Roxana-Mălina Chirilă

Odată ca niciodată, am ajuns să mă uit la Observator, la Antena1 azi.

When getting paid:

• translate
• procrastinate
• translate
• procrastinate
• finish first draft
• procrastinate
• edit for the first and last time
• procrastinate
• edit again, for good measure
• procrastinate
• throw a really final glance over the text, because you never know
• turn in (nearly precisely) on time

Translating for friends:

I learned computer science for four years in high school. One of the teachers didn’t know what arrays were for at one point, but if we had had somebody who was any good at programming, or teaching, or preferably both, I really wish they’d shown us this:

It’s what I need after last night. It’s not that I went to bed at 2 AM after playing around with tanks in one of the most memory-greedy games on my computer (I suspect with every update it leaves stuff it doesn’t need anymore lying about). It’s not that I looked at all the courses I’ve abandoned on Coursera and got a headache.

**Roxana's notes:** I was asked to translate this shocking, heartbreaking letter from Romanian into English. Many of the things in it (like hunger, theft, or stupefying rules) speak for themselves. Others, alas, don't. So I find myself offering a short introduction to who these people are and what context they live in.MISA -- the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute -- started out in 1990, in Romania, as a 'yoga school'. In the over 20 years since then, it grew to have thousands or tens of thousands of yogis attending their weekly courses and it spread to many other countries, like the US, the UK, Spain, Argentina, France, Germany, Finland, Hungary, Denmark, Italy, Australia and others. In some places it thrives, in others it merely gets by.

The yogis who wrote this letter are from Romanian ashrams, but MISA also has ashrams in other countries.While supposedly the organization itself has 20-odd members, the rest being volunteer instructors and yogis merely attending classes, the real structure of the school has Gregorian Bivolaru on top as the spiritual master and a number of VIPs, mostly yoga instructors, deciding things on a lower scale.

Bivolaru was involved in a number of trials in Romania, with some of the charges against him being human trafficking and sexual acts with underage girls and he currently has an international arrest warrant on his name for the latter charge. He ran way from Romania after his legal issues started in 2004 and obtained political asylum in Sweden in 2005. However, after that date many female yoga practitioners were invited to visit him for sexual purposes and discovered him to be located in Paris.Female students who were to his liking would receive free vacations in Costinești (a Romanian seaside resort where the international MISA yoga camp is held on a yearly basis), lasting from two weeks to a month, all expenses paid. They would also receive gifts of books, CDs, perfumes or other such. Those who were invited to Paris might also have their trip there paid and would stay for free, receiving gifts of money, perfumes, chocolate and so on.MISA has also been involved in media scandals for getting women involved in sex biz (pole dancing in foreign countries, erotic chat, erotic massage parlors, 'erotic' films).

[Note: This is a translation of an article I originally wrote in Romanian, but which I realized I wanted in English as well. And translators translate, even if they hate translating themselves.]

De atâta amar de vreme feministele ne-au obișnuit cu criticile lor împotriva pornografiei, împotriva reclamelor în care se speculează atractivitatea corpului feminin și împotriva altor zone în care femeia e privită mai degrabă sub formă de corp decât sub formă de ființă. Răspunsul lor: „Nu mă obiectifica!”

Do you know those books which you can supposedly brag about reading? You know, like „Pride and Prejudice”, „The Satanic Verses” or „The Iliad”? Of course you do. You run into them a lot – and there’s others which are less known, but just as impressive to mention.

Title: Incubus

Author: Amanda Meuwissen

Rating: 4/5

Is this book for me? Probably. Wait, no! Do gay people bother you? Then no, it’s not. But otherwise, yes. A cool, adventurous novel of the supernatural and romantic sort, complete with a Seer, fairies and magic.

Swear words do this amazing thing in language, that no other category of words does quite as well, or with as much versatility. I’m not referring to insults here (although that’s supposedly their main function), but to the fact that they intensify the meaning.