Phew!

 Ok, one down, 5 more to go. Exams i mean. meh.
 after that the actual fun begins: mugging up a script in 1 day, learning to act in 6. after that the summer training from july onwards. will try to punch in a language crash course within that span. probably French, because it'll be faster going than German. Though i love the german 'ch' a month is hardly enough to have me read Kafka or Goethe originals.
 Russian and German are two languages that seem somehow lost in translation. The Kafkaesque is still effective - the verb endings to sentences so uncommon in the english language lending that peculiar air of unpredictability. The bleakness. But Goethe really crops it. Kindred by Choice's english edition had me banging my head against the  walls.
 Russian's another - at times the threads flow into limpid pools of understanding. At others they sound stilted. Then again maybe that aids the whole thing: the prosaic statements, shorn of  all cloying ornaments. The difference between sketching out a rider at full gallop with a few bold strokes of the charcoal or a painstaking troimpe l'oeil in minute detail.
 Ivan Danisovitch's one day is all the more memorable because of the starkness, the unmitigated bleakness. Or the sheer volume of a Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. The same perception of a foreign language in Gorky as well.
 Sholokhov's Don flowed quietly through - all four volumes of it - with a surprising fluidity, almost lyrical. A truly beautiful translation.