Steal My Book!

I wouldn’t have known about my Russian pirate translator had I not set a Google Alert for the title of my debut novel when it was published, in April 2011. Over the following year, the alerts inevitably, depressingly became more infrequent. Worse still, they began to occasionally refer to eBay sales (“Like New!” “Unread!”). The title, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, began to seem freshly ironic, given the circumstances.

But in March, the alerts began pointing me to a message board on WordReference.com. There, a user with the handle AlexanderIII, who gave his location as Moscow, was regularly seeking help understanding my unusual word choices. He wanted to know, for example, what I had meant when I described the interior of a Bolivian hotel with 1970s decor as having “cucumber walls.” He wondered if that might mean that the walls had the texture of a cucumber, or maybe, he offered inexplicably, it meant that the walls were paisley.

Fortunately, a user with a teddy-bear avatar cleared things up:

se16teddy: I don’t associate the paisley pattern with cucumbers at all. I suppose it must be the colour: it is quite common to describe colours in terms of a familiar fruit (orange, peach, plum, apple, aubergine, …)

In another post, AlexanderIII cited a passage in which I described my protagonist waking up with his “hair askew, eyes puffy with sleep.” Did “hair askew” refer to a particular hairstyle, he wanted to know, or did the character just have bed head? A user with the handle Copyright—the irony of which I did not yet appreciate—assured him that sleep was to blame.

At first, I didn’t realize that AlexanderIII was translating the book; I thought he was just a fastidious Russian reader with a loose command of the English language. It was fun to see people debating the meanings of my thoroughly worked-over phrases.

After a few days, a member going by DocPenfro encouraged AlexanderIII to simply enjoy the book and not fret over all the details. AlexanderIII responded, “I’d love to, DocPenfro, but I’m translating it for a publisher so I must be sure.”

Holy crap, I thought, my book is going to be published in Russia! Then I remembered that no Russian publisher had acquired the rights, and realized that AlexanderIII must be translating it for some kind of book-pirating outfit.

In the U.S., book piracy is a growing problem. But Russia, I learned, has a remarkably mature black market for literature—particularly for ebooks, no doubt in part because the overhead is so low. Pirated books reportedly compose up to 90 percent of Russian ebook downloads. According to Rospechat, the state agency that regulates mass media, Russians have access to more than 100,000 pirated titles and just 60,000 legitimate titles, with illegal downloads costing legitimate vendors several billion rubles a year.

Of course, I wish one of Russia’s two major ebook publishers had given me a couple thousand dollars for the rights, but neither did. Like many novelists I know, I’m just happy to have people reading my work, whether they’re paying me for it or not. I’m also heartened that Russians care enough about reading to sustain a robust literary black market. In the U.S., you get the feeling that hardly anyone is creating pirated ebooks because—well, who’d buy such a thing?

I considered contacting AlexanderIII to offer translation help, but I sensed that if I wrote to him, he might vanish. He might even stop translating the book. So I became a voyeur to my own book’s abduction and, confusingly, found myself rooting for the abductor.

Though I was impressed by AlexanderIII’s dedication, his numerous message-board queries did not inspire much confidence in his translation abilities. At one point, he indicated that he was struggling with “white-liberal guilt.” (Me too!, I wanted to chime in.) He postulated that white liberal guilt meant: “the guilt for consuming white substance (cocaine).”

This post sparked a string of responses from fluent English speakers who for some reason were haunting the message board. In this case, a user with the handle Gwan rushed to explain that white liberal guilt indicated “that they are white (of European descent) men/women in a country colonised by Europeans.”

The rest of AlexanderIII’s posts were likewise met with a barrage of advice from jovial English speakers who would invoke the Oxford English Dictionary or conjecture about what I really meant when, say, I described Bolivian street kids “zooted on shoe polish.” AlexanderIII wondered: Did this mean the kids had smoked marijuana before shining shoes?

PaulQ: As you can see from the context, it is highly unlikely that the shoeshine boys would be smoking marijuana on boot polish. From Urbandictionary.com = Zooted: “being so f*cking high/drunk the only words you can say are nigga im zooted.”

Shoe polish can be melted to provide a drink (?) that will have strongly intoxicating effects. It is usually drunk by severe alcoholics or others too poor to afford proprietary alcohol, beer/wine/spirits/etc. (Do not try this at home.)

AlexanderIII: I see. Thank you very much, PaulQ. I’ve checked Urbandictionary but somehow have not found about drinking the melted shoe polish. This seems to suit best.

At that point, I very nearly intervened, to prevent any of my Russian readers from inviting severe injury or death. Lustrabotas, or Bolivian shoe-shine kids, get high from huffing polish, not drinking it. Before I could burst in, cyberpedant came to the rescue:

cyberpedant: Drinking melted shoe polish??? This seems absolutely incomprehensible. Sniffing it is far more likely, as the volatile chemicals are far more easily (and effectively) ingested through the nose. But, “whatever rings your chimes.”

In late March, a couple weeks into his work, AlexanderIII unceremoniously dropped my novel and began translating Dennis Lehane’s Gone, Baby, Gone. (A sample query: “Could you please help me out with a difficulty … ‘you are on fucking angel dust.’ ”) I was shattered. Even my pirate translator had lost interest in my book. But in early July, Google Alerts informed me that AlexanderIII had dropped Lehane and returned to the good stuff.

At one point in the novel, I describe my protagonist’s mother as having “a sentiment born of her cloying, overly maternal side.” AlexanderIII hypothesized that I had meant “a sentiment born of her memory about hardships of solitary life.” Though completely off base, he was drilling toward the character’s psychological core. I loved that. He misread the text, but he was wrestling with the sentences, much as I had wrestled with them originally.

And so, in early July, I finally sent a private message to AlexanderIII:

I’ve noticed that you have many questions about the book for the Russian translation that you’re working on. As the author … I am uniquely qualified to help you with these questions. Would you like my help?

No answer. He immediately stopped posting on the board. Then, a couple weeks later, to my surprise, AlexanderIII e-mailed me. It’s crazy to help someone steal my work, I know, but I couldn’t resist striking up a tenuous partnership with him. I still don’t know who he’s working for—no one has sought the Russian rights to the novel. Even so, I wish I could understand his translation: I’d love to read the book he read.

Yoda:

"Do or do not... there is no try."

From Star Wars

(and that's all folks

Buggs Bunny)

The historical archipelago Svefneyjar (“Sleepy Islands”) on Breiðafjörður fjord in west Iceland has been advertised for sale at the real agency company Torg. The islands have been in the ownership of two families over the past 18 years.

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View of Breiðafjörður and Stykkishólmur. Photo by Páll Stefánsson.

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Acquisition offers have been called for; the islands are estimated to be worth ISK 150-195 million (USD 1.2-1.6 million, EUR 1-1.2 million), according to realtor Sigurbjörn Friðriksson who is responsible for the sale, Morgunblaðið reports.

Svefneyjar number approximately 60 with a combined land area of approximately 0.4 square kilometers.

The archipelago is the birthplace of poet and natural scientist Eggert Ólafsson and served as home to the district assembly of Reykhólahreppur until the end of the 19th century when it was relocated to Flatey.

Considerable benefits come with owning the land. It is a nesting ground for eider ducks (eider down is a valuable export product), and egg collecting, bird and seal hunting has been practiced there, as stated on nat.is.

Also, Svefneyjar locals became the first in Iceland to harvest seaweed when the seaweed processing plant Thorverk in Reykhólar was established in 1986.

Svefneyjar have been for sale since November 2011.

.............

Islândia aceita arrendar 300km2 da ilha a magnata chinês

Preciso de enviar uma cartas para encarregados de educação, entro no programa e selecciono essa opção e preparo-me para escrever um texto com os avisos todos legais, mais a minha hora de atendimento e outras coisas e... alguém já actualizou os dados do programa de modo que a carta já tem essas coisas todas, por defeito, sempre, e eu não perco ali montes de tempo :))) nice... não sei quem fez esse trabalho mas...

Funniest Gifs

Solitude is enlightening but if it does not lead us back to society, it can become a spiritual dead end

I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls.’ Henry David Thoreau’s remark about his experience of solitude expresses many of the common ideas we have about the work — and the apparent privileges — of being alone. As he put it so vividly in Walden (1854), his classic account of the time he spent alone in the Massachusetts woods, he went there to ‘live deep and suck out all the marrow of life’.

[...]

To take oneself out into the wilderness as part of a spiritual quest is one thing, but to remain there in a kind of barren ecstasy is another. The Anglo-American mystic Thomas Merton argues that ‘there is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us. When our life feeds on unreality, it must starve.’

[...]

Karl Marx expresses this idea in another way. In his A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844) he says, ‘what difference is there between the history of our freedom and the history of the boar’s freedom if it can be found only in the forests? ... It is common knowledge that the forest echoes back what you shout into it.’

[...]

For the old cliché is true: no matter what I do, I cannot be free while others are enslaved, I cannot be truly happy while others suffer. And, no matter how sublime or close to the divine my solitary hut in the wilderness might be, it is a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage unless I am prepared to return and participate actively in the social world.

(John Burnside)

. more

NOCTURNAL READINESS

Dreams of abandoned order keep me company
each night. The unfinished novel
of married life, the endless harping
on the same thing, passion and its painful
consequences: ready now, and in all concience,
I must settle old scores,
get my own back, even though the digit clock
shows only 3.43: the present, I say, is
an illusion of a well-arranged past.
And yet, when I get up to sever
with my word the sinister plot, I wear
my slippers back to front, and the last few
drops always fall outside the bowl.

Pastakas Sotiris

Debt Crisis Wealthy Greeks Still Don't Pay Taxes

Average Greeks are reeling under the strict austerity measures passed in order to balance the country's budget. Top earners, on the other hand, continue to evade the tax man. Most of the self-employed in Greece significantly underreport their earnings, whereas shipping magnates enjoy generous exemptions. By Georgios Christidis more..

E nós não vamos pelo mesmo caminho com as excepções aos que mais têm cedendo à chantagem de, 'se me taxas mudo-me para outro país...?'

[...] conferences and corporate speaking gigs have helped replace the ­journalist-as-translator with the journalist-as-sage; in a magazine profile, the scientist stands out, but in a TED talk, the speaker does. And second, the scientific fields that are the most exciting to today’s writers—neuroscience, evolutionary biology, behavioral economics—are fashionable despite, or perhaps because of, their newness, which makes breakthrough findings both thrilling and unreliable. In these fields, in which shiny new insights so rarely pan out, every popularizer must be, almost by definition, a huckster. When science doesn’t give us the answers we want, we find someone who will.

[...]

“There’s a habit among science journalists to treat a single experiment as something that is newsworthy,” says the writer-psychologist Steven Pinker. “But a single study proves very little.” The lesson of the “decline effect,” as Pinker sees it, is not that science is fatally flawed, but that readers have been led to expect shocking discoveries from a discipline that depends on slow, stutter-step progress. Call it the “TED ­effect.” Science writer Carl Zimmer sees it especially in the work of Lehrer and Gladwell. “They find some research that seems to tell a compelling story and want to make that the lesson. But the fact is that science is usually a big old mess.”

(by Boris Kachka)

fonte

Ahmad Shamlou (Listen! 1957, Abridged)

The bad year,
The sad year,
The windy year,
The tearful year,
The year of pain,
and the year of plight!