Babel Clash

This will be a marker post, more than anything. Having a painful time loading the site from over here and fixing yesterday’s half-post was irritating in the extreme. So let me just pop in to mention how ‘universal’ some elements of interviews can be.

I spoke this afternoon with a smart reporter from a major Chinese-language daily. Language was no issue, though I’ll be curious how what I said ‘plays’ when translated into Chinese. She said she’d translate the piece back into English and send it to me. There’s a game some of us play with Google translator, where we take a passage and run it through a few languages then back to English, to see what emerges form this variant of ‘broken telephone’. (I know, writers are so sophisticated.)

But the minbor point of this minor post is just how ‘normal’ the main lines of questioning were, given that I’ve been doing so many interviews in person and online in English for the past 3 months. She wanted to know about Tolkien and my connection there, about who I read, about history and what lessons it has to teach, about writing methods (launched my sound bite about how my answer is only to be understood as applying to my own work, not in any way prescriptive for other writes…)

It was almost unsettlingly of a piece with an interview I might have given in Vancouver or online with an sf magazine. Yet we were drinking iced tea that was made with actual ice cream in it (!) in a hotel bar in Beijing, and earlier today I walked the grounds of Empress CiXi’s Summer Palace and saw the spectacular, full size stone boat (marble, and wood painted to look like marble) that was extravagantly constructed for her amusement out of money raised to equip the real navy.

Not sure what to make of this.

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