What Do I Do at my Internship, Anyway?

Actually, this will be far more specialized. Instead of talking about my internship in general, I thought I might use this post to give an example of the kind of work I'm doing on the translation that I'm working on, since that's the part that's hard to describe. Let's look at an example of one source I worked with last Thursday.

This is what the citation looked like:

          25. Alois Riegl, Le Culte moderne des monuments, son essence, et ses genèse,
     traduit par D. Wieczorek, Paris, Éd. du Seuil, 1984, p. 56, 49 et 47. Le livre a été 
     redécouvert en ces années-là. Sur Riegel, voir les remarques de Daniel Fabre, 
     "Ancienneté, Altérité, Autochtonie", in Domestiquer l'histoire. Ethnologie des 
     monuments historiques, Paris, Éd. de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 2000, p. 
     196-204. 

I won't show you what was cited as it appeared in the text, since it consisted of seven short quotes scattered through a fat paragraph, but I will get back to those specifics later. 

First, let's parse out that citation, because I don't need to worry about all of it. I only have to look up sources, not do any actual translation myself. So here's all I really have to focus on: 

          25. Alois Riegl, Le Culte moderne des monuments, son essence, et ses genèse,
     traduit par D. Wieczorek, Paris, Éd. du Seuil, 1984, p. 56, 49 et 47. Le livre a été 
     redécouvert en ces années-là. Sur Riegel, voir les remarques de Daniel Fabre, 
     "Ancienneté, Altérité, Autochtonie", in Domestiquer l'histoire. Ethnologie des 
     monuments historiques, Paris, Éd. de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 2000, p. 
     196-204.

Time to work with that highlighted bit. I've got a decent idea of what the title means: something like, "the modern cult of monuments, their essence, and their origins." So I head over to the Library of Congress website where I search for Alois Riegl by Author/Creator keyword. There are three listings for someone with that name, so I go for the one with the most titles. 

The first thing I notice is that there are lots of languages here: English, French, Italian, and German. And when I look back at the citation, I see that " traduit par D. Wieczorek" bit again. Since most of the books listed here aren't in English, that probably means the original work was not published in English (because, obviously, the LoC is more interested in collecting books in this country's primary language than those written in others). 

Time to do something a bit unusual. I head over to the Bibliothèque nationale de France and search for the French title--and the listing gives me the original German title: Der Moderne Denkmalkultus. So now I know that the LoC didn't even have the German version, because I didn't see that title.

Time to hop over to the British Library. They rarely have English versions of books that the LoC doesn't have in English, but it's always important to check. Their system's a bit different, so I search for Alois Riegl again and narrow it to books actually written by a "Riegl, Alois" (as opposed to written about Alois Riegl). I notice that there's a book called Problems of Style, which I also saw in the LoC, so I look that book up in the LoC to make sure that it's not a translation of Der Moderne Denkmalkultus. Usually titles are direct translations, but sometimes the title gets changed. That's not it. Neither are the other English books. Before I move on, I get rid of the "Written by" requirements and look through the books listed as "English" and then "Unspecified [language]" to make sure it's not been mislabeled. 

Nothing. But it's not time to give up just yet. Instead, I go back to my book, to the actual citation, find a longer quote, and type the French into Google: "le XXe devoir etre celui de la valeur d'anciennete" (Google's nice because even if I don't put on accents or bother with capitals, it will still find the quote.)  The only results are in online copies of French version of the same book. Not helpful. Sometimes it will show me that the quote has been quoted in another French book--and I can look that one up to see if it has been translated. Getting to the quote through the back door, kind of. 

What I do get out of the Google search is a version of my sentence with all the correct accents, so I copy that into Google Translate. "le XXe semble devoir être celui de la valeur d'ancienneté" becomes "the twentieth seems to be that the value of seniority"--which I know, from my own knowledge of French, should read more like, "the twentieth century seems to be that of the value of seniority." When I put that into Google, I get a hit! 

The quote, translated by a professional, reads: "the twentieth century appears to be that of age-value," but since that doesn't make much sense on its own, I copy down the whole sentence for the translator's reference: "If the nineteenth century was the age of historical value, then the twentieth century appears to be that of age-value." Yay! I have my quote!

Now to find the others. I love it when I find a book online, because it means that I can translate the unusual words and phrases that are unlikely to have been changed in translation, like "historical value", and search for them in the text. When I don't have the book online, or when there is no exact quote, I have to use the page numbers provided in the citation.

          25. Alois Riegl, Le Culte moderne des monuments, son essence, et ses genèse,
     traduit par D. Wieczorek, Paris, Éd. du Seuil, 1984, p. 56, 49 et 47. 

I have to find the French edition of the book online or at the library, look up those pages, and take note of the chapter name and context so that I can locate the quote in the English translation (because the page numbers rarely line up). 

In this case, though, I have a translated excerpt from an entire book that amounts to only three pages. It's unlikely that all the quotes in the book will be in this selection, but I'll try anyway. As I locate quotes, I type them in my document, making sure to keep them in the order that they appear in the text we're translating. This is what I find: 

     “commemorative value” (57) / “value as memory” (58) 

     “modern cult of monuments” (56)

     “intentional” (58)

     “historical” (57)

     “If the nineteenth century was the age of historical value, then the twentieth century appears to be that of age-value” (58)

Five out of seven!

I'm missing two longer quotes, one about appreciating old monuments for their artistic and historical value and one about the creations of men having meaning even if removed form their original context. I read the whole selection, since it's short, and I find nothing that gets close to those--and it's easier to tell that I'm getting the right quote the more words there are in the original, so I'm 99% sure that the quote just isn't there. I note the fact that these quotes are missing so that the translator knows she'll have to translate them herself. 

Finally, I scroll up to the cover and copyright pages of the book to assemble my citation. This is what it looks like: 

          Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and its Origin (1928),” The Nineteenth
               Century Visual Culture Reader, Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, eds, New
               York: Routledge, 2004, p. 56-59.  

Then it's on to the second source in the citation! Yay! I won't bore you with it. 

By the time I'm done, this is what I have in my word document: 

Chapter 5
[...]

214 [the page number]

25. “commemorative value” (57) / “value as memory” (58), “modern cult of monuments” (56), “intentional” (58), “historical” (57), “” (), “If the nineteenth century was the age of historical value, then the twentieth century appears to be that of age-value” (58), “” ()

Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and its Origin (1928),” The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader, Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, eds, New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 56-59;                  

*No complete translation—this book has translated excerpts

Not trd. [Daniel Fabre, “Ancienneté, Altérité, Autochtonie”].

And that's what I do at my internship when I'm not doing the ordinary things that most interns do. It sounds tedious, and to be honest it's getting a bit that way in chapter five because most of the sources are so recent that they haven't been translated yet, but mostly it's a fun little treasure hunt. And, oh, when I get to go to the library...

But that's for another time.


[Edit]

So it's a darn good thing I didn't post this sooner, because the story's far from over. As with any kind of writing, it's important to come back to what you're working on later. When I did that with Le Culte moderne des monuments, son essence, et ses genèse, I found the entire work!

Unfortunately, I can't remember what I searched to find it. Probably just Googled "Alois Riegl" and "modern cult monuments character origin" (I sometimes leave out articles and usually conjunctions--the former because they get too many hits, the latter because "and" gets translated as "AND", a way to specify search options, which throws off my results). I think the problem was that I'd been looking so hard for a single book that I missed a little detail: Le Culte moderne des monuments is only a little more than a hundred pages long with fairly large font. 

So when I just searched for the title, up popped an entirely new book: the Oppositions Reader, a book of essays collected from Oppositions magazine, which shuttered in the 80s and specialized in architecture and restoration. In this book is a translation of the entire Modern Cult of Monuments.

It's still not a totally happy ending. GoogleBooks and Amazon rarely let you see a whole book--certain pages will be "omitted from this preview," and of course they sometimes happen to be the pages I need to see. Such was the case this time. Fortunately, I'm interning at the press of a college with a very impressive library--so impressive that there are actually specially themed libraries around campus as well as the main one. A quick search of the library catalog told me that Columbia has a copy of Oppositions Reader, not in their main collection but in the Avery Library. I haven't gotten there yet, but it's now on the list. 

Ta da! I can't say that's an average example, because some go much, much more quickly, and lately I've been finding that at least half the sources haven't been translated.

There are about 270 pages in this book. I'm just abut at 230. After that, I'll do a quick sweep or two through the sources I couldn't find, just to make sure that I wasn't missing them for a silly reason, as I was with the example above, and then it'll be time to turn the completed list over to the translator. 

The best part? I've been promised a free copy of the book when it's done--so I'll actually know what the whole thing is about!

Little Acts of Heroism

Bit pompous of me, but I think you'll see why it might be justified, at least in one cat's eyes. 

So this morning Ripley and Sibu were being annoying. Audrey rarely meows, and I've never heard her complain for food, but a couple months ago Ripley and Sibu had gotten to the point where they meowed LOUDLY and PITEOUSLY and PERSISTENTLY in the morning until they got fed. Mom responded as any intelligent being with an IQ so high she won't disclose it: she started feeding the cats at night. It worked pretty quickly, and the boys stopped complaining (even if they do still follow me in the morning hoping I'll forget and feed them again!).

But this morning they were being completely obnoxious. Sibu was following me around meowing at the top of his lungs, and Ripley was being loud, too, though I figured he was up outside Mom's door. I got a drink and settled in on the couch with Dad, occasionally responding to the meows with one of my own (quite good) or a short, "Shut up." 

Finally, after an hour, Dad asked if Ripley was shut in the basement. Yes, he was. And what do you know, as soon as I let Ripley out, both cats stopped meowing. Ripley proceeded to be the cuddliest I've ever seen him, crawling all over me and Dad, rubbing his face in ours, the very picture of feline gratefulness. Audrey watched the display disdainfully from her perch on top of the cable box. 

So that made me feel nice, if a bit stupid for not thinking of the basement sooner. That's what I love about pets--it's so gratifying to know that you can quite easily make something else so happy. Now Ripley's curled up on Dad's legs, completely blissed out and warm.

Oh man, I hope this doesn't become a cat blog!

Other than that, not too much to report this week. I went to a job fair on Thursday. Nothing very promising for me, but it was a good experience, since I'd never been to one before. And yesterday I helped get a couple books ready for office-wide release. Mom and Dad and I started watching House of Cards on Netflix, and we're loving the political intrigue.

Sorry I misled you all with that first, arty post. There should be some more interesting and varied blog posts coming up. The middle of March is filling up with events:

• 15: My birthday (I'd rather ignore it this year, but I've been informed that won't happen)
• 16: First installment of BBC radio's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's book Neverwhere
• 17: St. Patrick's Day
• 18: BBC's third season of Sherlock starts filming (not actually all that excited, but it's bound to make the Tumblrs I follow blow up)

So sit tight until something more exciting happens. Or better yet, enjoy your own, undoubtedly more interesting lives. 8-)

First Post: A Bookly Day

Well hello again! Or, if we haven't met, welcome! 

I don't have any fancy plans for this blog. Mostly I just want to get myself posting a little something at least once a week, just to keep my creative juices flowing. This shouldn't be as intense as my Morocco blog, though--more like the little notes I used to post on DeviantArt and FaceBook. 

On that note...let's begin! 

Yesterday was full of books. You might not think that's remarkable, since I am interning at a university press, but I don't usually handle many physical books myself. (More on that later.) However, last week kicked off an office-wide Spring cleaning spree that resulted in a tower of to-be-donated old computers and piles of broken office organizers, crumbling and outdated encyclopedias, bags of trash from the backs of desk drawers, and paper--lots and lots of paper. Wish I'd been there the day they brought in the "industrial shredder."

With cleanliness restored, it was time to zero in on more specific tasks. Yesterday, one unfortunate but brave and determined young employee recruited four interns to help him perform a monumental task: organize the conference room library! 

Since part of our mission was to ensure that a copy of every book published in the last five years was present, I'm guessing the library had been neglected about that long...though I might have just as easily guessed that from the amount of dust! Four of us worked on putting new books onto the shelves in alphabetical order while the fifth cleared a section at a time to clean the shelves. Once the books were put away, we got lists of books that should be present and noted which ones were missing. I put together the final list of missing books--over four hundred--and we started an office-wide treasure. I didn't get too far before quittin' time, but I'm guessing there will still be work to do on Monday. 

The wordy goodness continued when I met up with Dad at the Museum of Modern Art after work. I got a membership to the MOMA last year that I've been taking advantage of here and there before and after interviews, but this was the first time I got to bring a guest. After seeing the big square of pollen, we decided to target the special exhibits, one of which focused on Dieter Roth, whose artistic experiments often involved books and, to some extent, language. No wonder I found it so interesting! The big hit was definitely the Literaturwurst, which the artist made by following a traditional recipe for sausage...but replacing the meat with ground up books!

There was also an interesting stamp project that looked a bit more like a book. Roth made a stamp for every letter of the alphabet - just random pictures, nothing to indicate whether or not they represented a letter or a sound. One was a heart, one the outline of a bicyclist, one an odd goblin-like face, and so on. His intention was that anyone who used the stamps would give each one a value for each of the four ways it could be positioned--right side up, upside down, or on either side. How you stamped them would then indicate the kind of sentence you might form. So the two hearts in the photo below, for instance, could mean four different things. If we said the words were "four" for the side ways heart and "cat" for the upside down one, you might have a sentence that said something about four cats. But if you turned it 45 degrees clockwise, you'd have an upside down heart and a sideways heart facing the other direction, which would mean something entirely different--the four would be involved, but it could be in a very different way. It's a bit hard to explain. Sorry I couldn't find any bigger images. Anyway, it sounded like a great class activity for an early grammar lesson--have each child design a stamp, assign the stamps random words, and have children stamp combinations. Then pass them around and have the children come up with sentences based on the words. They would all be quite different--and probably fun! But you'd be able to point out that without rules of grammar and spelling, you leave so much work for your reader to do in order to grasp the fact of what you're saying that they can't focus on understanding what you're saying. If nothing else, it'd be a fun craft/creative exercise. 



I also thought of a great art/oral history project. First, make the modern art and put it in an exhibit. Hide microphones and record the varied reactions of visitors, then do something with the words. Wouldn't that be fun? It could certainly make a great installation. Hmm, maybe if the publishing thing doesn't work out I should pursue a career as an artist...