I am seized by anxiety as classes end and I turn in grades. What books should I bring back to St. Louis for the holidays? Will my graduate class next semester be success? Am I spending too much time with this bloggistry?

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A bilingual edition (French/Spanish) of a book by Jacques Ancet, a French Hispanist and poet. "on cherche quelqu'un." I don't know what his reputation as a poet is in France. I know him as translator of Gamoneda and scholar of Valente. (Gamoneda's daughter [a professor of French] is the translator here). Translations between French and Spanish aren't very interesting, usually, because the languages are too close: the possibilities and dangers are limited. Ancet's Gamoneda translation is excellent, but perfectly predictable. I've always felt that translation should be a rigorous search for the absolute best solution to a particular problem. One should be able to demonstrate the superiority of one's solution.

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I didn't have many readings in Spanish in my translation course. The "target language" in Second Language Acquisition is the language one is learning. The "target language" in translation is the language into which one is translating. This put me in the awkward position of making English the "target language" in a course in the Spanish department. I will have to write essays in Spanish myself in order to teach the class again. It is not that I disrespect other translators and what they have had to say (well, sometimes!), but that I am not interested in the conventional wisdom: that's what I've been trying to escape my whole life. I believe the conventional wisdom on translation is mistaken. When I try to articulate this difference, I often have a hard time making myself understood.

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You would think that I would be perfectly adapted to academic life, since I have never really left the University, but I have often found myself at odds with the dominant culture of the university and my department. It is hard to define this difference. I guess it is because I have a hard time pretending to be comfortable with the low standards of intellectual discourse that ultimately prevail, despite everyone's best intentions, in a large, mediocre public institution. The sort of person here who is most successful is the one who not only is comfortable with mediocrity, but openly embraces it. I have published very little (by my own standard) in the past few years. I have a hard time bringing my articles out into the open. Fear of not fulfilling my own high standards? Depression and anxiety?