Here’s a drinking game for a slow weekday morning. Watch Sportscenter and take a shot every time the anchors misappropriate urban slang.

Valen-time is two days away. The melange hopes you bought it roses.

Yen Press is printing 350,000 copies of the Twilight graphic novel. That’s an enormous number for an initial run. Most graphic novels only sell between 20,000 and 25,000. Of course, this is Twilight we’re talking about. Stephenie Meyer has sold about 45 million books from her angsty-vampires-in-love series. I’m pretty sure Yen will recoup.

I previously established that I have no love for Twilight, but I do like Meyer’s willingess to break into graphic novels (with help from artist Young Kim.) The graphic novel is a medium which has been treated as a genre, focusing on science fiction, fantasy and superheroics.

I’m interested to see what kind of stories people will tell with graphic novels when the emphasis is off the spandex.

Also, graphic novels and their lil’ cousin, the comic book, have been boys’ towns. With some worthwhile exceptions, sequential art has mostly ignored or objectified women. Its creators are also predominantly male. (It often feels like Gail Simone and Devin Grayson are the only women writing comics.)

Meyer has a fanatical female following. Perhaps, she and other female voices like Janet Evanovich (who has a Motormouth graphic novel coming) can generate parity for women.

Next on the itinerary: a Brazilian author talks about how difficult it is to be on the cutting edge of science fiction, when the cutting edge hasn’t been translated to your primary language yet.

Fabio Fernandes, author of Os Dias de Peste, said: Having no access to what’s new from the world outside, Brazilian SF writers either write stories using old, stale tropes (for example, writing space opera novels with cardboard characters and tremendously clichéd situations that reminds us, at the very best, of RPG campaigns) or reinvent the wheel.

This is a legitimate gripe. It’s almost impossible to push forward any school of thought when you’re using the eighth-grade model. If it’s any consolation, U.S. writers don’t read enough translations for some people either.

Finally, Gene Wojciechowski of ESPN, played the Smith Magazine game by writing 6-word biographies for a few athletes. (Scroll to his tenth point.)

Have a happy Valentine’s Day. Read Byron, lots of Byron.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

I spent about 12 hours reading 458 pages of Gregory Rabassa last weekend.

Never heard of him? Neither had I until I read the back cover of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

But didn’t Gabriel García Márquez write that? Well, sort of. He wrote “Cien Años de Soledad” in 1967. Then, he waited for three years while Rabassa’s schedule cleared, so he could translate it to English.

Márquez was even known to say the English translation of his story was better than the Spanish original. (I’ll have to take Márquez’s word for it, since my Spanish hovers at a second-grade level.)

Translators have a rough deal. They are one part necessary evil and one part artist. Would it be better if we could all read Tolstoy in the original Russian? Sure, I guess. Honestly, I have no idea. (I can count the Russian words I know on one finger. Gazpacho is Russian, right?)

Were it not for Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, I would be incapable of understanding “Anna Karenina.” (Even with them, I’m pretty sure I missed something.)

“Don Quixote,” “The Brothers Karamazov,” “The Aeneid,” pretty much any religious text that isn’t the Book of Mormon… most bookshelves are dependent on these invisible hands. They have to take one artist’s words, translate it to a different language, but preserve the story and the art.

How do you translate the Italian pun of traddutore/traditore into English? How do you maintain the rhythm of a French stanza while transforming it into another language? It’s like trying to recreate “Night Stars” with charcoal or “Pour Some Sugar on Me” into folk rock. (I would listen to that.)

I have enough trouble trying to rewrite what some people say to me in English, let alone leaping the language barrier.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is, thank you, Rabassa. Thank you, Pevear and Volokhonsky. Language is still the easiest way people have to communicate, and you span the barriers that divide us.

So the next time you’re reading Márquez, Voltaire or Sun Tzu, flip the book over and remember the translator. They are just as much artists as the authors.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. Rabassa has written a book called “If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents” about the art of translation. I have not read it and, as such, cannot recommend it. But I liked the last thing I read by him, so it might be worth a gander.