was translating an ancient Chinese folktale into a script today,as you do, and found myself surprisingly affected by the experience. while converting the author's voice into the narrator's, i was in the forest with the old man in search of the magic herb. i felt his fatigue as he stumbled fruitlessly from trunk to trunk. i was with him as he leaned down to spare a hill of ants from a flood, in a flash of distracted generosity like the way you stop to thoughtfully dust a neglected shelf on your way from the doing the kitchen to the dreaded bathroom in your rubber gloves on a sunday. it's an incedental act of kindness that makes you feel better on your way to solving a real problem; one that will truly test your character.
anyway, so i'm in the forest with this old man who's now a monk in my mind, red robe and all, and i'm buying the way he's communing with the animals, seeing himself in them and lending them a hand cause he happens to be in the neighbourhood. i'm fully there even though there's a cursor flashing in my periphery and the words are flat and colourless on a photocopied page.
so powerful, the voice, the i guess you call it zen-like simplicity of it all reaching me thousands of years after it first found its way to the folklore.
amazing.
