Lorrie Anderson

Lorrie served among a group of headhunters in the jungles of Peru for many years. They had never allowed anyone else in, but Lorrie and her co-translator were not threatening, so they were able to work among this group who had no written language. In 1950, the only way they kept track of new words and phrases that they were learning was on 3 x 5” cards stored in a shoebox. Actually, they had boxes and boxes, and spent quite a lot of time going through the Greek lexicon for the translation they were doing, looking up each word, one by one. Lorrie says that the whole computer revolution has been incredible. Computers can hold such a large amount of easily accessed information that translation has been streamlined incomparably.

Lorrie has two favorite foods. The first is the Spanish-peanut-sized flying ants, which the headhunters toasted over the fire in clay pots and ate along with a sour fruit. The second sounded so revolting that for a while she would not try it. After her co-translator came back from a break, she had promised her father that she would eat anything offered to her, so she and Lorrie, in the dark, so that they could not see it, tasted the larvae from the palm tree. This was threaded onto a blowgun stick to be cooked, and tasted like peanut butter and bacon sandwiches. Lorrie says that she loved it and misses it.