Partners in Crime

We had tea together in Daughter’s flat on Saturday afternoon, the whole family. It was nice, and quite rare that all of us were in the room at the same time. The Resident IT Consultant was there to lift boxes – of books – for the umpteenth time. We were in post-decorator mode. I was there, I think, to provide moral support. Or something. Daughter was there to enjoy being back after some enforced staying with the old people while paint was wielded. And Son was only there on a laptop screen, as he was mid-event with his fellow translators and some crime writers and academics. But he was sort of there.

It was the Scottish Society for Northern Studies’ half day conference of Partners in Crime. It’s the kind of thing that can threaten to be worthy but boring if you’re unlucky. We weren’t though. It was pretty good throughout the afternoon, including the tea (which we had to provide ourselves).

We missed a few minutes here and there, as we drove from A to B, dealt with a grocery delivery, and generally carried furniture around. But I caught Son in his introduction, followed by more introduction from Alan Macniven, head of Scandinavian Studies in Edinburgh, followed in turn by Dr Joe Kennedy, who seems to have taken over the running of the Gothenburg students’ classes at Sussex. Very appropriately he had to leave to deal with childcare.

Then there was Lorna Hill on women in crime fiction. Before she finished she was joined by Lin Anderson, who had been expecting a green room, but who ended up ‘on stage’ so to speak. She in turn was joined by Arne Dahl and their chair Jacky Collins, who were also a little startled to find there was no privacy, so we could hear everything! But it was nice to listen to these authors discussing their writing, and I will now forever think of bad weather, or good weather, or any other weather, as characters in their books. And I didn’t know that so many small aeroplanes from the Nordic countries crash in the Cairngorms…

After we learned to exercise care in the non-existent green room it was time for Prof. Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen to talk. Daughter and I puzzled over his accent to the extent that we didn’t hear all he had to say. Sorry. The last session of the day gave us three Scottish-based translators of Scandinavian crime fiction, Anne Bruce, Kari Dickson and Ian Giles discussing their work with Duncan Beattie. And I/we might have heard it ‘all’ before, but it was actually both fun and interesting. Swedes spend too much time in the staffroom talking about coffee, and sometimes a dead author is best. The Norwegians are dropping their funny letters to sell better abroad. You know, ø and the like.

And as we’d already ‘had our tea’, we didn’t join people in the Magnusson Arms for an informal chat afterwards. I’m sure it was good.

On who you are

‘Yes, I know who you are,’ they say. Or they look vague. Or you simply don’t go up to them because you’re not sure they will remember you, either your face, or your name. So you often don’t even try.

And the more famous they are, the faster your feelings of inferiority kick in.

I came across A S Byatt, who died last week, a few times at events. Never spoke to her, and to my shame, I have not read any of her books. I will need to remedy that. She seems to have been not only a very good writer, but also a nice person.

I sort of knew that. At one of Terry Pratchett’s launches I saw her go up to him and gently tell him who she was. Seeing as I knew they did know each other, I wondered at her modesty. She was famous, after all. So was he.

And then, not that long ago, the penny finally dropped. She did what any sensible person chatting to someone with Alzheimers should do. You tell them a pertinent fact, whether or not they need it. She did not assume he’d be able to place her, among all the rest of us.

I could have done that too. I was fairly certain my face alone would not have sufficed at that moment. But Bookwitch and interview might have been enough. I suspect a lot of us circled Terry quite cautiously that evening. Which might have felt lonely.

We should stop thinking of ourselves and our vanity.

And if I look blank next time we meet?

Going Postal – the second time

I love Moist von Lipwig, almost as much as I love Terry Pratchett. I also love Going Postal, which I have now read for the second time. I can just about see the third time coming up.

Not sure why I chose to read it the first time, but suspect I was wanting to read about something that would remind me of my own early professional times. I can still miss the days of the Post Office, and Moist’s exploits in Ankh-Morpork are quite close to my own experience. At least the way I remember it.

Moist is a crook, of course, but a kind one and someone who thinks on his feet. Lord Vetinari clearly knew what he was doing when making Moist Postmaster General. Post people are such fun. And there is stamp collecting.

The loveliness of postal matters apart, I was [again, maybe] struck by Terry’s way with words, making some new ones up whenever required. It’s the thinking of things. Stuff like using the doorway when you run out of wall. I could say that too, if I had only been able to think such thoughts.

There is a ‘romance’ of an unusual kind, which is so much better than too much soppiness. And one wishes all tyrants were more like Lord Vetinari.

The question now is whether I read another book featuring Moist, or reread this one.

The Christmas Appeal

I don’t generally like the email/text message type of novel. They are hard to read. But here I was, with Janice Hallett’s The Christmas Appeal, all about the [sort of] appalling people in Lower Lockwood, who are hoping to raise money for the church roof by putting on a pantomime. And it’s great fun.

I recognise Janice from her photo in the book press, and gather she’s a big deal, but have not read anything by her before. This should find her many new fans.

The thing here is the way people ‘talk’ to each other in the group, WhatsApping and emailing, the way we all seem to these days. And we have all met these people in our own lives; the ones who boast of their wonderful achievements in a round-robin while being really quite awful, and the hard-working ones, and the others who flit between the two, wanting to stay on everyone’s good side, and the gossips who spill beans faster than you can pick them off the beanstalk.

After a while I started to dislike most of them. They are just too true.

Nestling in among the messages and the panto preparations is something else. Maybe a murder? How can you know who is a criminal, or who is merely eccentric? Will there be a dead body? Whose is it? Who dunnit?

Can it really be a merry Christmas with a corpse?

Hold Your Nose and… Translate?

You can end up having to translate ‘terrible tosh’ but that’s all right. You might even like terrible tosh. And if not, someone is bound to want it and to pay you for your efforts.

I attended a Zoom event today where four translators talked about the worst they get to work with. And why they do it. ‘Think of the money, think of the money, think of the money.’ (That’s my boy!)

As part of the Advanced Scandinavian Translation Workshop 2023, Sophie Lewis talked to Charlotte Barslund, Ian Giles and Atar Hadari about bad books. There are a surprising number of them around. And you need to be able to sniff out the ones you really don’t want to read, let alone translate, before it’s too late and you have agreed and have a contract, and you need not to vomit when things get really bad.

Because I seem to know more translators than the average witch, I do hear things. But I would never tell. Some books are dreadful. Some authors are oblivious to the [lack of] quality of their book. When it comes to translations into English, which ‘everyone’ speaks, they often know that their version of English is better than that of the paid professional.

If it’s really awful you might translate faster. Just to get to the end. Some of them divide up a bad task into more manageable chunks. They usually don’t mind putting their names to even the terrible tosh, but Ian did say he’d rather not have had his name displayed on the front cover of one book. Charlotte mentioned a back catalogue translation where a bad word we would not use today occurred, and asked the author if they wanted to change it. They did. Atar read a poem he translated a long time ago, by a poet long dead (apart from this they did not name or shame anyone at all).

All the translators reckoned that they tend to improve the books they work on, especially the ones that ought to have been better edited in the original. It reflects badly on them if they help publish something that is even worse than it needs to be.

This left me very grateful that when I read a book I don’t like, I can always stop. Translators can’t. And won’t. They have mortgages to pay.

Wet wet wet

Should have paid more attention to the photo of the Northern Ireland woman online in thigh-deep water yesterday. She was illustrating the dangers of storm Ciaran, and I absentmindedly wondered why she was out at all. To be fair, when we arrived in Edinburgh Daughter and I merely ended up foot-deep in the raging streams by Haymarket. Our umbrellas kept our hair dry, but that was all.

We were there because Daughter was taking part in a panel, on AI in space, at the Data Summit 2023. She was keen to get out there talking again. More fun if you’re dry, though, but her socks and boots just squelched quietly.

There was a keynote from Moriba Jah before the panel, and I haven’t yet decided if I was more taken by his talk or his hair. Close thing. (I jest. Obviously. Marvellous hair.)

It was a popular panel; hordes of people arriving as it kicked off. The panellists had things to say, from common sense to selling politics. Daughter told them about poor Kepler – the telescope, not the man – and how it managed to change what it could do when its first purpose failed, leaving it with many more years of service. That’s sustainable.

In the end not much was said about AI, or even about the man who puts so much junk into orbit round Earth. We seemed to be in agreement on how to be sensible.

Feet were still wet when we got home, and I am looking into waterproof backpacks, having had to dry every last thing in my bag. Never saw such a damp Kindle.