Valerij Tomarenko, requiescat in pace

Some of the professional circles of which I am a part have been shaken once again by an unexpected and very untimely loss. One of the most gifted colleagues we were privileged to know, Valerij Tomarenko, lost his life on holiday while hiking in a Scottish national park. The alarm was raised after he failed to return home when expected.

I met him for the first time years ago at a conference in Warsaw; I don't remember all the details of that night in which at least half a dozen bottles of wine were opened with another colleague as we chatted late and later. He was always "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" but his astonishing talents, and the kindness and respect he showed me over the years were all unmistakable. The quality of his writing in English and German - neither his native language - and the subtlety and humor it so often revealed - consistently and rightly drew the admiration of the most perceptive people I know in what was our shared profession. His eye for detail was expressed not only in beautiful words, but in photographs and composed images which never ceased to surprise and delight me and many others.

We had our differences, as people do, but always he refrained from the ad hominem attacks one sees too often now, and expressed himself in ways more likely to call a listener to reflect and consider. I never thought of him as an adversary, but if I am to have adversaries in my life, I hope to be blessed with ones of such caliber and to enjoy a glass together as we toast and dispute our divergent perspectives.

The world of communication and culture is less now without Valerij, and the void he left there is surely less than the one in the hearts of his family and those who knew him. Go read his words, and remember. Vai com Deus, meu amigo.

 

Farewell, Mr. Hawking.

It's often quite interesting to see what Google offers to auto-complete what one types. Today, on the birthday of Albert Einstein, another great physicist, Steven Hawking is in the news again, the man born on the day Galileo died having taken this day to shed his mortal form.

Professor Hawking has been on my mind quite a bit in recent years, though his disciplines are quite different from any I have practiced. But as life has happened to the son of a colleague, and the debate on quality of life and euthanasia has evolved, my thoughts have returned time and again to the man who was supposed to die more than half a century ago but who instead lived a full life and made enormous contributions to science and human understanding of the Universe. A man who, by some modern practice, would have been aborted in the womb after DNA testing or who might have been put down like a stray dog if some Dutch or Belgian doctor decided his life was an undue cost burden on the State.

Arrogant fools make such a calculation, and their House of Evil too often has its foundation on such "good" intentions. And humanity is poorer for that, immeasurably so.

Education, vocational training and professional practice without well-considered ethical foundations, subject to frequent, careful integrity checks rest on uncertain ground that can too easily turn to deep mud or quicksand and swallow all that keeps us apart from the most degraded of beasts. If you want examples of the grand architecture of the human spirit, look not to the Coliseum, the great aqueducts or the pyramids. Look to the tubercular Keats. To Helen Keller. To Freddie Mercury. To Mr. Hawking. Time held them green and dying, but their songs carry on as the sound of the sea.

The lightning passed.

The difference between the right word
and the almost right word
is the difference between
lightning and a lightning bug."
- Mark Twain

RIP Chris Irwin, a friend and example to many

Known by some by his business pseudonym Textklick, Chris Irwin was an extraordinary man in his quiet way. His unexpected death recently has left many shocked and grieving for the loss of a friend and colleague whose wit, kindness and good judgment were usually understated but of a quality seldom surpassed. In over a decade, he enriched my life in ways I will remember to its end.

One of his qualities I appreciated most was his reluctance to take sides in a fight and his consideration that a human being is a complex construct, one we should judge with care. I do not, however, think anyone will decry a lack of care in judging him a good one and an example to follow in many ways, both professionally and personally. The many entries in his Kondolenzbuch attest to just some of the ways in which he will live for a very long time in the memories of those who knew, loved and respected him

In the last week I have thought a lot about how, despite challenges he faced, he never forgot the importance of savoring life's vintage, even the sour notes, and he remained an active part of our professional community with his good wife through all the good times and those which were less so. Life is good. Enjoy it to the last drop. Even the lees.

Genius lost and discovered: Seamus Heaney

"'Xxx' is dead." I dread such words usually. Too seldom do they speak of the passing of a Ceausescu or an Idi Amin, too often of some friend or family member or colleague who will in fact be missed, and if not by me so very much, then at least by some whose happiness is important to me.

Or Xxx is another who reminds me of my deep ignorance of the breadth of Western Culture. Thus it was with Seamus Heaney, who died last week. "Who was that?" I asked.

The usual exclamations of astonishment ensued. An Irishman. A poet. Aren't they all in their cups? And a translator. That inspired only a little more interest. Then I saw a tweet from Jost Zetzsche which mentioned Beowulf.

The appreciation of his work Jost shared told of the inspiration this translation had given to a young boy, and I was hooked. Hard.

I have never been able to find much enthusiasm for this Anglo-Saxon classic. Too f-ing obscure in its stilted translations, with my command of older English forms barely managing Chaucer in the original and probably missing half of that.

Could this man in fact have raised this dead text to a living thing to capture the imagination of young boys and grown men? Such word-sorcery is too rare and always to be celebrated.

So. I downloaded the in fact monolingual bilingual Kindle version from Amazon.de and sailed to the land of the Shieldings, watched Beowulf's struggles with Grendel and his monstrous mother with tense fascination before the best part of the tale, as old Beowulf, a tired king of 50 years' reign bade farewell to his cowardly chosen guard and faced the ravaging dragon alone, meeting his doom with but one loyal man at his side.

And as I read on to the funereal mourning and the keening voices in Heaney's voice, which spoke of the hero lost and the dark days ahead, I felt that the world was indeed a little darker for the loss of the Bard who gave a hero's tale new life to last another thousand years and inspire new generations to stand firm against the wyrm.

Miguel Llorens RIP

I just learned that we have lost a colleague I very much looked forward to meeting next week for the first time. Miguel Llorens passed away about two weeks ago. His blog had been silent since mid-August and nothing had been seen from him on Twitter since the beginning of this month. Quite unusual for a man who readily and frequently shared his insight and wit on many relevant controversies in our profession.

We who are his peers in the profession can never know the loss of this man as his family and friends surely do, but I saw him as a man of integrity who did not hesitate to call out naked emperors and other charlatans, and he often did so with a razor wit and a depth of analysis that I cannot match on my best days. He entertained me, he informed me, and he often inspired me. He was a man worth knowing.

Farewell, Miguel. Vaya con Dios.

The final passage

One of many books on hunting
traditions translated by Oskar.

Yesterday I learned that my friend Oskar Kasperl had died last Sunday. He was a great translator and a very unique man. When I sat in his living room and looked at the rows of books he translated, including many of the most important teaching texts in the GDR for agriculture, veterinary science, dog training, hunting and other subjects I love, the thought in my mind was that if I could manage 20% of that in my remaining years I could look back on a very successful life as a translator.

I first got to know him as the stubborn old man who walked with two crutches but kept his gardens immaculate, by himself, through sheer force of will. He reminded me of a favorite uncle who died over 20 years ago who, when crippled by arthritis so he could no longer bend over to tend his garden, brought his garden to his great height with boxed beds raised on high tables. Oskar was not one to let small matters like age, infirmity and pain beat him.

When I got to know his daughter, who was trained as a translator and interpreter of English and Bengali, I had no idea the two were related. She and her husband sat with us often and told about "Oskar" and his wild life as a translator and hunter. He worked in a team with his wife, dictating as she typed at high speed. His output was enormous. His contributions to education and knowledge sharing did not go unappreciated at the highest level. Erich Honecker once gave him a wish to honor this contribution on a milestone birthday. The wish was to own a drilling, a traditional three-barreled hunting rifle. At the time, private possession of such weapons was virtually impossible except to the SED's most faithful - of which he was not one. The wish was granted. When he gave up his hunting license at age 88, the drilling passed to me somewhat to the amazement of the local police, who had granted special permission for him to keep that gun until the end of his life after he had given up the rest of his arms collection acquired after the German reunification. The gun itself is 30 years old; the scope on it is probably 15 years older than that. I have other, technically better rifles and scopes, but this one somehow shoots better than all the others as I have found time and again on the range and in the field. When I carry it, I feel a special connection to a friend and the traditions he cared so much about.

Oskar made a difference in this world as a translator and a person. He was certainly no saint, and home life was often not peaceful. But his abiding love for his children was never in doubt, and this was obvious whenever his daughters spoke of him. I visited one tonight, and we sat for many hours in the kitchen eating Russian pancakes and garlic soup and drinking coffee, talking about him and his life and its many crazy tales. Perhaps some of these will be written down; perhaps the writings will be translated. I know just the illustrator for the tales. Her work reminds me of the best illustrations of Roald Dahl's stories, and Oskar's are often just as strange. When I was leaving, his daughter told me about a cache of old photographs she had discovered, which she had never seen before. She saw herself as a tiny baby held in the arms of a father radiant with pride and love. I know that feeling, and I know that light will never dim.

In memoriam: Richard Davey Benham

Our colleague Chris Irwin has written the following text to honor the late Richard Benham, a man noted for his professional competence and wit and whose untimely passing reminds us to appreciate our lives and the people we share them with today, because tomorrow may not count.

************

August 26, 2009 was a sad day for some in our profession, seeing the untimely demise of highly-respected and popular professional linguist Richard Benham in Australia at the age of 52.

Richard was well-known to many members of the Proz.com community for the extent of his knowledge, his integrity, wit and the unique character traits that emanated from his entries in forum postings and terminology questions.

As a member of the UK Chartered Institute of Linguists, he held their DipTrans award for translation from both and French and German into English.

Richard’s fields of speciality were primarily in technical, including IT (he had experience as a programmer), automotive, electrical engineering and marketing work of a technical nature.

His elder brother Chris wrote: “Richard was the 'great brain' of the family, and the only one to have mastered more than one language. He had massive, massive knowledge and some great personal qualities. He could remember some of the things that happened in my childhood that I'd forgotten. He was the family champion at card games.”

Richards’ mother Daphne added in a letter to a colleague: “From early childhood, Richard loved learning and won state-wide prizes for both French and mathematics twice. He had suffered a fall last year on wet Geneva cobblestones and broke his left shoulder, which was a personal and financial disaster, severely affecting his ability to be present at the University of Geneva at the time. He was happy to be back in Adelaide uni doing a maths course and co-writing a paper on Dirac Delta Logic with an old friend who was a professor of philosophy, as well as finding time to do a bit of translating. It was all blue sky, or so we thought. Richard had a recurrence of stomach problems and the day after he had had both an endoscopy and colonoscopy he started vomiting in the night, subsequently passing away.”

Comments on an ‘R.I.P.’ forum on the Proz.com site included these statements:

“I knew him only through this site and he was an inspiring and good person.”

“Oh damnit. This hits me pretty hard. We had emailed extensively a few years ago but were out of touch more recently. Am very sad to hear this and extend my sincere condolences to his family.”

“A much valued and respected colleague. I shall miss him.”

“He was someone I admired enormously, who was clearly a very talented person with excellent translation skills. I'm very saddened by the news of his death and I am sorry that I never had the opportunity to meet him in person.”

“I am shocked and saddened to hear of Richard's passing. Richard will be sadly missed by the many colleagues who got to know him over the years when he was an active member of the site. His outstanding skills as a translator, his sparkling wit and his frankness and honesty made him a colleague so many of us admired.”

“I had many great collegial discussions with Richard on KudoZ and respected him very much. I always valued his frank opinion and feel his contributions really helped.

Richard was truly a gentleman and a scholar. His passing is a huge loss to the translating community.”

Part of Richard’s integrity was indeed in his frankness, which led to his activities on the Proz.com site being restricted. Some comments about this were edited out of the above forum; a tasteless action which caused disgust among several members.