My Life Will Go On (32) by Junior Win

‘I write for pure love and enjoyment,

I read for pure love and enjoyment.

I never have any other aim, noble or otherwise.’

I translated my grandmother’s books (Flowers and Festivals Round the Burmese Year and Three Years under the Japs), and Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll) and Introducing Camus into Burmese, because I liked them with love and enjoyment. But the people around me regard that I am a translator rather than a writer.

 

Sometimes I was requested to do translation. Every time I met this situation, most of the time I did not accept their offer, because I did not like the subjects. Sometimes I met misunderstanding between people and me.

Here some example; one day my friend asked me to translate some texts into Burmese, he also said that I would get a large amount of money from his company if I accepted his offer. I read the articles and I did not like it and I refused it. He was angry with me for refusing his offer. He said it was a special offer, and he wanted me to think it over again. I explained him for why I refused. I only write and translate with my pure love and enjoyment. Without enjoyment, how could I do it?

Sometimes I met same situation again, sometimes my close friends asked my help to do translation for their work. But I did not like their subjects. However I explained them, they never understood. They said I was a translator as well as a writer, and translator’s work was the same as writer’s work. They asked me how much money I wanted. They did not know why I did not want to do their work.

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Finally they asked me that what the important thing in life was. They never realized the important thing in my life was ‘love and enjoyment’ in my work. All my creation; thought and prose are to the writer instrument of an art. I cannot do which are beyond my enjoyment. They remarked that I was always thinking unimportant things.

Well, the time passed. I still met the different points of views between me and the people around were always evident however I was in the different world; my literary life.

Whenever I believed such things were important, they never thought that such things were as important as I believed. Whenever I thought such things were useless and unimportant, they considered such things were important and necessary for their life. So, I now realized that that is always a factor which will play an important part in my academic life as well as my literary life.

I still believe ‘love and enjoyment for doing whatever what one does is the thing that influence all my work-‘ that guides me for the rest of my life.

‘Blessed is he

Who has no other aim

Than love and pleasure

For reading what he reads,

Or writing what he writes.’