...Get increasingly nervous at the prospect of my first serious, adult, A-league professional meeting. How will those sacrosanct academic figures receive a self-taught asshole? Wait, rollback rollback:
Some 6 years ago I put up on my blog two chapters of David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" translated into Portuguese, just because. Back then some big shot professor from a University down South sent me an email complimenting me on the quality of the work. Another few pleasant emails were exchanged and I thought that was that. Unbeknownst to me, he started putting in a good word for me with the publishing houses he knew (something very kind and even slightly risky, considering that I don't even have a degree in anything), and then last year I was contacted by some people who, out of desperation, decided to test me, a complete nobody, for a gig translating James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". I aced it and got the job, translated the thing and now the book is supposed to come out in, I think, two or three months. Which is cool as all creation, but...
See, this book is 1 of a series of 3 that this publishing house is gonna put out. It's gonna be "Dubliners", "Stephen Hero" and then "A Portrait(...)". The first two were translated by a real translator (you know what I mean), an aged professor who spits academic titles and professional accomplishments every time he coughs. He is introduced in the book flap with a thick paragraph detailing his career accomplishments. As for me, I noticed no one asked me to provide details about my formation. I wouldn't have anything to show for it anyway, but... just what the hell will they say about me in the book flap? "He followed us home?". Anyway, this is just an offshoot worry from the main branch of worries, as I said in the beginning of the post:
This Friday and Saturday they'll celebrate Bloomsday in Sao Paulo and I'm supposed to go there and meet the editor, the other translator, the dude who put in good words for me way back (he now works for the most prestigious publishing house in Brazil, and he just put out his last translation... "Ulysses" - just to hammer in the A-league aspect of the thing). I'm giving you all this information so perhaps you can empathize with me here, because at some point someone is bound to ask what's my formation, and the only answer I can give is "Natural inclination and boredom at work". Not good. Not good at all. Also my literary knowledge is patchy as all shit, considering that it has always been the product of my interests and whims at a certain time, and not of a consistent study plan (the list of woes continues like this for a while). Fuck, well, what's the worse that could happen, right?
(God, luckily there will be plenty of whiskey there...)
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Topic: Today I'm gonna... (Read 1343824 times)