None of These Corrections

A young man, who has swiftly become a very good friend of mind surprised me the last time we met together for dinner.  In the few months since we’d last met, he’d written a book.  It was a book about China.  It had already been published in Brazil.  And he asked me to read it and consider an English version. 

I have considered writing one or another book, or script about China for twenty-five years.  So immediately I was remarkably impressed, unwittingly envious and defensively suspect that someone who had only been engaged with China for a few years, could have penned something on the topic, so quickly.   But all of that was swirling inside and outwardly and genuinely, I was honored that he’d ask and immediately promised to dig in.

It isn’t particularly difficult to translate a few hundred-page document from Portuguese to English.   You cut a few pages, throw it in Google Translate and cut the English out and form a new document.  I recall trying to do this on the plane ride home, but the internet connection wasn’t any good and I read a novel instead. 

And this task stood in front of me for the last two months.  I had always meant to read it, but the process always seemed daunting and many other things were pressing.  Once I had the doc translated the actual reading and editing would be a significant task unto itself.  I have edited the work of a number of people over the years and beyond being a nice gesture it is usually an educational process as well.  And I knew it would be in this case, if I could only just find the time. 

Today I sat down to make my way through.  It was odd, making suggestions knowing on the one hand that the finesse of his native language writing had necessarily been blunted by this rough translation and, perhaps more pressingly, it has already been published.  So none of these corrections would necessarily wind up in the text.  It was already in the market.  In some cases, I wondered if what I was reading wasn’t an anecdote or an epiphany I might have shared, myself.  

It took two full days to properly complete.  But I was glad to send it off today, with a note apologizing for being so tardy and a suggestion that everything was offered with the utmost humility.  I hope it proves valuable to him.  He’s a good man and he’s worth the time.  And as expected it was useful for me to consider my own as yet unborn work looking carefully through the pages of a friend’s.

Sunday, 01/05/20