Private Adventures

I spend quite a few hours every day in my exiguous home office, facing my computer screen, with a Hebrew book open on my left, rewriting the author's words in English. Usually I translate literature, which is stylistically difficult, or academic material, which can be conceptually difficult. Even when a job is fairly simple, I have to concentrate hard on it – if only to avoid skipping a line or a sentence, which has been known to happen. It's tiring. It can be very demanding. I'm constantly making decisions about individual words, about the shape of phrases, about the structure of sentences. And it's lonely: I make those decisions by myself – although later the authors often respond to my work, making corrections and offering suggestions.

Some of my more polite friends occasionally ask me what I'm working on, and sometimes, when I'm enthusiastic about a job, I'll tell them more than they really want to know. However, I'm deeply aware that my work entails intense, private experiences, which, paradoxically, because it's all about communication, is almost impossible to communicate. There's nothing outwardly dramatic about it. I'm not driving a car very fast, thrashing through a jungle, arresting violent criminals, or engineering billion dollar buyouts. There's also very little at stake – even if I get a sentence in a novel completely wrong, no one's going to suffer very much from my error. But I care deeply about getting the right word or expression, about making a sentence read well, about conveying the author's voice and ideas.

In the end, the locus of human experience is in the heart, not out in the world, and the essence of civilization is caring infinitely about things that don't have many practical consequences.