I’ll be honest, I always thought you were something of a drunkard and a fool. A stoner. Brash and brassy and a bit trashy, you know? Not my type at all. I was so confident in my assessment of you that I never gave you a second thought, never made an effort to find out for myself why people so often mentioned you in glowing terms. I was snobby and made assumptions about you based on rumor and conjecture. And you know what happens when you assume, right? Well, in this case, you wind up missing out on one of Europe’s greatest cities.

In my mind, I had populated you solely with roaming packs of Englishmen in search of a debauched “stag do” and hordes of backpackers stumbling in and out of coffeeshops, interspersed with tour groups surging from one attraction to the next before moving on to another city. And let’s face it, you do cater to all of those folks in many respects. But when I laid eyes on you myself, I realized this is not the sum of what you are.

It was a late afternoon in spring when I first made my way into your heart and you first found your way into mine. We crisscrossed your waterways, bumping over bridges, stopping occasionally when a drawbridge rose to let a boat to cruise past. Tables and chairs spilled across your pavements, filled with café-goers drinking up the sun while drinking their coffee. Long-legged women pedaled effortlessly down your leafy streets, sitting bolt upright on their bicycles. Higgedly-piggedly buildings and houseboats crowded along your canals. You appeared refined and bohemian, vibrant and serene, old and new, all at the same time. You were nothing like I’d thought you’d be, and I was immediately beguiled.

Later we glided down the canals ourselves, and in the twilight, when the gloom gathered around our boat and lamps flickered on in your sublime old houses, I was transported. There is a feeling I sometimes get for which I have no single word, something primal triggered by darkness and light, by lanterns at dusk and illuminated windows in shadowy façades. It’s a tugging deep inside of me, a sense of yearning and familiarity rippled with an enticing shiver of unease. I succumbed to this feeling eagerly and entirely as we drifted down the water. I was mesmerized by the crooked canal houses scrolling past, their uncurtained windows inviting me to marvel at the mysterious wonders inside—and those attic rooms, the cozy lofts and snug garrets perched behind ornate gables, with their sloping ceilings, beams and pulleys, wood and stone shifting and creaking in the dark. I dreamed about those attics all night, imagining myself in one of them, caged by heavy wooden beams, the ceiling soaring away from me—terrifying and thrilling. (One year later, I got to sleep in just such a room—a dream come true.)

Your magic isn’t dimmed by day. For every vast, impressive museum there is a hidden corner: an old synagogue, a quiet bench on a canal, a tranquil courtyard behind an unassuming door. You reward the aimless wanderer with your succession of charming bridges and curious nooks and crannies. There are dusty maps in the window of one shop and 3D-printed art in the next, dusky pubs and bright cafés, wheels of cheese and buckets of tulips, and a cat in every doorway. I stroll your streets and feel like I could happily stroll them forever (and judging from the number of people who ask me for directions, I must look like I have strolled them forever).

Of course, as a tourist I have the luxury of only interacting with the pretty things. I can spend all day mooching around in galleries instead of working or lugging groceries up narrow stairs or trying to find a good plumber. And it’s not like you don’t have your shady side, too, just like everyplace else. Your red-light district may be as much a theme park as it is a den of iniquity, but the iniquity is still there. I resolutely avoid your big pigeon- and people-packed squares, and I steer clear of the rowdy groups that are drawn to some of your less charming locales. As I gaze at your serene canals, I find myself wondering how many drunken and/or drug-addled individuals have to be fished out of them each year. Also, your cyclists are hell on wheels.

But when I think about you now (as I do quite often), I think of you only with fondness. I love your wonky buildings and your delightful houseboats, your gingerbread cookies and apple tarts and cheese, your beer and herrings and frites, your museums big and small, your history glittering and grim. I love the canals that encircle you and the bridges that span you. I’ve met a good number cities in my time, and you’ve charmed me like very few others. I was wrong about you, Amsterdam, and rarely have I been so happy to be wrong.

It’s such a seemingly straightforward question, but when I thought about how to answer it, it started to unspool in front of me, spawning a tangle of associated questions and thoughts about how location has been a defining characteristic of my life: my peripatetic childhood as an Army brat, my college years bouncing between Massachusetts and Germany, my post-college life in Freiburg, my current life as an ex-pat in Brighton, and, ultimately, my travels with Jeremy, which have taken me to countless places that have captured my imagination and made me stop and think: “I could live here.”

But where would I really want to live? I’d have to divide my answers up into two categories: the realistic possibilities (as in, places I could actually potentially wind up in some day) and the comforting fantasies (as in, places that probably don’t exist).

In terms of realistic possibilities, I’d say Brooklyn, Seattle and San Francisco are at the top of the list. I have to admit that my perception of the first two places has been affected by family ties; my brother and sister-in-law live in Seattle, and my mom’s side of the family has its roots in New York, so the connection I feel to these places goes deeper than simply liking all the coffee shops and artisanal food producers. That said, I do love the coffee shops and artisanal food producers. I also love the mountains around Seattle and the Manhattan skyline from Brooklyn. I love that these are cities on the water as well (as treacherous as that water can be). All of this applies to San Francisco, too, though the presence of friends and acquaintances would be the substitute for family ties in this case. Equally, these are all places where Jeremy and I could both easily work and where we’d already have a network of people we know to ease our transition into a new life. So when I think about moving for real instead of just going off on flights of fancy, these are the places that come to mind first.

There is a sub-category of realistic possibilities consisting of places where I think I could live quite comfortably but can’t picture myself actually moving to (at least, not anytime soon). Amsterdam and Berlin are probably at the top of the list here; Amsterdam charms me and Berlin fascinates me, but I don’t have any particular reason to move to either place. More unrealistically, I’d add places like Sydney and Kyoto; Sydney dazzles me and Kyoto enchants me—but maybe it’s enough to be dazzled and enchanted as a tourist in these towns.

When it comes to comforting fantasies, I picture living in a place that exists beyond the spatial constraints of the real world. It’s a cozy cottage, and it has a big kitchen with French doors that open onto a patio and lovely garden. There are neighbors close enough to be available if I need them but far enough away that I never see or hear them when I don’t want to. It’s within walking distance of a friendly, tidy town filled with the coffee shops of San Francisco, the markets of Seattle and the artisanal food producers of Brooklyn. All of our friends and family live in this town or the surrounding towns so we can see them whenever we want. This town is in the Scottish Highlands, on the Washington coast, on the Cornish coast, in the Florida Keys, in the French countryside, in Tuscany, in the Alps, in the west of Ireland. It’s wild and windswept, placid and tropical, calm and quiet, fun and bustling. Oh, and it’s close to an airport so I could easily get to all of the other places that aren’t this place.

So, the short answer: if I could live anywhere, I would choose to live everywhere.

I’ve had a pretty spotty track record when it comes to National Blog Posting Month. Encouraged by my friend Ms. Jen, I managed to make it all the way through my first NaBloPoMo in 2007, posting something to my blog every single day in November. I bowed out in 2008 because I was traveling too much to able to blog consistently. I was back in 2009, though I resorted to some silly haikus to make my quota. 2010 was a bust, and last year I only managed a single blog post in November about the misery of a migraine headache.

So how about 2012? I’ve been back in the blogging saddle again recently and I’m really enjoying the feeling of writing for the sake of writing. I want to keep up the good work, and NaBloPoMo could be the incentive I need to do that. On the other hand, the next few weeks are going to be travel-tastic again, and I hestitate to commit to continuous blogging when I’m likely to crumble under the pressure around mid-November.

But nothing ventured, nothing gained, eh? Take the plunge, feel the fear, bite the bullet, write the darn blog posts. I’m not making any promises, but I’ll try. NaBloPoMo, here I (sort of) come.

After I had located the Anna Seghers quote in Hangen’s piece, I started skimming the rest of the essay to get a feel for the context—but I soon found myself reading more and more slowly, and then scrolling back to the top of the page to read the whole excellent (and long!) piece from the start, and then looking around at the website itself and wondering: “What is this amazing thing I’ve stumbled across?”

This amazing thing was The Astounding World of Holiday, a website run by Josh Lieberman and dedicated to Holiday magazine. Holiday was a kind of travel magazine published from the 1940s through the 1970s. I say “kind of” because it’s certainly not your typical ten-best-places-to-eat-in-Venice sort of mag. Most of the long-form essays in Holiday are less about travel and more about places and the people who inhabit them. They transport you to different eras and different worlds: to an Atlantic City clam-shucking contest in 1946, to Kentucky coal mines in the 1950s, to a Tahitian dive bar in 1968, to the Hollywood Hills of the 1970s. They don’t necessary entice you to visit these places, but they give you an insight into what life might be like in each of them.

The quality of the writing is outstanding, probably because the list of writers who contributed to Holiday is astonishing. There are essays by Flannery O’Connor and John Steinbeck, by Joseph Heller, William Faulkner, W.H. Auden and Ernest Hemingway. There’s a touching piece on “The Machine-tooled Happyland” of Disneyland by Ray Bradbury. There’s a guide for tourists traveling to Mars by Arthur C. Clarke (“Take only the stuff you actually need on the ship. I strongly advise you to buy one of the approved travel kits—most of the big stores like Abercrombie & Fitch can supply them.”). Bizarrely, there’s a 1961 profile of two fashion models by Alfred Bester—yeah, that Alfred Bester. There’s even an illustrated tale by Edward Gorey, for crying out loud.

My heart leapt when I found the Holiday magazine site because both the magazine and the website remind me of all the wondrous things that remain to be discovered out there. And like so many of the best things on the World Wide Web (and in the whole wide world), the Holiday site is a labor of love. As site owner Josh Lieberman writes:

“Holiday is a testament to the fact that some things still manage to get lost in an age when almost everything is archived, or at least mentioned, online. As far as I can tell, no one seems to care much about the legacy of Holiday, and no archive exists. By now I own some forty copies of the magazine. I may be the archive.”

This welcome internationalism goes hand in hand with a somewhat tricky issue: multilingualism. For better or worse, English is the lingua franca of the web, and English tends to be the lingua franca of web conferences throughout Europe (France, unsurprisingly, being an exception). And while your average young Continental European generally has a good-to-excellent grasp of English, it’s not entirely unusual for conference organizers in southern Europe in particular to provide simultaneous interpreters* for attendees who might struggle to follow a native English speaker barreling full-tilt through a technical presentation.

To be fair, when speakers or attendees actually notice the presence of interpreters at a web conference, they usually express interest in what the interpreters are doing as well as a degree of sympathy for the difficulty of the job. But this sympathy often has an overtone of bemusement, like “Ho ho ho, just wait until [insert name of speed-talker] gets on stage—those interpreters have their work cut out for them!” Well, yeah, they do, and that work becomes a whole lot harder, if not actually impossible, when presenters make no concessions to the interpreters laboring on their behalf.

The process of comprehension, interpretation and expression that I talked about in reference to written translation applies to interpreting as well, but on a massively compressed timescale (i.e., instantaneously) and with added technical issues. For an interpreter, it’s not a matter of just talking (or signing) faster to keep up with a speedy presenter, it’s a matter of speeding up the entire input/output process—and even for the most proficient interpreters, there are cognitive and physical limits to how quickly you can absorb information, process it and spit it out again in a different form.

If this all seems too abstract, here’s an exercise you can try to get a feel for the job of an interpreter. Pop some headphones on and fire up James Burke’s talk from dConstruct this year. Just for fun, skip ahead to about 1 minute 40 seconds where he talks about the “speak/listen event” and try shadowing or parroting what he says, when and how he says it, while doing something else at the same time, like writing a list of numbers.

To kick it up a notch, try it again, but instead of simultaneously parroting him, stay about a phrase (or a “unit of meaning”) behind him and, using your own words, reformulate or paraphrase what he says as he says it. Do this for 20 minutes at a clip, on and off, all day long—and you still won’t be performing the mental and physical feats demanded of simultaneous interpreters, but you’ll have more of an idea of what the interpreters are going through as speakers blast through presentations on stage.

You might think it’s not your job as a presenter to cater to an interpreter, it’s the interpreter’s job to keep up with you no matter what (I’ve encountered speakers who seem to take a perverse pride in doing absolutely nothing to accommodate an interpreter—an arrogant, self-defeating attitude if I’ve ever heard one). But if you care at all about accessibility—and surely you do if you’re working on the web—then you should understand that interpretation (signed or spoken**) is an issue of accessibility, and this accessibility goes two ways: Interpreters are there to make your presentation accessible to others, but they can only do that if you make your presentation accessible to them.

In an ideal world, the interpreters would get the text of your presentation, or at least an outline or even just the slides, in advance. But I know how these things go in real life (talks are tweaked late into the night, slides are context-dependent), so I know in most cases this isn’t going to happen—though if it does happen, you will probably have the interpreters’ eternal gratitude.

If nothing else, providing the interpreters with a list of technical terms, acronyms or unusual product names can be helpful so they don’t waste time trying to parse something like “whatdoubleyoujee” as a word when you’re actually talking about the WHATWG. Also bear in mind that numbers are tricky; they fly by quickly when spoken and are constructed differently in different languages (the relatively pithy “ninety-nine” in English is a mouthful of “quatre-vingt-dix-neuf” in French), so rattling off long lists of dates or statistics may cause your interpreters to struggle. If those numbers are important to you, say ’em clearly and slap ’em on a slide to boot.

If you can’t give the interpreters a heads up on your presentation and you won’t go to the lengths really required to internationalize your talk (e.g., taking out language-based jokes and specific cultural references), then the least you can do when you get on stage is be aware of the interpreters who will essentially be giving your presentation along with you while translating it on the fly at the same time.

Presumably you want your words to reach as much of the audience as possible. The interpreters are there to help you do that, and you can help them help you by speaking clearly and at a moderate speed (which you should be doing anyway, right?). I know from experience that a measured pace of speech is usually the first thing to fall by the wayside during a public presentation, but it’s worth working on this—not just for the sake of interpreters or a foreign audience, but for any audience anywhere.

At the very least, there needs to be communication between conference organizers, interpreters and presenters. Organizers can let presenters know well ahead of time if there are going to be interpreters at a conference, presenters can speak to the interpreters about potentially problematic parts of a talk, and interpreters can request as much advance information as possible from the organizers. If everyone is prepared for the situation, it’s a lot more likely that everyone will be happy with the outcome.

There’s no way around it: Interpretation is an effort, providing interpreters at an event is an effort, and adapting a talk for a multilingual audience is an effort. But it’s an admirable, necessary effort, and by making it, you show that communication, accessibility and people are important to you. As a speaker, not making the effort is the equivalent of saying “I don’t really care whether anyone understands what I say”—in which case you may as well be speaking to an empty room.

* A brief note on translators versus interpreters: Translators work with written documents, interpreters work with spoken/signed language. At conferences, the people muttering into microphones at the back of the room or the people signing at the front are simultaneous interpreters, not simultaneous translators.

** Incidentally, while conferences rightfully get kudos for providing sign language interpreters, they rarely garner the same level of public praise for providing spoken language interpreters, even though the two kinds of interpreters are doing the exact same job for the exact same reason—one is just doing it more visibly than the other.

Note: In the course of writing this, I came across an article with tips for an interpreter-friendly presentation in the August 2012 issue of the American Translators Association magazine. The article goes a bit further than I do, but the gist is the same: There is an effort to be made and it’s worth making it.

Also, if you’ve worked as an interpreter at a web conference recently, or if you’ve organized or spoken at a conference with interpreters, I’d love to hear about your experiences. Leave a comment!

Freiburg looms large in my psyche. I spent six formative years there; it’s where I first really set out on my own, where I realized that I could hack it in a foreign country after all. It’s where I met Jeremy, where we started playing in a band, where both of us gradually worked out what we wanted to do with our lives. The town played a big role in making me the person I am today. Freiburg is more a part of me than almost anyplace else I can think of; even after twelve years in Brighton, I’m not convinced Brighton has as much of a hold over me as Freiburg did—and perhaps still does.

In light of this, the idea of returning to Freiburg for a visit filled me with both wild excitement and a faint sense of unease. I wondered if I would feel a painful pang of nostalgia, or maybe even a longing to move back. I thought I might be dizzied by memory, and I feared seeing the ghosts of lost friends, or the ghost of my past self, wandering the alleyways of the old town.

I was certainly slightly dizzied when we first showed up. The sun was shining, the town was picture perfect, and I felt like I was in a dream, like the dream I had in Shanghai. I had the unsettling sensation that I was about to wake up and find myself still in Brighton—and when Jeremy said “What if Brighton was all a dream?” a chill swept over me because it was an idea I couldn’t dismiss out of hand.

It was such an odd feeling to be someplace I knew so well but didn’t have any direct connection to any longer. I recognized the buildings and I could find my way around the streets, but it was an abstract recognition, as if I were in a simulation I had run through countless times before. Everything was unnaturally sharp, everything jumped out at me: the way they wrap up pieces of cake in a café, the cadence of old women speaking dialect, the height of the forested hills around the city, the whack and thud of spiky chestnuts plummeting from the trees.

It was strange, too, to be a tourist in a town I once called home—and to be reminded of just how beautiful that town is. As I walked around taking pictures, I had the urge to say to the people passing by, “I’m not seeing this for the first time! I lived here, I know all of this!” I think I wanted to re-stake a claim to a place that was no longer my own and capture that place in a way I never did when it was my own.

After the dizzying rush of the first day, I started to settle in and my memories came back in snapshots, like the photos that pop up when you move your mouse across Google maps: that’s where I watched Jeremy and Chris busk, that’s where I waited for the tram to take me to a party, that’s where we had a conversation the week I was suffering badly from asthma, that’s where we dangled our feet in the Bächle on a hot day, that’s where we ate dinner and our friend first started to seem unwell. There were happy memories and neutral memories and sad memories all jostling for attention, coming into focus and fading out again as I moved through the city.

And yet, for the most part, I didn’t feel the pang I was expecting. I was only overcome by nostalgia once, on our last day there, as I walked down the main street and heard a busker strumming a guitar in the distance. It instantly snapped me back to 1995, when I would walk down that same street and listen out for the jangle of the bouzouki—and if I heard it, my heart would leap because it meant that Jeremy would be there, strumming and swaying in his waxy green coat and fingerless gloves, smiling through his song when he saw me. When I reached this particular busker (who was belting out Wish You Were Here, of all things), I scrambled through my wallet for some change while blinking away tears and the image of a Ghost Jeremy and Ghost Me. And then the haze of the past lifted, and I moved on.

In fact, I feel more of a pang now, writing about being back in Freiburg, than I did when I was actually back in Freiburg. I kept telling people that it was weird to be back, but it was mostly weird because it wasn’t that weird. The town was just as I remembered it. Things change in Brighton all the time; we go away for a week and come back to find a restaurant we liked has closed or a shop we used to frequent has moved. I’m sure a lot has changed in Freiburg over the past twelve years, but I mostly saw the places that were exactly the same: the same stores in the same spots, the same dishes being served at the same restaurants, the same trams going to and fro in the streets. There was something supremely reassuring about that; I didn’t need to try to recapture the past because it had been preserved in amber for me.

The much bigger change has taken place within me—or rather, in the situation that Jeremy and I now find ourselves in. While we were in Freiburg this time, several people asked us if we were revisiting all the places we used to go when we lived there. We laughed and told them, “No, we’re visiting all the places we couldn’t afford to go to when we lived here.” I suspect a lot of people who know Jeremy and me now have a hard time imagining us as a busker-cum-bread-seller and “starving student” respectively. But when we lived in Freiburg, we lived on a shoestring. We shopped at Penny Markt or would sometimes splash out on spaghetti bolognese or fried potatoes at a student pub for five German marks (about two bucks). We got all of our furniture second-hand or for free. We frequented the library and went to cheap movie nights at the university. We didn’t travel, ever (hard to believe now, I know). And we certainly didn’t sip sparkling wine on the terrace of the Greifenegg-Schlössle while watching the sun go down over the city, which is how we spent our first evening back in Freiburg this time around.

So this time around, we got to experience the other side of the city. We stayed in the hotel that we had previously only admired from the outside. We ate on the patio of the restaurant where I had watched Jeremy and Chris busk about sixteen years previously (and when buskers came around to us this time, we tipped them generously). We drank all the wines we hadn’t been familiar with back then, we lounged in beer gardens and ordered microbrews with abandon. We spent a considerable amount of time each day at the farmer’s market, gobbling down local tomatoes, berries, hams and sausages, our minds boggling at the abundance we never got to take full advantage of when we lived in Freiburg. And we sat together and talked not about “how far we’ve come”, per se, but about how lucky we’ve been, and how funny life is, and how much sweeter wine tastes after such long anticipation.

So with the exception of a few moments of sentimental reflection, visiting Freiburg after twelve long years was pretty much like visiting any other beautiful town—with one difference: Usually when I visit someplace, I walk around imagining what it would be like to live there. And when I walk around someplace I’ve really fallen for (like Amsterdam, or Brooklyn), I spend much of my time there with a faint feeling of longing for a life not (yet?) lived. But as I walked around the lovely streets of Freiburg in the glorious weather, I enjoyed it but I didn’t feel the frisson I was expecting—and I think it’s because I wasn’t imagining what it would be like to live there because I didn’t have to imagine it because I already know. That made it easier for me to visit, and easier to leave again as well. It’s not my town anymore, but at the same time it will always be my town, and that’s a great comfort to me.

As the translator, mind you. Just the translator.

In my life as a translator, I have had people (sometimes jokingly, sometimes not) ask me if I’ve ever considered becoming a “real” writer instead of “just” translating other people’s writing. Even when people don’t ask outright, I feel it is often the unspoken thought lurking behind any discussion of translation between a translator and a non-translator. The value placed on producing an original piece of writing is certainly not equivalent to the value placed on producing an original adaptation of that piece of writing in a different language.

From the non-translator’s point of view, translation may seem to be nothing more than “typing in a foreign language”, substituting one word for another, like a machine. A non-translator may assume that for every source text (the text to be translated) there must be a canonical target text (the translation), and the translator’s job is merely to pound out the right words and be finished with it. The common preconception is that someone else has done all the hard work of researching and writing, so the translator “just” has to transpose the completed work from language to another. And how hard can that be, right?

It’s a matter of ignorance—and I really don’t mean that in a derogatory sense, I mean it in the literal sense of not knowing something, of simply not being aware of or understanding what the process of translation actually entails. As a professional translator, I feel it’s my duty to help educate people, to dispel the myths about translation (anyone can do it! machines can do it!) and make others more aware of the difficulty—and the value—of what it is I do.

The problem is that I find it almost impossible to convey the difficulties and the intensity of translation to someone who is not a translator, and particularly to someone who may only be familiar with a single language. How do you explain what it’s like to look at a sentence in one language and see a hundred possible permutations of that sentence in another—because there are always permutations, sometimes endless permutations. There is rarely a “right or wrong” in translation**, rarely a one-to-one correspondence. You can almost always express something this way or that way, use this word or that word, this phrasing or that one. But even if you have all of the permutations at your fingertips (which, let’s face it, you never do—the human brain is not a brute-force computational machine), you have to choose, and to choose you have to understand—understand who the original author was writing for, who you’re writing for, what this particular word might mean in this particular context, what that phrasing might do to the rest of the paragraph, how everything hangs together—and just what it is that you’re really trying to say.

And how do you explain the frustration when you don’t see the permutations right away and instead have to throw the full force of your semantic and syntactic knowledge at a problematic sentence, sifting through vocabulary and idioms, combining and recombining, switching this word for that one, shifting clauses around, making one sentence into two or two into one, hacking away and hacking away at it like a sculptor, until you can finally step back and look at what stands there on the page and say, “Yes, that’s it. That’s how that needs to be said”—or rather, yes, that’s how that could be said, and that’s how I choose to say it.

Every act of engaging with a text—even just reading—is an act of interpretation. As we read, we interpret what we think the author is trying to say. And because all interpretation is subjective (based on our personal knowledge and experiences), all acts of engaging with a text are subjective. Texts don’t always trumpet their meaning at us—we have to negotiate their meaning. So reading is one level of interpretation, and translation is several levels beyond that (very few people will engage as intensively with a text as a translator will). Translation moves beyond interpretation back into the realm of expression: As a translator, I have to interpret the words and the deeper meaning behind them and then re-express that meaning for an entirely different audience using an entirely different set of tools (the “tools” in this case being the tools of my target language). The source text is the original author’s—but in the translated text, the interpretation is mine, the words are mine, the choices are mine.***

Translation exists in a hybrid zone between production and interpretation, originality and adaptation. When I look at the book I’ve translated, I see my thoughts and words on the page, but at the same time I see the author’s thoughts and words. I see all the work and research that the author put into the book, and I see all the work and research I put into it, the hours and hours (and hours!) I spent poring over reference books, the weeks and months I spent chipping away at sentences, circling the tortuous corridors of grammar, leaning so close to the computer screen to hear what the text was trying to tell me that I thought I might be sucked into my computer. And the final product, the translated book, is something that is both mine and not mine, the outcome of both my work and another’s—my achievement, but an achievement which springs from the achievement of someone else.

Analogies are a good way of helping people understand things, but I’ve struggled to find an analogy that really grasps the nature of translation and its hybrid character. The best I’ve been able to come up with is this: Being a translator is something like being a classical musician. The relationship between the translator and the original author is akin to the relationship between a performing musician and a composer. The musician doesn’t make the initial decision as to which notes go where—that’s up to the composer. But interpreting what the composer is trying to say musically and conveying that interpretation to an audience—that’s up to the musician. Without the composer, the musician has nothing to work with; and without the musician, the composer’s work is dead on the page****. Just like a performed piece of music is both the performer’s and the composer’s, a translated text is both the translator’s and the author’s. Many authors might not agree with this—but I suspect authors who are also translators would.

So, I have translated a book. I have performed the music. I may be “just” the translator, but without me there is no translated book, there is no music—so I think I’m ready to drop that just for good.

* There will be more details forthcoming…eventually. Right now it’s very much at the “in production” stage.

** Obviously you can get meanings wrong when you translate, but assuming you’ve got the meaning right, there are often countless ways in which you can express that meaning.

*** Sometimes the interpretation and the choices are made in conjunction with the original author, but more often than not the translator is left on her own.

**** In the context of translation, the original author’s work isn’t “dead on the page” to the original audience, but it’s dead on the page to anyone who can’t read the original language. Similarly, some people can look at a written musical score and “hear” it in their head, but I’m pretty sure most people can’t.

She was a librarian, a research librarian. She seemed to know everything, and if she didn’t know it, she could find it out for you.

She was head of the Bay Shore-Brightwaters Library on Long Island. She dedicated her life to that library and its community, and she was named a New York State Woman of Distinction for doing so.

She showed me New York City, as a kid and as a college student. When my brother and I were young, she showed us the architectural canyons of Manhattan, Radio City Music Hall, the Statue of Liberty from the Circle Line. When I was in college and obsessed with medieval history, she ran me into the Metropolitan Museum of Art so I could see the Unicorn Tapestries.

She was an Irish dynamo, small, dark-haired, bustling, organized and organizing, holding everything and everyone together.

She was a dear friend of my mom’s from college. Not a “blood relative”, but so much closer to me than many of the people I could claim as relatives.

I stayed with her and her gentle, ailing mother once as I was passing through New York on my way back to Germany. We ate dinner at the River Cafe, and as we sat there under the Brooklyn Bridge and peered at the glittering Manhattan skyline, I told her I had fallen in love with an Irish boy.

I last saw her in London several years ago. She finally got to meet my Irish boy, and we all went for lunch at the marvelous Mandarin Oriental. It was a sunny day, the restaurant was washed in light.

I spoke to her on the phone last year. Jeremy and I were in Brooklyn, she was in the hospital. She wasn’t taking visitors, but she was happy to hear from me, and I was happy to hear her voice, as vigorous and New York as ever.

I sent her flowers last week, because I didn’t know what else to do. I sent a note and told her I loved her and that Jeremy and I were thinking about her.

I do love her, and I am thinking about her, and I miss her.

I’m pretty sure I got my first migraine when I was about 10 years old. I remember doing math exercises in school one morning and having a hard time focusing on the numbers. This visual disturbance morphed into a sickening headache that left me sitting inside during recess, unable to move without nausea and pain. I suppose it eventually passed and I just got on with my day. I don’t remember even telling anyone about it. Childhood nonchalance, I guess.

The migraines didn’t really come back until I was in college, when stress and hormones did their part to make the headaches a more common if (thankfully) still not very frequent occurrence. These days, hormones, stress and air travel are my most reliable triggers, along with (surprise!) excessive alcohol consumption - though unlike a lot of migraine sufferers, I seem to do fine with red wine, thank goodness. But sometimes there’s no apparent trigger at all. Sometimes you just get a headache that “turns” at some point; it ceases to be a headache and becomes something much, much worse.

If you’re not sure you’ve ever had a migraine, then you haven’t had one. Migraines aren’t just “really bad headaches”, they are agonizing, debilitating, all-encompassing beasts that leave you curled up in a ball, whimpering, thinking you would do anything at all to make the pain stop: cut off a limb, kill someone, throw yourself out the window. A relative of mine used to beat her head against the wall because her migraines were so bad. I tend to compulsively press on various parts of my skull as if I could find the single pressure point that would block all of the pain. Unfortunately there is no such point, and I just wind up with sore spots all over my head the next day.

As far as migraine sufferers go, I’m one of the lucky ones: I don’t get migraines terribly frequently, when I do get them they don’t last for more than a day, and if I can get to a darkened room and go to sleep they mostly pass within a few hours. Some people’s migraines last much longer. My mom has been migraine-free for several years now (thank you, modern medicine), but when I was growing up, her migraines would lay her low for days on end. I remember her ghostlike shuffling when she was in the throes of a migraine; I didn’t understand it then, but I certainly do now because I do that shuffle myself. Some people get multiple migraines in a month - or even a week. I can’t begin to imagine the suffering they experience, and I would pray to any god available that I never have to go through such hell.

I had a migraine yesterday. It was partially my fault: We were out late the night before being somewhat debauched on Halloween, and while I tried to be good and balance glasses of beer with glasses of water, I clearly wasn’t good enough because when I woke up at 7 yesterday morning, it felt like my skull had split open in the night. I drank water and took some painkillers in the hope that this was a hangover headache that would fade with a bit more sleep. Ten hours later I was still awake, still in bed and still in agony, trying not to cry because crying made it worse. At some point, someone had slowly driven a railway spike through my left eye and out the back of my head (this is my typical migraine profile). Any light was blinding, any sound was deafening. The pounding pain came in nauseating waves, over and over and over again. The wave would crash in my brain and I’d think I was going to throw up, then it would abate and I’d think “please let that be the end of it please let that be the end of it” - then it would crash again, then abate (“please let that be the end of it”), then crash again, all day long.

I rolled over and over in bed, eyeshades on, fingers pressing into my skull, wishing fervently that I could just fall asleep, getting up only to shuffle to the bathroom or, once, stupidly, to answer the phone (the person on the other end asked if I was okay, because clearly I didn’t sound okay, and when I mumbled that I had a migraine, she perkily replied, “Oh, yeah, lots of people are sick here today, it’s miserable, isn’t it?” - and it took all my willpower not to say, “Lady, you don’t have a f*$king clue.”). I briefly thought I might be able to sit and do some work, but two horrendous minutes at the computer convinced me otherwise and I blindly stumbled back to bed, thankful that I didn’t have anything too pressing to do or any responsibilities to anyone other than myself.

I kept thinking of the sumatriptan I picked up from the pharmacy a few weeks ago, but having never taken it before I was too scared to try it, particularly while I was alone. Sumatriptan constricts the blood vessels in your head, with strange and sometimes dangerous side effects. Many migraine sufferers get relief from it, but many others find the side effects worse than the migraine itself. My fear of having a heart attack trumped my desperation to get rid of the migraine, so I kept pointlessly popping acetaminophen and worrying about liver failure instead. There’s no easy way out when you suffer from migraines.

In the end, I don’t know whether it was the passage of time or the pills that finally made the migraine start to fade yesterday. All I know is that by 5 o’clock someone had started to withdraw the railway spike, by 7 o’clock I could sit up without feeling like I was going to throw up, and by 8 I was hesitantly enjoying some chicken noodle soup and rice from a local Chinese takeaway. I felt as fragile as a blown-glass Christmas ornament, spaced-out and slow, but I felt like a human being again instead of just a bundle of wildly firing pain synapses and over-dilated blood vessels.

Today, as expected, I’ve got my typical post-migraine symptoms. It feels like there’s a bruise through my head where the railway spike was. I feel a twinge there every now and then and it makes my stomach clench with anxiety - is the migraine coming back? I don’t want to move very fast, and I’m cautious about what I’m eating and drinking. I feel wrung out, not just physically but emotionally, like I’ve survived an ordeal. I’m relieved the ordeal is over, and I’m trying not to think too much about the next one, because another one is bound to come at some point.

But I woke up without a migraine this morning, and it was the best feeling in the world.