Rotting kiwis

If you are a professional translator like me you have to take everything that comes, the funny, the sad, the downright boring.

One of the most amusing jobs was the long text describing, for an insurance claim, the situation when the refrigeration system broke down on a ship carrying a large cargo of kiwis from New Zealand to Antwerp. Disposing of several tons of rotting fruit is no easy business in this part of the world. Another time a divorce case from Antwerp’s strict Jewish ghetto lightened a dull November's day. Then there was the crackpot trying to sell a system of predicting perverse behaviour by measuring sexual reactions to pornographic material. I passed that on to a trainee female translator to test her out. Recently there was the obituary notice for a test pilot, in case the maiden flight of a totally new aircraft went very wrong. It did not, the plane landed safety, and my translation thankfully in the waste bin.

Occasionally you get something which makes you angry, where you are in violent disagreement with writer. This occurred today: it was the trade unions complaining about job cuts and reorganizations at a large steel manufacturer. I should perhaps, as a good Christian, sympathize with them - life is a lot harder and less secure in that industry than it was a generation ago, before the global economy struck and when China and India were industrial backwaters.

But no, I cannot quite do so. What they are screaming about is the slow and inexorable breaking down of the dream of a workers’ paradise – steady work, good pay, early and long retirement. The dream broke down in Russia 20 years ago, some tell me because Gorbuchev was an honest enough economist to realize that the dream was taking the USSR to bankruptcy. Here in Western Europe, where we are better organized, it has taken longer to own up to the dream’s fundamental unfeasibility. It has in both cases has been an essentially godless dream, based on a false belief that human systems can take the economic risk out of life, and with largely consumption-based set of values (junk food, junk entertainment, junk sex). And with a concomitant sapping of vitality and spiritual strength.  

Unfortunately the one place that this dream still lasts is in the – again largely godless – European Institutions, the only difference being that the dreamers can pull salaries and pensions that the likes of you and me can only dream of….