Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Lost in Translation

I work much better once it gets dark outside so I usually leave a bulk of the bare bones translating until evening and then I work until I get tired, usually around...well...now.

I light a few candles and shut myself in the dining room facing the giant wall of mirrors.

I go into the world of this play which is profoundly dark and lonely. Extremely lonely. It really sucks the warmth right out of you. Especially this one character. This one guy. Leslie. He really gets to me. He creeps me out. He just, I don't know, I don't like getting inside his head. He's intensely fucked up and he works it out in ways that I find really disturbing. He's not killing people or anything, nothing like that. Nothing criminal. Just...unsettling. He's falling off the edge.

Especially tonight because I'm working on scene 4 which is mostly made up of his prolific monologues. And all my candles keep mysteriously burning out. I'm starting to think this play is haunting me.

I finally start getting a headache from staring at the computer screen and the shitty lighting reflecting into my eyes. I go upstairs and lay in bed, staring at the ceiling my parents had painted with a glow-in-the-dark starmap of the day my sister was born - it used to be her room - and I lay awake for a long time. Last night it was hours. I just can't chase away this loneliness and my mind races through hundreds of snapshot memories trying to pull my own self out of Leslie. I know it sounds weird, and by morning I'm perfectly fine again. But boy am I having trouble falling asleep.

As for my Brit History Thesis...well I just don't want to work on it. I can't make myself do it so instead of doing nothing, I work on Sallinger. But man, I just may take a break and dive into 16th century literature because that Koltès is really getting to me.

And I'd like to get some sleep!

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