I have a bit of extra time during lunch and I will try to use it to alleviate my former embarrassment at posting so infrequently.
Today is Rosh Hashana, literally translating to "head of the year"--the Jewish new year 5772, or, a very long time. It's traditional to eat apples and honey to mark the occassion. While I don't have apples, I recently acquired some honey that was produced (well, bees produced it, but humans collected it and put it into little jars) in the Baha'i gardens and am looking for a good dessert recipe to use it. Maybe I'll try to make some baklava of my own, though for now I suppose you could argue there is no point, since I can buy wonderful and cheap baklava at a little shop down the mountain.
My cooking experimentation continues. I thought I would "specialize" in some sort of cooking for a while so that I could get really good at something, because I often feel like a jack of all trades and a master of none. For me, trades tend to have some sort of shiny gleam or other attractive element and I tend to get sucked into one and then another and another quite easily. I am trying to work on my staying power. In any case, I thought I would focus on breads and bread-baking until I learned that Israeli gluten contents in breads, flours etc. are especially high and if that's true that explains why a number of my friends have developed gluten allergies or intolerances in the Holy Land. That was enough to make me want to stop eating bread almost entirely. Lately I've been having or planning to have "theme" nights: Mexican (with a Mexican cooking), Brazilian (with two Brazilians, one cooking and one, well, affirming it was good and eating), cheese fondue (no Swiss were present), chocolate fondue (two Swiss will be present), Italian (Italians are unlikely to be present), and Turkish (I'm not sure we have any Turkish people here, but we're close enough to Turkey it doesn't matter...it doesn't matter anyway).
Remember, these are spaced out so I'm not going to get as fat as it seems, perhaps. In any case I am very excited for my upcoming nutrition class to begin (that will be next week) and I hope it will give me more ideas for cooking healthy as well as deliciously. I also hope it will inspire me to go running more--I've been walking for an hour almost every day since the springtime but it's not helping me lose a little bit of weight as I would like (I am in fact now a pound below overweight) and I feel so much better after a run.
To depart from the topic of food for a while, my literary translation did undergo critique as planned. I was rather disappointed that of the initial 14 participants only six bothered to show up to my critique. To be completely honest, I was very disappointed and have been having trouble tolerating the slightest bit of flakiness from anyone since then, myself included. If the group carries on I don't think I'll carry on with it, but I will work on my writing at home, including translation, since that may be good preparation for graduate study.
Since I passed the qualifying exam for the UWM program in translation I've been added to the program's email list and I have to say it's freaking me out a little bit. Many of the emails I've received have "call for papers" in the subject line. I do NOT want to earn a research degree. I want a practical degree. I know that UWM is not a research-oriented programme--no more than any other. That's what's freaking me out. I suppose with any schooling papers will need to be written to demonstrate assimilation and exploration of concepts, etc. Well, whatever I have to do, I'll do it. It's hard to get a job as a translator without a degree in translation. The bar is raising. The practical will come, if not so much in school then in actual work.
That application is nearly finished! I am still looking for schools abroad that may be cheaper and allow for immersion, but the problems with degrees abroad are the following: funding (even if the cost is overall low where will I get the money?), working from my native language into my non-native language rather than the other way around which is the ideal and in fact the standard unless desperate times call for desperate measures, and the fact that most programs abroad do have the research rather than practical thrust I so fear. UWM seems to be the best possible compromise in this regard, having opportunities for graduate study abroad in Spain or Latin America and even offering most courses online so that it is possible, if I were to find a source of income, that I could stay on and take my classes while still benefiting from Spanish immersion. I can't say how happy I am that this program exists at all. Sometimes it seems like it was made for me (all except the price tag...and maybe I'll get some sort of funding, who knows?).
Tomorrow I have a full day with work, more work, and a going-away party for one of my best friends (this is the chocolate fondue event I referenced above). Saturday, thankfully, my calendar is clear and I can do whatever I want. I hope I can watch it rain. It rained recently even though it is very unusual for that to happen before autumn even begins, and now I am hungry for more rain and more rain to fall down.
Time for me to fly.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Friday, September 16, 2011
16 September
This is embarrassing. I meant to post every month or so but it's been nearly two months.
The writers' workshop is in full swing (we just had our seventh weekly meeting). We began with some exercises and a warning that in three weeks' time we would have to generate 10-25 pages of prose or 3-5 poems. After those three weeks we switched to a critiquing format in which we critique two participants' pieces each week. Since the deadline for submission was three days after my Spanish translation qualifying exam (and since it's my area of special interest anyway), I told the facilitator, to whom I've expressed interest in studying library science, that I wanted to do a literary translation from Spanish to English. She suggested that I undertake Jorge Luis Borges's "La biblioteca de Babel"--"The Library of Babel". I wondered as I read the story whether she wished to torture me as the story is about an infinite library containing all possible combinations of characters in a certain type and length of book. It is a work of mathematics, religion/spirituality and utter bafflement. I'll be critiqued next week.
Speaking of my qualifying exam, I passed. Now I'm in the thick of the process of applying to UWM. And speaking of translation, this week I had the good fortune of chatting about translation as a career with a departing staff member who is relocating to the Netherlands to work as a translator of six or seven languages into English in the international criminal court. He's quite a brilliant man, and a fast talker. Later I spent an hour de-condensing the notes I'd jotted while he streamed valuable advice. I'm so glad I caught him before he left. It was a great reminder not to let opportunities slip by--he's been in Israel longer than I have and yet I never bothered to have this conversation with him until now. I was actually very fortunate that he extended his service by a couple of weeks at the last minute--he was supposed to leave on the same day it occurred to me to get in touch with him, a Saturday.
I turned 26 last week. It's not so bad. I had a great birthday party. It began as a Mexican cooking class, turned into eating Mexican food and ended with storytelling among friends.
My cooking is improving, little by little. I'm getting a bit carried away when it comes to certain ingredients (like oil). I'm going to take a series of nutrition classes spanning next month which I hope will help me expand my ability to integrate the nutritious and the delicious.
It will be nice to be in the land of inexpensive, good-quality clothing again. In Israel, consistently, clothing that is not expensive is interesting...very interesting. While it isn't the most important thing in the world to have nice clothes, my clothes are getting worn out or holy in the wrong sense of the word, which is a bit embarrassing given the way that I am expected to dress.
Last week I went on my second trip to Jerusalem. It was just as good as my first trip, maybe better because I spent the whole day in the Old City rather than trying to cram in a visit to the massive Israel museum afterwards. This time I went to some additional places such as the interior of the Church of Gethsemane (also known as the Church of All Nations), the tomb of King David, and the room in which the Last Supper supposedly took place (this was interesting as the building had been converted to a mosque and elements of that such as a prayer niche and some calligraphy remained, which reminded me of so many places in the south of Spain). Old Jerusalem is otherworldly. I will never forget it.
The writers' workshop is in full swing (we just had our seventh weekly meeting). We began with some exercises and a warning that in three weeks' time we would have to generate 10-25 pages of prose or 3-5 poems. After those three weeks we switched to a critiquing format in which we critique two participants' pieces each week. Since the deadline for submission was three days after my Spanish translation qualifying exam (and since it's my area of special interest anyway), I told the facilitator, to whom I've expressed interest in studying library science, that I wanted to do a literary translation from Spanish to English. She suggested that I undertake Jorge Luis Borges's "La biblioteca de Babel"--"The Library of Babel". I wondered as I read the story whether she wished to torture me as the story is about an infinite library containing all possible combinations of characters in a certain type and length of book. It is a work of mathematics, religion/spirituality and utter bafflement. I'll be critiqued next week.
Speaking of my qualifying exam, I passed. Now I'm in the thick of the process of applying to UWM. And speaking of translation, this week I had the good fortune of chatting about translation as a career with a departing staff member who is relocating to the Netherlands to work as a translator of six or seven languages into English in the international criminal court. He's quite a brilliant man, and a fast talker. Later I spent an hour de-condensing the notes I'd jotted while he streamed valuable advice. I'm so glad I caught him before he left. It was a great reminder not to let opportunities slip by--he's been in Israel longer than I have and yet I never bothered to have this conversation with him until now. I was actually very fortunate that he extended his service by a couple of weeks at the last minute--he was supposed to leave on the same day it occurred to me to get in touch with him, a Saturday.
I turned 26 last week. It's not so bad. I had a great birthday party. It began as a Mexican cooking class, turned into eating Mexican food and ended with storytelling among friends.
My cooking is improving, little by little. I'm getting a bit carried away when it comes to certain ingredients (like oil). I'm going to take a series of nutrition classes spanning next month which I hope will help me expand my ability to integrate the nutritious and the delicious.
It will be nice to be in the land of inexpensive, good-quality clothing again. In Israel, consistently, clothing that is not expensive is interesting...very interesting. While it isn't the most important thing in the world to have nice clothes, my clothes are getting worn out or holy in the wrong sense of the word, which is a bit embarrassing given the way that I am expected to dress.
Last week I went on my second trip to Jerusalem. It was just as good as my first trip, maybe better because I spent the whole day in the Old City rather than trying to cram in a visit to the massive Israel museum afterwards. This time I went to some additional places such as the interior of the Church of Gethsemane (also known as the Church of All Nations), the tomb of King David, and the room in which the Last Supper supposedly took place (this was interesting as the building had been converted to a mosque and elements of that such as a prayer niche and some calligraphy remained, which reminded me of so many places in the south of Spain). Old Jerusalem is otherworldly. I will never forget it.
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