i heard from jennifer geer today! jenny is, or rather, was, a grad student in our english department, but she's got a job, so now she's my very first professor friend!! a real professor, office and all! i got to know her because she loves children's lit, teaches her ENWR classes on fairy tales, and her dissertation is on victorian children's lit. prof nohrnberg, who interviewed her during a practice interview, describes her as kind of british-proper, starchy-friendly kind, but i think he is wrong, for i've had frequent opportunities of observing her walk and if there is anyone who walks with a light hoppity-skip it's her! also, once, when i was in the library, having skipped class (i owed a paper) the professor walked in, and i dived under the table. jenny was instrumental in acting as lookout then (it's safe to come up now, he's gone) this is her first email from her new home. it seems that the university of louisiana at lafayette has its own swamp, with resident alligator! she promises to write when she espies alligator.

i am now regretting not learning modern european languages for this new erasmus world business seems very exciting. is it too late to learn dutch? i want to go and study in amsterdam!!! suddenly, i don't really want to go on to grad school in the us anymore. i want to go to europe and get a masters in something. or for that matter to china for a m.a. in chinese lit. su-lin says i'm going to be one of those people who spend their lives collecting useless degrees and never getting a job. that is true! i worry for my future too, but there's always winning the lottery, or saving a billionaire from drowning, or catching the eye of the prince of sweden. i went to a info session on monday night, it's a post-graduate specialist diploma in english-chinese bidirectional translation, classes are conducted in singapore by professors from nanjing u, and it prepares you for professional translation and interpretation. the institute of linguists also sent someone to talk about their certification exams. i think it would be very very exciting to be a translator! or an interpreter. i think simultaeneous interpretation is one of the coolest things ever. it's horribly difficult though. just looking at past year exams make me shudder. jane smiley came out for the lit passage! that's the other thing, i think people tend to think that if you are very very good at two languages, you would be good at translating too, and that's absolute nonsense. for one thing, the way i think in chinese and in english are completely different, and i've frequently said things to people that quite convey the wrong idea because i was thinking in the other language when i said it. i would really like to be trained in translation and interpretation though. of course it wouldn't be like an m.a. in translation, where you would focus on theories and issues in translation too, which i'm more interested in. and i would like to do literary translation rather than interpretation, or translation and commentary for businesses and journals. that's a completely different thing though, and perhaps i'd do better to go to school longer and then swtich to translation later. argh.