Translating Early Modern French

I have spent over 35 hours in the past couple months translating two articles from French to English. One was in contemporary French about a medieval subject; the other was in early modern French (16thC, I think) and was on the subject of medicine and astrology. I'd read Rabelais in my undergrad many moons ago (pun here = the astrology text was about the moon) in the original early modern spelling, but at least it was a modern type with all of the elipsed characters inserted back in. This was a microfilm or EEBO-like printout of the original. Not an easy thing to read! If I never have to do another translation again in my life, I'll be very happy. These two texts were on top of the traduction d'enfer that I'd done earlier this term. It feels like my entire semester has been spent doing nothing but translating! (Well, that, and admin, job apps, and the web work for which I'm really paid.) Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be translators. It's a long and thankless job. I've been told that professional translators get paid by the word. Some misspelled early modern words can take me an hour to figure out! Fortunately I was getting paid for this by the hour, but I'd hate to do it every day for a living by the word. I'm soooooo happy to be done though! And now that the semester is almost entirely over, I'm looking forward to getting some "real" work done on my "real" research. Real work! Yay!

New office--finally!

16 months after we were supposed to move into the run-down, old house on campus that was being renovated and redubbed "Espace Renaissance" just for us, the day has finally arrived! Yes, after 16 months of "Oh, you'll be moving in next month", we actually have. I'm blogging from my own, freshly painted, private office. Muse, you would like it. The "coconut cream" accent wall looks pink under the neon lights in the ceiling (you know I don't do pink!), and the locks on the individual office doors are still not-functioning / non-existant, but all in all it is pretty good. The view out the back window, against which my desk is positioned and out of which I'm looking now, is not that bad either. If you can get your eyes to look through the thick screen of the fire escape fence, you can see the green rooftops of some of the old buildings in the center of campus, and even a little bit of the green soccer field next to the library. There are lots of students milling about, walking to and fro between the student center and the library, which is nice and attentuates the isolation of being a postdoc with next to no contact with other people on campus. Plus, the walk over to the real building for our faculty will be a bit shorter now. Best of all, from now on, we only have to climb half-way up that damn, steep hill! And, I've got my own bookshelf and my own file cabinet! What more could a budding scholar want?!

Keith Olbermann's Special Comments

Keith Olbermann's special comments are amazing! Biting, scathing, and smart. I only discovered him about a month ago, and I immediately changed my cable subscription to make sure that I got MSNBC just so that I could watch him. I first saw him when he did a special comment a month ago about the whole Bill Clinton Fox News interview brouhaha. A ten-minute rant against Bush, and every word of it rang true. Ditto for this one from November 1st about Bush's ridiculous demand that Kerry--a Vietnam vet--apologize to the troops in Iraq for supposedly calling them stupid when Kerry was really calling Bush stupid and Bush was too stupid--or too demagogic!--even to realize it.