This afternoon, as I sunned myself quite happily in the building’s lobby and ate my lunch, I finished reading Gene Wolfe’s amazingly dense The Shadow of the Torturer. It’s a wonderful book, and I eagerly anticipate reading the rest of the series. And I absolutely love what he writes in his “A Note on the Translation” in the appendix at the end, so I pass it along to you:
In rendering this book — originally composed in a tongue that has not yet achieved existence — into English, I might easily have saved myself a great deal of labor by having recourse to invented terms; in no case have I done so. Thus in many instances I have been forced to replace yet undiscovered concepts by their closes twentieth-century equivalents. Such words as peltast, androgyn, and exultant are substitutions of this kind, and are intended to be suggestive rather than definitive. Metal is usually, but not always, employed to designate a substance of the sort the word suggests to contemporary minds….
To those who have preceded me in the study of the posthistoric world, and particularly to those collectors — too numerous to name here — who have permitted me to examine artifacts surviving so many centuries of futurity, and most especially to those who have allowed me to visit and photograph the era’s few extant buildings, I am truly grateful.