An American POW writes in his diary as he sits in a Japanese prison camp. His shorthand skills are rudimentary, but he writes as many words as he can in shorthand so the guards can’t read it. Day after day after day, he writes about food … what kind of food he gets; how much; when is the next time he will get food. Year after year, for four years, he writes.
The diary is often subjected to inclement weather, but both it and its writer are liberated from the camp at the end of the war in 1945 and make it home. Here’s an excerpt from his October 28, 1944 entry. The image is poor because it suffered moisture damage. The translation is written below the image:
TRANSLATION: Got to buy some stuff with the proceeds from the canteen: some sugar &
flour. Story is that the galley is going to make gravy with the flour &
sweet spud jam with the sugar. Only question is when. Evening soup had some corn–
starch with the greens. – & no beans in the rice. Got a salt issue. –
I’m in the path of the hurricane hitting FL today, so expect to lose power any time. I’ll check back to respond to any comments if and when I can.
Thank you for that story, Angela. It’s amazing how shorthand has been used in traumatic times like this. An Australian POW kept a shorthand diary while in the treacherous Burma Railway camps. When prisoners were moved to another site he buried his Shhd notes but returned to retrieve them at war’s end. They were the basis for a book. Like your story, the personal notes provided first-hand details.
Thoughts for your safety, Angela.
Thank you. It’s been my privilege … literally, a privilege … to work on translating this multi-year diary. Now, it will live forever within his family. Our current generation in America has never known the draft … the ravages of a full world war. I think these things are important to share … lest we forget.
Thanks Angela for this, and please take care of yourself and be safe. Praying for those in the path.
This is extremely interesting. I think the Gregg Shorthand is very well written. Perhaps the writer (the POW) was a competent shorthand writer; but for writing in his journal, he used both shorthand and longhand, rather than just shorthand. I have observed this many times over the years: people who write in journals, diaries, notebooks, etc., who know shorthand, go back and forth between shorthand and longhand.
He had a lack of confidence in his shorthand skills. One of his entries, written entirely in shorthand, was something like, “I’m going to write today’s entry entirely in shorthand. Then if I can read it next week and understand everything, I will know it is okay to write only in shorthand.” That was a bad paraphrase by me, but you get the gist. He never did switch entirely to shorthand. I agree, his shorthand skills weren’t that bad. But he was afraid if he wrote everything in shorthand, he wouldn’t be able to read it back when memory faded. I think the longhand words were sort of a security blanket, even though he really didn’t need it.
I’d be interested in knowing how you approached this task. Was the shorthand generally legible for you? Did you have strategies for figuring out things that were unclear? Did you produce a running transcript of the material?
It’s fascinating, but the project seems daunting to me!
Lee
Daunting, yes. But I’ve developed a system over the years for tackling projects like this. I get a pretty good idea of what’s ahead of me when I do a preliminary analysis for the purpose of working up a quote. And I always ask the client a series of questions, including when the writer learned shorthand (so I can figure out the version of Gregg); whether anything else was found with the document (like lists, letters, etc.) and I get a copy of those. I also ask the client for as much info as they have about the subject matter of the document; a list of proper names I might run into; and generally what was going on in the writer’s life at this time. When I start the translation, I just pick out the easy stuff for the first go through. Then I go through it again and spend some time analyzing the troublesome outlines. Depending on the quality of the penmanship and the physical condition of the document, I might only have to go through it a couple of times, or dozens of times. For very idiosyncratic writers, I might make a spreadsheet with copy/pastes of weird outlines they use for certain words and put them in alphabetical order as an ongoing reference sheet. When I’ve done all I can do, sometimes I reach out to the client to see if they can help me make any more progress, providing them the translation of the complete sentence containing the troublesome outline(s) for context. Sometimes the client can read the longhand bits better than I can because they are more familiar with the writer’s handwriting than I am. Once all progress has been made, any words in the final translation that I am less than confident about are placed in a different color font so the client knows not to rely on the certainty of those words. A new thing I learned on this project is that with severely degraded/faded/moisture damaged documents, it is a REALLY big help to have the client put each page inside a colored transparent sleeve. You can get these in office supply stores, and they usually come in a pack of yellow, green, blue, and red. Then the scans are done on a flatbed scanner, color setting, high res. There’s no one color that works best for all pages, so the client has to put each page into the four different colored sleeves and scan of each one, then compare the results. They usually send me the best one or two of each page. It’s unbelievable how strokes that are completely invisible otherwise suddenly pop off the page when placed in these colored sleeves – a fun factoid you might want to squirrel away for future reference!
Thank you for the detailed clarification! It seems like a complex process to me. And I’m interested to read about the degree of involvement of the family.
Lee