Happy Independence Day!

The traffic headed downtown this morning was unbelievable. The line of cars extended several miles along Highway 160 from downtown to somewhere in front of the Pagosa Lodge. The red light at Piedra Road just gave the cars coming down that road an opportunity to cut in front of the traffic on 160. The whole point of going downtown was a parade, and a carnival, and who knows what else.

But I had work to do, so after it turned out that my trip to the auto repair place was ill-timed (we had ordered and received the wrong spare part), I came back home and started translating science fiction.

It's a humbling experience, let me tell you.

I guess I'm just used to the stuff I usually deal with; there are documents where I can work for long stretches of text without having to refer to a dictionary. Not so this text.

I suppose the good news is that none of the words that've been giving me trouble appear in the usual sources. Like that surveying text from earlier last month, more often than not, attempting to Google turns of the phrase turned up hits leading only to the text I'm translating (the book has been widely pirated, which has not prevented it from selling 350,000 copies).

I eventually ended up with all four physical volumes, on my physical desktop, of V. I. Dal's Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Russian Language (Толковый словарь живого великорусского языка), which was originally published in 1882, at a time when the Russian alphabet had a few extra letters and somewhat different spellings for some words. It's helped me track down the meanings of a pile of words, mostly indirectly, and it's helped expand my understanding of the language.

I've been too busy to take notes, but now that I've finished the first half of the project, I might go back and mark up the places where the Dal' dictionary came in handy.

Tomorrow, naturally.

Cheers...