Remembering the Zodiac.

Just how weird can this get?

You are walking along an enclosed passage, holding a rope tied to a striking-looking ram. As you come up against a barred door, a barrier slides down across the passage behind you, between you and the ram, and as the rope slips from your hand, the door in front of you opens. You are in an empty bullfighting ring.

Well, not quite empty. There is a bull in the ring, and it's looking at you. It seems annoyed. It paws the ground. It grunts. In short, it gives every indication of charging you and impaling you on its long, sharp horns.

Matching doors open to each side of the bull and two identical rodeo clowns—twins, as far as you can tell—run out into the ring. As one distracts the bull, the other runs up to you, looks up, and starts gesticulating as if guiding some piece of equipment.

Something grabs you by the shirt and lifts you out of the ring. You look up and see that it's a flying crab, which is holding you in one of its claws. It soon deposits you outside the outskirts of the town with the bullfighting ring.

Safely on the ground, you hear a roar and see a lion nearby. It does not appear to be aggressive, but—well, it is a lion, so you are wary.

A maiden emerges from some bushes near the lion, walks up to it, pets it, tells you not to worry about the lion, and motions for you to follow her.

She leads you through a small forest to a paved, two-lane road, where there's a set of truck scales. She instructs you to wait for someone to take you to safety and leaves the way she came.

The road is straight and deserted. There is no traffic. You hear a skittering sound and turn around. A scorpion, about the side of small cow, is coming at you across the surface of the scales. It moves mechanically, but steadily.

Just as you turn to run, an arrow strikes the scorpion and kills it. You look in the direction from where the arrow came and see a centaur armed with a bow. Seeing the surprise on your face at seeing him, the centaur notes that if you follow him, he'll show you something really strange.

He leads you some distance down the road to a bridge over a river. You descend to the river bank, where you are introduced to a being that is a combination of a goat and a fish, lying in the shallows under the span. After a brief negotiation, you board a skiff and the goat-fish tows you downstream to a stone jetty, where a water-bearer is about to carry an aquarium full of water up a hill. He asks for your help, and you pitch in.

It turns out the water-bearer is taking water from the river up to a swimming pool in which there lives a large fish. The fish sticks its head out of the water and suggests you might want to start at the beginning again.

* * *It occurs to me that it takes a lot longer to commit this to phosphor than it does to remember the signs. This could easily be expanded to help with, say, the Latin names of the signs, e.g. each of the twins might have a gem in an eye (Gemini), or the goat-fish might be watching a film by Frank Capra while eating popcorn (Capricorn), etc.

And the purpose of the exercise? It's to strengthen the imagination and to create loci.

Cheers...

The things one learns while translating...

When you begin to work in the "words" side of a publishing house, you are introduced (if you lack such an acquaintance) to the idea of "style," a concept that may sound all cool and highbrow and whiffy, but in reality, exhibits a sort of 24-carat mundaneness that eventually becomes difficult to wash off using ordinary soap and water.

"Style" is sort of a step short of "grammar," answering questions such as "Do we use the serial comma or not?" and when (and where) to capitalize various words (president? President?). The well-known Chicago Manual of Style, for example, has this to say about quoting from "constitutions, bylaws, and the like" (indicating, by the way, that the serial comma is very much part of the University of Chicago Press house style):

In quoting from constitutions, bylaws, and the like, the words section and article are spelled out the first time they are used and abbreviated thereafter."

People get all sorts of hot and bothered when you violate rules of grammar, and they may have a point in doing so, because following the rules of grammar tends to keep the language understandable. On the other hand, when people get their knickers in a twist because of style differences—delivering lectures on Latin plurals when the word "data" is used as a singular noun, for example—my reaction is to want to poke fun at them.

And so, upon emerging from the hothouse environment of a publishing establishment, one finds that one had been forever changed. On the whole, I think the change has had a beneficial effect on my translation/writing career.

And thus it was that, upon seeing "Kurt Vonnegut" (sans ", Jr.") in a Russian text, it occurred to me to look up what the proper rendering might be of the name of the author of books such as Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions. Google obligingly found multiple references to the following explanation:

The author's name appears in print as "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." throughout the first half of his published writing career; beginning with the 1976 publication of Slapstick, he dropped the "Jr." and was simply billed as Kurt Vonnegut.

Now I know.

Onward!

Cheers...