Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Translation Meatloaf Dream

I'm taking the elevator up to the 14th floor to my translation agency. The 14th floor is the highest story in the building, but somehow there's a 25th floor button in the elevator. I dare not press it because as it is the elevator is very wobbly and swinging back and forth and I feel like I'm having a near-death experience. The elevator moves like a pendulum towards and away from the doors on each floor, swinging more and more violently. When the elevator dings at the 14th floor and the door of the 14th floor opens, I wait until the elevator swings close enough to the door and jump out and land on the floor of the 14th floor.

My classmate is already there and I make a reference to Edgar Allan Poe with regards to the elevator. She tells me the elevator won't kill me. I open the door to the translation agency. The translation agency woman is also my violin teacher. I hand her the electricity bill for January and she gives me an additional translation case--I am already working on somebody's autobiography. The new case is in classical Chinese and about the period of Chuen Chiou.

I am translating everything all at once and mix up the pages to the two manuscripts. In fact, the manuscripts are ground beef, mostly raw, some of it accidentally cooked a little at the edges from being defrosted in the microwave. I mix it up evenly like meatloaf and notice that there are actually still page numbers on the manuscripts so I should be able to separate the translated results. While I knead my meatloaf-translation project, the translation agency is torturing a graduate student whose thesis I translated and who still hasn't paid the translation fee.

3 comments:

  1. yum, translation meatloaf

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  2. I wanted to say I like this dream because it's so Borges, but then I realized I have never read any of his work :P

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  3. Hey, knowing what "so Borges" means is enough :p

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