My book lacked a direction. It was all facts and curiosities and vignettes. A lot was interesting, but coherence kept escaping me. When writing about a river, you can start at the source and make your way to its outlet, a bit like Claudio Magris does with his Danube. But a sea? Where do you start? Where do you end?
At last during this break — it’s one of the reasons why breaks are so necessary — I found a direction: south to north and east to west. A knight’s move, as Viktor Shklovskii might have put it.
I also found a vehicle. It will be unsurprising to some, and it was staring me in the face for quite a while. Well, since the VERY BEGINNING! The vehicle, the vessel, ferry, traghetto for this tragitto, is translation.
In the meantime, the monster, the beast, the abomination, has grown to 95,000 words. Not all good words, definitely not all the right ones. And I’m not yet done letting them out.
But now, with a direction and vehicle, I have a principle for cutting, a principle for forgetting, as Yosef Yerushalmi might have put it. Which means I can see the end.
It swallowed me, and then it spit me back out again.
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Russell Scott Valentino 