Ping Summerdays.

I appreciate you and your writing talents. It's some other people who make me bitter. No, I won't call them toadies or laceys, because I like most of them.

You are intelligent enough to understand what the language barrier means: I don't have to explain it to you. Imagine that your candle is behind a thick draper -- draper that is the language barrier. It is dim, and the others think it is not very bright. I gave one good example of the Plyushkin story some weeks ago but I don't know if you were here then, so I repeat it again. In P's fairy story put together two long and rare adjectives -- autereinen and heilimÃ¶ivÃ¤; both rare and powerful in the original language, word painting at its best. And my poor English translation? "Hazy, flowering." If I translate those two adjectives back to my language, the result is extremely mediocre, commonplace, lost all of its nuances, color, its rare pictoresque power. Nabokov knew there is no such thing as translation, you should re-write your text in the other language, not translate it. I tried to improve the impression a little by writing 'hay-flowering'. Still a cold comfort - void of the real pictoresque value.

One of my older stories: "leaves rotting under the threes, black as rust or tar"... For once an expression that could be translated exactly into English! But they are rare.

It is not only my person, my bloated ego, but the general discrimination of non-English posters at this boards that has embittered me since the Danpedo days. Imagine a brilliant foreigh student who goes to school and get lower marks and the others because his Engish is not perfect. Discrimination, eh? Sure. So you see that it is not only about me, but a political question with larger dimensions. This discrimination works in the subconscious level; the native English-speakers may not notice that they instintively disparage the others whose languages skills in English is not as good as those of the natives, and think that they are not intelligent, as good as writers or thinkers. They don't even notice this inbuilt attitude of theirs.

Well, you are an intelligent person and you understand that if a foreigner person has a hight notion of his writing skills and he still gets constantly underestimated from one years to another, the bitterness may piling us inside him until he makes to think "to hell with it all!"

I could post here some passages of dazzling Finnish things, as I once did to NFiH, but you would not understand anything about it. There is no such thing as translation, as Nabokov said, the text should be rewritten and rethought in the other language, but in most often it is not possible to the original writer.

Ok, you do not annoy me very much, it is some else... This is a long message already, I must get it out of my system.