A simple question with complicated answers

Well, in the morning I was reading a few pages from a novel (biography-like novel?) written by an English writer – Julian Barnes – about Dmitry Shostakovich, and strangely, all the people’s names and geographical names “converted” in my head into the good old Russian Cyrillic shape, meanwhile the unfolding story of the mounting pressure of a repressive regime on any creative person took me back to a period of my life that I and all the survivors would like to forget but we can’t, and just a simple Soviet cigarette name – Kazbek – opened the floodgates of memories from the very first visit during my student years to that land of terrible history and enormous lies; the box of those tobacco products had an image of the mountain peak (Kazbek today is in Georgia), actually, they are not cigarettes, as we know them in the West, in Russian they call them “papirosy”, and probably the Belomorkanal (named after the White Sea–Baltic Canal) was the first one we tried in the train during the long voyage… in the ubiquitous four-person sleeping car [wagon lit] compartment of the Soviet long-distance trains, right after shameless sex in front of the other student couple we picked each other to be together, although we mainly did it in the same time and often, since we were in our early twenties and full of drive and lust, then we drank tea and vodka, and we smoked, and watched the monotone steppe outside. OK, I went quite far from Shostakovich…

Then I had breakfast and, to break the silence, listened to a political podcast from a Canadian independent news outlet, which doesn’t want to accept funding from Google and the government, as many media entities do, and while this shitshow between the Meta (a.k.a. Facebook) and our federal government is going on, we cannot see or post links to news on our wall, neither can we see, for example, news links posted by our friends in faraway lands, Europe or anywhere, even though those newspapers are not under the jurisdiction of the Canadian government, effing Zuckerberg decided, that as Canadians we should be deprived even of those, so any news items posted by my friends from Hungary, Romania, Russia, Ukraine etc. are replaced with a stupid message from Facebook. I learned from the podcast that our so-called liberal (Liberal?) party shifted to the left. I knew that for a while: they always were, since I became a Canadian, a party of people without strong political convictions, just a bunch of opportunists who don’t like to work, so they went into politics for the excellent retirement benefits. Had I known this when I arrived, I’d have jumped into politics immediately. By the time one learns the intricacies of this country, it’s too late: you are old and retired without the pension benefits of a politician.

Then I tried to figure out why the three editions of my Hungarian Nabokov-translation (The Defense) were getting thicker and thicker. It turned out that the margins, the trim, and the line spacing, as well as the different fonts used, made all the difference. Add to this mix the quality of the paper, a thicker, maybe better kind of paper… and the mystery was solved. My friend, who doesn’t even know Hungarian, told me the other day that I should be proud because the translation must be good if all those editions (1990, 2008, 2024) used it practically unchanged. I can definitely say that my Hungarian version of the novel has been time-tested, and it is still appreciated. Of course, the exercise of dealing with the translated text reminded me of an unfinished project, a curious manuscript of mine about the “genesis of the translator” –  a somewhat pretentious title or topic put in this way, in which I try to trace those moments in my life that lead to my immersion in the world of languages and translations. And to the discovery that the cultures “behind” the languages are even more fascinating.

Now that my mind was freed from this thickness-enigma, distracting me for days, I could focus on cleaning up some text that I “exported” from a blog of mine into a Word document via RSS (don’t ask, total PITA), the only plugin that would do this presently is disabled on the WordPress site, for review. The action was aimed to create eventually a small e-book containing those blog posts, for a conveniently collected series of articles. Work in progress. Or another futile project…

Then I made a draft for a new website to sell my books directly from there. Years ago I wrote a small booklet for wannabe bloggers, how to plan and design the functionality of a website (mainly using WordPress as the engine), first starting with a draft on paper: add sections and pages that are vitally important for your own goals, and I still follow that advice of my own. If I found it good enough to share and teach, it should be perfect for my sites, as well.

And it’s still barely past noon…

That’s how I spent a quiet Saturday half day.