
The Transnational Bear

Originally published on March 4, 1998
Thanks Anni for clarifying. I admit I'd thought that you'd written me off as just another yahoo now that you had your information, but am now shamed by my impatience and your continued goodwill. Your commentary is much welcomed. Do continue to write when you have the chance. Translating Geffen? Bigtime stuff! So do you work in the TV industry fulltime, or are you a freelancer. I just finished reading a late 1970s biography on the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (who drank himself to death in 1952 at the ripe young but bloated age of 33). DT occasionally wrote for London TV & radio in his era, and your reference to your own connections in the business was sort of eerily coincidental.
You wrote:
No doubt that the situation we are having now in this countrypolitical, economical, socialis hard to be called stable. And the news you get now and then from our newspapers, especially criminal colomns are frightening, though I would not say that we are unrecoverably pessimistic. People go on living, working, planning the future. I guess, that we are as a nation, despite our world-known Russian sadness wildly praised in the classical Russian literature, very induring and able to overcome the difficulties, which seem to be dreadful. This is our advantage (as it saves the nation to some extent) and disadvantage (as we tackle uor problems rather slow) at the same time.
Unfortunately, I have never been to your country and my knowledge of it is also very limited, limited mostly by our and your popular Press and some knowledge acquired at the university. But I was astonished to hear that racial problems are still rather serious in your country. I believed that in such a multinational country as yours these problems are in the past. Though I should say that with the collapse of the Soviet Union we also come across with misunderstandings between nationalities, but I do think they have a rather momentary political character than national.
You wrote:
Again, thank you very much for your letter and assistance. If you wish to buy some books or need something to get translated into English/Russian, I would love to be of any help.What particular titles of the authors you mentioned would you like to have?
Oh, I don't know. How about I pick books for which I already have an English version. Mmmm . . . lemme see. Oh yes. Dostoevsky's NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND. For now I will just mention that one. Are all these Russian language books in your collection ANNI, Russian authors, or do you have other western or oriental authors translated into your native tongue? If the latter is the case, perhaps that may present an interesting set of choices. Anyhow, lemme off my soapbox for now. And thanks again for your notes from Moscow. Until next time . . .
Best of all worlds,
Gabriel