A Spot of Trumpet-blowing

The instrument in question being my own. Yesterday, I had without a doubt the best 2 hours I've had at Columbia since I got here. I've been taking a seminar course with Prof. Carol Gluck this semester, mainly because my field of interest often crosses over from literature to history, and Prof. Gluck is one of if not the most pre-eminent figures in the field today. Seriously, she's a hugely respected, nay titanic Japan scholar on a world scale.

The class was a translation workshop - we had had four translation assignments throughout the term in addition to our reading, two Meiji and two post-war ones, and last week, in a writing workshop, we had been informed that our translations basically sucked, that to use CG's words, "they were only just beginning to emerge out of the swamp". So I think probably all ten of us, all grad students, were expecting to get ripped apart for the two hours for which it was scheduled. We had copies of everyone else's translations in front of us, heavily marked up, crossed out and so on by CG, so everyone could see where everyone else had made mistakes.

Forty-five minutes and two or three eviscerated classmates later, CG starts talking about the mechanics of academic translation. And she says "Now, Rob..."

Here it comes, I thought.

"...Rob is the master at this."

Huh?

"His translations are fantastic. Read his work, he writes beautiful English. Right, the rest of you, look at his Aizawa translation. That's English. That's how it's supposed to be done. You'll recognise his one in the pile by the star I put on the front of it because I couldn't believe how good it was."

Oh, so that's what that meant. And why none of my translations had any marks on them. I thought she'd just forgotten. That was not what I was expecting. "The master?"

"It's not because he's necessarily smarter than the rest of you, but because he's been doing this longer. So, Rob, how do you do it? Why don't you tell the class some of your secrets?"

Bloody hell, I thought. So I did.

They're few and far between, these moments. The ones that make all the hard work, the lost social life, the breadline existence and all the hours spent in the library seem worthwhile. That was one of them.

You have my permission to refer to me as "The Master" from now on.