alexpgp | LJ Idol Week 5.16: Coloring Outside the Lines

After marrying a Soviet citizen in Moscow, I returned to the States secure in the knowledge that my days working in the USSR for an American travel agency had come to an end. I was comfortable with this watershed, realizing that, as a newly minted husband with responsibilities, it was time to move on to bigger and better things.

Then again, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that intellectually, I understood that I needed to find a place to live, get a job, and maybe even start putting down some roots. In reality, however, I knew it might be a year or more before the Soviet bureaucracy might get around to letting Galina leave to join me, and meanwhile, my wedding band - very nearly the only tangible evidence of my new status - didn’t have the mana to light a proper fire under my butt and keep it lit.

I interviewed for few jobs, but it seemed nobody was interested in an engineering major who hadn’t pursued engineering straight out of college. So, between temporary day labor assignments, I tried to make money with my typewriter and my camera, confident of my talent, but ignorant of the fact that talent is commonplace, and that the secret to freelance success is not the ability to produce a product, but to sell it.

The day finally came when I learned that the creaking wheels of officialdom had come full turn, and Galina would be permitted to leave the USSR to come visit me in New York. It was a day marked by unbridled joy at the prospect of again seeing my bride, and gut-wrenching terror as I realized how little there was for me to show for the intervening time apart.

And so it was that, newly inspired, I buckled down. In short order, I rented an “apartment” in the basement of a house in my old neighborhood in Queens and then set about finding a job. Still starry-eyed about the printed word and convinced I had printer’s ink in my blood, I interviewed for - and landed - a position as a “senior production editor” at a publishing company that, as it happened, published English translations of around 150 Soviet scientific journals. I would be responsible for just over a dozen of them.

Shortly thereafter, Galina arrived from the USSR and, mirabile dictu, did not go shrieking back across the ocean intent on cutting the ties that bound us and begging the Politburo’s forgiveness for ever having had anything to do with me. Things were looking up.

The curious part about my employment was that no knowledge of Russian was required to do the work (though as creaky as my proficiency was when I started, a reading knowledge of Russian was a definite plus). My job was to work with three employees in my “department,” along with a couple of freelancers, in a routine that started with editing received translations for spelling, grammar, and house style, then proofreading typeset translations after they had been technically edited and typed, and finally, checking camera-ready plates to make sure the typeset copy, equations, figures, tables, footers, page numbers, and whatever else had been properly pasted up.

The work load was murderous. I sat down once to calculate just how many words I passed my eyeballs over every week, and the figure I arrived at was staggering, something close to one million! Naturally, I wasn’t reading for comprehension, but at some level, my mind still processed what my eyes looked at, in fields as varied as semiconductors, plasma physics, and astronomy. The hours were long, and there was always work to take home. Eventually, my eyesight deteriorated to the point where I couldn’t make out the street signs in my neighborhood.

On the other hand, all that exposure made me pretty good at comparing translations against the corresponding Russian source text, mostly in cases where the English sounded strange - as in the case where “hydraulic ram” had been translated as “male water sheep” - or when it was obvious something in the original had been missed. I even started to translate short snippets of such omissions, both for myself and for other editors.

And that's how I earned our daily bread for nearly two years.

Then one day - I recall it was a Friday - an article translation went missing from a sheaf of translations returned by a technical editor for an upcoming issue of the Soviet Journal of Low-Temperature Physics, one of the books I was responsible for, which had to go to press by a certain date that was not far off.

I called the editor, who obligingly tossed his uptown office with no result. Then my boss tried calling the translator, who apparently had departed for a three-month vacation to parts unknown. What to do? My boss’s office settled into a sepulchral silence as he and I tried to think of a way out of our predicament. After a few moments, an idea formed in my mind.

“I could translate it,” I said.

“Who, you?” said my boss, “Don’t be ridiculous! You’re not a translator!”

His reaction made me recall comic book ads that began “They laughed when I sat down at the piano...” Still, the missing article was only four pages long, and I’d been eyeballing translations for so long, I was confident I could do this.

“Why not let me try?” I asked. To his credit, my boss kept his mind open and thought about my proposal. Doubtless he also realized that it was late in the day and that no translator could be found until Monday, at the earliest.

“Okay. Here's the deal,” he said after a few moments. “You bring in a translation on Monday and we’ll courier it up to the editor. If he says it’s good, you get paid the freelance rate. If he say’s it’s no good, you get nothing. Agreed?”

I'd worked for him long enough to know I could expect no less. We shook hands.

I don’t remember the details of that ensuing weekend very well, which supports the theory that our minds cause us to repress overly painful memories. I do recall, vaguely, that I struggled and strained and looked up very nearly every word - twice - in the course of writing that translation. I learned, along the way, that it was one thing to compare source text with its translation, and quite something else to conjure up a translation given just the source. I became one with my Smith-Corona typewriter and a weatherbeaten copy of Callaham's Russian-English Dictionary of Science and Technology I had borrowed from the office.

By the time Sunday night rolled around, I realized that I had never before put so much effort into a writing project.

Late on Monday morning, my boss came into my office and announced the technical editor’s verdict. “His note says your translation was better than most,” said my boss. He didn't smile, but he didn't scowl, either.

Then he handed me a form to invoice my translation, my first ever, and the first of many since.

Cheers...