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Manipulated Science...
Jul. 18th, 2016 06:41 pmBack during the time I worked as a production editor at Plenum—and totally unrelated to that work—I ran across a book by one Mark Popovsky, the title of which was best translated into English as Manipulated Science. The style made me think of Solzhenitsyn's multi-volume GULag Archipelago, but the Popovsky book was much shorter, so the enumerations of various perpetrated outrages were much shorter as well.
I made notes as I read the book—typing them out on my dad's old Smith Corona (with a great many typographical errors, which gave me loads of editing/proofreading practice, I might add) and I effectively created a summary of the book as I went along.
I ran across those notes a few minutes ago, and realized that a chance encounter with an editor from TIME magazine could well be looked upon as the watershed between the twenty-five cents per column inch I was paid to write up the results of my high school track meets for the Locust Valley Leader in 1968 and 1969 and the long, uniformly dry path that brought me, in 1982 or thereabouts, to the first of what would prove to be many sales of articles to computer magazines and contracts for two programming books.
That chance encounter took place during a softball game played between the Plenum team (I played third base) and a team from TIME magazine, under the auspices of a summer "publisher's softball league" that took over a chunk of Central Park real estate on a regular weekly basis.
Somewhere in medias res during the game—I may have been talking to a TIME runner on third, I don't remember exactly—I mentioned the Popovsky book and floated the possibility of maybe, possibly writing a bylined review. All I got was a grin in return as the next TIME batter grounded out to short to end the inning and the teams swapped sides.
However, as the game was breaking up, another member of the TIME team came up and asked me for some details about the book, which I was happy to provide. A business card was then pressed into my hand, with a request that I call. I did, and in the end, I received a check for $50, as a sort of "finder's fee." Something appeared a couple of weeks later in TIME about the book, but it was too short to be a review, and appeared with no byline.
It was not as satisfying as writing a review, but I did not send the check back, either.
All of this occurred before I took my first baby steps in translation, so the thought of actually translating Popovsky's book never really occurred to me. A year or so later, a translation was published, by Doubleday, if memory serves.
Those notes have been scanned, and the paper is in the recycling bin.
Progress, of a sort.
Cheers...
I made notes as I read the book—typing them out on my dad's old Smith Corona (with a great many typographical errors, which gave me loads of editing/proofreading practice, I might add) and I effectively created a summary of the book as I went along.
I ran across those notes a few minutes ago, and realized that a chance encounter with an editor from TIME magazine could well be looked upon as the watershed between the twenty-five cents per column inch I was paid to write up the results of my high school track meets for the Locust Valley Leader in 1968 and 1969 and the long, uniformly dry path that brought me, in 1982 or thereabouts, to the first of what would prove to be many sales of articles to computer magazines and contracts for two programming books.
That chance encounter took place during a softball game played between the Plenum team (I played third base) and a team from TIME magazine, under the auspices of a summer "publisher's softball league" that took over a chunk of Central Park real estate on a regular weekly basis.
Somewhere in medias res during the game—I may have been talking to a TIME runner on third, I don't remember exactly—I mentioned the Popovsky book and floated the possibility of maybe, possibly writing a bylined review. All I got was a grin in return as the next TIME batter grounded out to short to end the inning and the teams swapped sides.
However, as the game was breaking up, another member of the TIME team came up and asked me for some details about the book, which I was happy to provide. A business card was then pressed into my hand, with a request that I call. I did, and in the end, I received a check for $50, as a sort of "finder's fee." Something appeared a couple of weeks later in TIME about the book, but it was too short to be a review, and appeared with no byline.
It was not as satisfying as writing a review, but I did not send the check back, either.
All of this occurred before I took my first baby steps in translation, so the thought of actually translating Popovsky's book never really occurred to me. A year or so later, a translation was published, by Doubleday, if memory serves.
Those notes have been scanned, and the paper is in the recycling bin.
Progress, of a sort.
Cheers...
