Something Worth Doing: Translating "Life Everlasting" into Swedish

  

I'm translating a book called "Life Everlasting" into Swedish. This project is a lot more difficult than I had envisioned when I volunteered for the project.  To be specific, the book is well over 500 pages long, and it's taken me about forty days to translate forty pages.  I do an hour or more each day. But it's something worth doing.  Really worth doing.

The publishing company isn't paying me. They will pay royalties later, if and when anybody actually buys this book in its Swedish language form. But I am quite certain that the number of Swedish readers who have an interest in life after death from the LDS perspective is so small that it is highly unlikely I'll ever be paid even to break even, for my time.  But that's okay.  Money is not why I'm doing this.

The book is powerful. It blesses people's lives who read it at the right time. My husband read it because when his three year old daughter (who would have been 17 today) was killed in an inexplicable boulder-rolling-down-a-hill accident many years ago, he was so devastated and lost that he thought he'd lost all his faith.  It took him time to rebuild from the bottom up. This book was instrumental in that rebuild.

My friend read it this week. I gave her a copy of it because this year, her mother died, her father found out that he's dying of cancer, and she got divorced.  That is a lot to bear in one year. She told me that she stayed up until 3:00 a.m. the day she received the book. She couldn't stop reading it, and when she was too tired to go on, she got on her knees and prayed and cried, feeling so comforted and feeling the rock of anger that had settled in her heart since her mother's death, dissipate.  She understood many things she had not understood before.

I read it just a year or two ago. It enlightened me so much-- even though I'd been raised since age 9 in this faith, there were statements by our latter-day prophets that I'd never read, that thrilled me. They made the afterlife seem more real, more tangible, more wonderful, and more close than I'd ever imagined it.  It made me want to do more temple work for the dead. It made me want to live closer to God and to outwit the devil and his temptations better than I have before, to rely on God and to know that angels are real, are close, and are more powerful than the devils who try so hard to bring us down.

So, I think this translating process will take all of 2012.  But it will be worth it.