The Brilliant Weather…

…continues but we didn’t see much of it today. The photograph shows the autumn and one of the town’s school buildings, built around 100 years ago.

Partly we saw little of the outside today because we are helping, in a very small way, with the translation of Jeanette Winterson’s latest book, “The Gap of Time”. This book is a retelling of Shakespeare’s “The Winter Tale”, transposed to modern times and language but still faithful and refering to the original.
It is such fun to work with translations like this. We look at details of the language, laugh at beautiful phrases and occasionally sorrow over clever word games that just can’t be translated. We read the book, and then reread it, together with the translator, page by page as we go over the trickiest words and phrases, trying to figure out exactly what they mean and how to reproduce them in Swedish. At the end of the process we truly know, and often love, the book.
Of course, Janet and I get all the fun, without any of the responsibility. That belongs to the translator, who has been working with the book for months, doing a brilliant job for very little reward. We come in for a few hours and add a little extra polish to a few sections but our part in the whole is very minor one.
I definitely recommend the book, which is clever, funny and hard to put down, even though you know how it is going to end.
So this is our second day of Shakespeare. Yesterday was Hamlet, today is The Winters Tale.  Tomorrow it’s the garden and the tax forms!