I haven’t really got into writing a blog yet. I spend too much time thinking about what to write and then rejecting it. So I’ve decided to try a different tack, I’m going to try writing the way I go for a walk: just set out and see where I end up. It has to be better than agonizing over every word. More like writing an email to a friend.

My aim at the moment is to post something once a week, and hopefully when I get into it I’ll write more. Why am I doing this? For my own benefit, I suppose, to impose some discipline on myself, to prove I can. I’ve been keeping a diary for years, but it’s not the same. Even if nobody reads your blog, you know they might. And I’ve had one comment so far, so somebody’s read it. At the moment I’m making no effort to acquire new readers, but if anyone happens to find it, that’s fine by me. I just don’t feel ready to announce it to the world at large yet.

It’s one thing to translate, quite another to write your own stuff. With translation you’ve got something to start with, the text you’re translating. Your job is simply to express what the writer wants to say as clearly as possible in another language. And a lot of it seems like shunting the words around to get them in the right order, like that game that consists of 15 little plastic tiles and one space in a square that you have to move around to make a picture. Nice when you get it right, frustrating when you can’t seem to get the last piece to fit and have to pull the whole thing apart.

So maybe if I throw something together I’ll have something to start with, then I can treat it like a translation and try and rework it into something that at least satisfies me, and I won’t be ashamed off is someone else happens to see it.