Very quickly, Gavriil encountered a major problem: the subject of the text. He was dealing with biology, a discipline he didn’t understand, and a good translation required a minimum understanding of the context. He couldn’t just do it verbatim, the risk of it turning out to be inappropriate was far too great. And Latin didn’t appreciate approximations: we were easily left with sentences making no sense. The professor had, therefore, searched his garage—or, as his daughter would say, his brothel—to find two particularly specialized dictionaries. Assisted by Syssoi, he tried to transcribe as best as possible the words contained in the manuscript. However, they had to face the facts: even so, they fumbled far too much because Baranov was as incompetent as he in the matter. Gavriil dared not s
