At the meeting on Saturday (Jan 5), during the announcements, I announced the passing of our colleague and friend, Leslie Willson. I quoted from Mike Conner’s earlier posting and to some extent from the obituary in the paper, which gave a few insights into Leslie’s life.

His story reminds us of the myriad ways in which translators find their languages and their destiny: World War II interrupted Leslie’s plans for a writing career and he left the University of Texas to join the army, where he discovered he had a gift for German, in which he soon became fluent. He was later assigned to a top secret operation known only by its mailing address “P. O. Box 1142” where he and others used their language skills to great effect in the war effort.

That sounds like a blurb for a great movie, one of those black-&-white ones with steely-jawed men in fedoras and women who always used a really long cigarette holder, dahling! In his photo, Leslie looks as though he starred in his own movie – which sounds like one definition of a happy life.

When I finished reading about him, I asked the old question: Where do old translators go? And it occurred to me that old translators never die because they live on in their works. Not just in literary translations of books and poems, but in the countless documents of all kinds that translators work on day to day. The manuals and labels and patents and contracts. The signs and forms and letters and birth certificates. The brochures and instructions and warnings and all the fine print that nobody ever reads.

All those words were one day invoked by a translator and thenceforth entered the canon of their time and space as the issue of their creators – as the fruit of their lives, the essence of their very own synthesis, an expression of their being. Translators make the world a little more understandable, which is an honorable occupation. Leslie Willson did, and we salute him for it.