Dear Readers,
I am up late and translating neo-Aegean records. Their society is fascinating, and I hope I can eventually tell you more about them. Your time stream will find out about them sooner or later, but you might not. Fascinating people, really. So much more advanced than you as a society, but the individuals are so much more ignorant of things you would take for granted. But then, what is truth, really? Is it Zeus, or electricity?
In life, I wrote, and in this retake of life, I also write. Sometimes original things, like that fable, but more often translations, like my work on the neo-Aegean things. Translation is a funny business, especially when the original language is some offshoot without a clear dictionary and the people in Linguistics really do not know how to make head or tail of it. That's when it gets really interesting.
And the reason is, of course, that each polished user of language, that is to say, the people whose work gets most often detected by augury, picks words with painstaking care. Each word is a puzzle piece, a harmonious element, a sling, an arrow, a tender knife. Each has weight, weight that lifts you with butterflies above golden fields of poppies or drags down in the darkest, slimiest depths of neo-Aegea's globe-spanning ocean. When the language is poorly understood, it takes a stroke of genius to find the right translation. These strokes of genius do not happen all the time, unfortunately. I wish they did.
Back to work.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
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