It's been a while...

Dear Diary, In the half a dozen years or so since I last wrote much has happened. I moved to Cambridge, met some people (mainly musicians), fell in (then out of) love, then ended up in rural Wiltshire. I am now a 'master of the arts' just having passed my M.A. in Classical Studies, but it has led me nowhere, nay, less than nowhere. I did have a few editing jobs, but they pay less than even the barest minimum wage. So, I still do the same job I did as an undergraduate, as a post graduate and now as a so-called 'master' (that is, unskilled labour for minimum wage). This says more about Britain 2022 than it does about my abilities as a scholar, a translator and one of the world's workers. I have translated The Power and Wisdom of God by Marsilio Ficino, and The Asclepius allegedly by Apuleius. Right now I have just finished translating The History of the Britons by Nennius (a frivolous and trifling work of little or no consequence, after all, who cares about Britain in this day and age?). I have also translated De deo Socratis by Apuleius as part of my master's degree dissertation. My next projects are more focused on translations which either have not been translated before, or translations which are no available. In ninth century Baghdad, during the Abbasid Caliphate, the standard rate for a mediocre transltor for just one translation was £2,000,000. A monthly salary for an average translator then was £30,000. (For evidence of this one only need listen to the BBC Radio 4 podcast The Translation Movement (that is, their In Our Time archive). Me? I work for the bare minimum wage doing unskilled labour, as befits my station as 'master of arts'. You can be damn sure that Cosimo d'Medici paid Marsilio Ficino more than minimum wage for translating De Potestate et Sapientia Dei. Yet this is not Renaissance Italy, evidently. It's Dark Age Britain. It is anything but a 'Golden Age', that much is absolutely certain. Max.