Home
Webmail
Sakura
Flickr
About meWorking [on] the Weekend
I bought a Loverboy CD recently. It gives me all kinds of clever ideas for the post titles.
I’m slapping up a couple paragraphs I just finished in this ongoing book translation . . . It needs to get done and moved out of the way so I can go on to bigger, better things. Like ski season! (Although some of the slopes we usually go to are in the Niigata quake zone; wonder how the resorts up there will fare this winter.)
Hideyo had a particular restaurant he always went to, and he ordered the same dish every time. The waiter no longer needed to take his order when he showed up; he would show the customer to a table and bring him his food. Without a word Noguchi would take his seat and bring out some book–literature like Goethe’s Faust or a medical text–which he proceeded to read to the exclusion of all else. Without looking at the plate he would chew on whatever he had managed to spear on his fork while he turned the pages.
His approach to research was little different. After working at the institute laboratory late into the evening he would return home and continue the work there. Midnight always came and went with Noguchi reading some text or peering into a microscope and sketching a microorganism, a cigar clenched firmly between his teeth. At times even he would succumb to fatigue, collapsing into a chair for a nap or toppling onto his bed. He was a stranger to pajamas. He would sleep like a dead man for a few hours in his clothes and awake refreshed and ready to work some more.
As I read about this guy’s life I marvel at his energy. He slept perhaps three hours a night for most of his life, from his teenage student days on. If I had that sort of talent . . . ah, I’d be done with this translation already.
Translation class has started up again and there’s homework to correct every week. Last night I got interviewed by ALC, a company that puts out a bunch of translation-related magazines. “Here’s a teacher at School X and here’s his philosophy on the art of translation.” That kind of thing. Don’t know if it will ever be online anywhere so I can link to it, but it’s certain to make me famous throughout the land. I think.
In a couple weeks I have to go to South America with the prime minister. APEC meeting in Santiago. I’m so there.
What can one do in Santiago, I wonder.
-
Flickr photos
www.flickr.com 
More of Durf's photos
Comments are closed for this entry.