When God's sense of humour strikes again

[tilia_tomentosa]

So, the good news is that the author of a certain book unambiguously approved me as a translator today.

The bad news is that he's already losing hope of finding a publisher in Bulgaria. I can see why.  It's a highly inconvenient book to publish - too "scandalous" for this culture, and not in the way that would sell.

That means that there will be

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[tilia_tomentosa]

I wrote to the author again today, and I more than hinted that I feel tempted to translate the book "just for the hell of it". He hasn't replied yet. My half-personal, half-professional correspondence with him is beginning to develop into a whole book of its own. LOL I guess we could publish it together - it's conveniently in English, so we wouldn't have to deal with the Bulgarian publishers.

It's a very little book. I did an approximate calculation what it would bring me from the publisher of The Half-Shakespearian Translation from Hell, and the net income would be... maybe about 140 Euros (I can't calculate the standard pages of a translation that doesn't exist yet, but I used the original for rough orientation). You bet I wouldn't want to translate any small but difficult book for that company, or any other of the same kind, but.. I've got it into my head that I want to at least try to translate this particular book, money or money, even if the only "publishing" it gets would be sending copies to a few Bulgarians who are mine or the author's friends.

Boian sent me his draft translation of the first page from a time when he was toying with the idea of translating the book himself. He is absolutely enchanted with the book. I compared his version with my experimental draft translation of the first three sentences (those sentences are LONG, I tell you). He is very good with some of the tricky vocabulary, but I manage to transform the sentence structure better. I wish we could do it together, but he doesn't have enough time and energy for it.

One of my Bulgarian friends unexpectedly offered to help with finding a publisher. I don't know what he can possibly achieve.

I'm going to have some work for the old company this month, and maybe even in October, but it's not very predictable, with their "organization".