

I saw a picture of RDL in the wilderness embracing the sky with his head back and his arms stretched out, and because of the mood that I was in, I wept. I wouldn't be as emotional as that usually, but I was sick and have been continuing to have a drug residue reaction, so my emotions are intense and distorted. But they are still clearly triggered by particular things. It was the shape of the hands that set it off. I don't know why.