Forced by circumstances, I go after some translation jobs: freedom as to workload, reasonable return… I fill out my resume: vast experience in the industry, knowledge of several languages, etc., etc. They send me as a test, from the land of Shakespeare, the manual of a stupidly modest portable air conditioner. I look at it and almost laugh. From English to Portuguese it is a piece of cake! I have been translating a thousand words a week for years… And what about the domestic machine? I have a diploma that allows me to design boilers, pressure vessels, loading lifts, industrial ovens, stoves, combustion engines, cranes… and I already know that it will not take me fifteen minutes to pour out the extremely banal five hundred words and guarantee my new source of income. I read Shakespeare, Blake, Walt Whitman… Easy money! And then I get to work; in thirty minutes, the result is ready and revised. I send it by email to the contracting company. The next day, the answer: translation rejected! “We are so sorry, sir. You did not pass the test this time.”
Forced by Circumstances
It is amazing how torture it is to feel forced by circumstances to apply one’s own effort to something that delivers nothing more than money. To apply one’s own effort, and almost always the bulk of one’s own time… I see the average artist in despair before the seemingly insoluble question: how not to be useful to other human beings, or at least, how not to be outrageously useful, strictly useful, and still survive? How not sum up one’s own life in a creeping utilitarianism? How to be an artist, and not a commercial manager, a designer, a salesman? How to be an artist and, at the very least, abstain from any financial necessity in the production of one’s own work? It seems that the supreme merit boils down to being lucky…
The Substance of Life Is Time
The substance of life is time: to live is but to define the application to it, on a smaller scale, during the space of twenty-four hours, and on a larger scale, during the indefinite interval of a lifetime—and I am but a spreadsheet-man! In any case, the immediate decision is always the most important, and planning, the later it comes, the less fruitful it is. The truth is that the distribution of time involves, in the first instance, the ability to visualize the desired result which, as if it were not uncertain enough, has to fit the primary needs and the longing for the consummation of something that justifies one’s existence. Generally, these are conflicting spheres, and generally the former ends up sucking up the bulk of the vital substance. If we knew, at least, the circumstance of the last breath and if there was not such vagueness about the horizon, everything would be easier: distributing time would be an almost pleasant task and the fruits of life would be much more meritocratic. However, the plot would lose in emotion and suspense. It seems very difficult to live and not sin, on the one hand, by precipitation and, on the other, by cowardice.
A Movie Script Worths Its Structure
In an untimely manner, I set out again to write film scripts. The work of the moment, which was beginning to crawl, is interrupted. And I do not know what to feel. Perspectives, I have few, whatever I am creating. But the ease of spitting out pages of screenplay jumps out when compared to the agony of literary creation. The screenwriter sees his work progress, every day, and finds manifest satisfaction. A screenplay, in fact, worths its structure, its effectiveness in distributing scenes within a predefined format, and its strength in exposing a dramatic arc. The screenwriter works on the structural demarcation of the text: he defines the conflict, its progression through the plot, and its ending; then he distributes it into scenes, with positioning and length following the dramatic arc and the format of the work. Then it is just a matter of formalizing, or rather, transforming the diagram into text. With well-defined characters, the dialogues spring up with amazing ease, in infinite variations. Of course, they are to a great extent adaptable, replaceable: the script, which is nothing but the outline of a work, worths its outline itself. And I, from being an artist, return to the role of a diagrammer.