Endless Work
MY MOTHER comes from a family of restless activity lovers. Her dad built stone walls and took daylong bike rides well into his seventies; his brother Leon, meanwhile, tried to retire but hated it so much he launched a whole second career. My father comes from a family of major- and minor-league obsessives. In me these inheritances manifest the same way: endless work. Years of juggling jobs, school, translation, freelancing, and fiction writing have reinforced my natural inclination to overload myself, to pack my schedule, to open my laptop before my coffee kicks in and not close it till well after my brain has leaked down the back of my neck.
I am, to be clear, neither a productive nor an efficient writer. I am an anxious and maniacal one. Take my editing process, which barely deserves the name: I revise by retyping the same paragraph five, ten, fifteen times, waiting for it to shake itself into place. This strategy leads, eventually, to precise and deliberate prose, but for a freelancer on a deadline, which I usually am, it is a terrible, time-sucking way to proceed. For a fiction writer it has real hazards. My ceaseless rewriting can leave me with polished pages full of plot holes, character inconsistencies, bad ideas, and general garbage. But when it comes to translation, my bad editing habits—all my awful work habits, in fact—become complicated. Some turn into virtues. Others turn into traps.
Rewriting is the lone bad tendency that becomes good without qualification—or almost without—when I start translating. After all, translation is rewriting. Specifically it is a form of
