The Translation

You can't complain that the world has forgotten you, when you yourself have forgotten the world.  My mobile phone, an antique model commonly called a flip phone, as opposed to the modern miracle preferred by the masses, a smartphone,  on the rare days when its battery is charged, seldom if ever rings, making powering it off unnecessary when visiting doctor's offices or cinemas.  The land line telephone, which connects to my house never touching land, at least not in its last half mile, rings every hour, voices offering me a new house roof, home improvement loans, presumably to finance the new roof, hearing aids (if I needed a hearing aid, would I be able to hear the hearing aid salesman's voice?), and other items I should not be able or allowed to live without.

Then, just yesterday afternoon, the land line telephone rang, I picked it up, and a female voice said: "Hullo Lucas, this is your aunt Cecilia from Sydney!  How are you?", the voice sounding as if we had last spoken a few days earlier, when in actuality, we had spoken some twenty years ago, and then about trivial matters over a bad connection.  I decided to use my best Rodney Dangerfield line in response, and said, "I'm fine now, Aunt Cecilia, but the last couple of weeks have been rough!"

"Oh, I'm sorry to heard that," said she, "Spring fever?"

"No, you must remember that it is fall in our hemisphere now."

Silence. Laughter.

"Your late mother told me you were a comedian."

"More like a clown without a circus. So, what's up, or shall I say, down in your upside down world?"

"It's you who's upside down, my dear," said Aunt Cecilia.

I hoped that next she'd tell me "I'm dying and decided to leave my interest in the diamond mines to you." I've never met aunt Cecilia, who's only a few years older than me, and whose exact relationship I'm not sure of, although it's been explained to me several times, remembering only that she's not my mother's sister like a regular aunt would be.   We're related, that's enough. She had married an Australian millionaire and moved there decades ago.

"I've got a favour to ask," she said, and I could swear I heard the British spelling of the word "favour" with the letter 'u'.

"Your wish is my command," I said, the diamond mine fortune still in the back of my mind.

"I have here an article you wrote in a Spanish film magazine, and I'd like to translate it and publish it here.  Do you have the English original handy?"

She told me the title.

"That one?  Oh, I wrote it in Spanish years ago," I lied.

"You speak Spanish?  I didn't know," she said.

"I was joking.  I'll have to look for it through my papers."

So aunt Cecilia was doing Spanish translations in her spare time now.  Certainly not to support herself, I figured.  The article in question was about a Russian film pioneer whose grandson I happened to meet and interview in New York.  When writing about historical figures you must strive to find an original angle, an impossible task when everything has already been said, or preferably a source which adds new information to what is already known about this figure, if you want somebody to publish the piece.  I got lucky that time.  How it ever got published in Spain, I don't remember.

"What exactly do you have in mind, if I may ask?" I said.

"Well, since you have the original English version, it would save me time and effort to use it as my translation.  If you don't object.  You'll get paid anyway"

I didn't object, and I started searching for a copy of the old article.