Translating separating reporting blogging

Maria is combatting early-onset blogging-ADD by …(re)starting another blog called Marin Outings. It’s a “writing separating” strategy that makes sense since it’s impossible to put everything into one blog. I wonder whether Marin will be outed in more ways that one here…

Co-incidentally, I started writing in a separate category last week, but it’s not online. It’s a “Homeschool Diary,” intended as occasionally hysterical fieldnotes for this new terrain of blowing factory schooling to bits in new and unexpected (and sometimes thoroughly Canadian) ways. Neurotic, nagging, complaining, full of doubts, triumphant, celebratory — really undone, full of “whys” and “hows” and “what they (the kids) are doing now.” A diary which currently is just for me, but which might make sense later, reworked in another context or format.

However, so far there’s just one entry, and I suppose I should rectify that, but I spent the evening stuffing envelopes with invitations to that winter solstice party….

More substantive postings later this week — spent a bit of time this weekend translating a newspaper article (from German to English) about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and plan to put it up with commentary in the next couple of days. She recently gave an interview to a reporter for the Rotterdam paper NRC Handelsblad (she is in hiding in an undisclosed location). The German article (written by a man) was annoying in a hard-to-define way, but when I found the Dutch original, it was easier to see how and why, because I could see what he left out. Unfortunately, I can only read bits and pieces of Dutch, and can’t read it with fluent confidence, but I made the effort to translate a bit more of what she had to say from Dutch to English (and gave the Dutch original, in case anyone out there is fluent in Dutch). Hirsi Ali’s angle is critical thinking, enlightenment, and feminism; in my book, a compelling set of tools. Tomorrow I’ll post that translation, but for now I’m too beat to find the links that post still needs.

Lots of reading, my head’s exploding.

It’s interesting to translate from a language you don’t know well. It’s like a blueprint for life, an Erector set, a cookbook, hermeneutics, some skill, and a soup