| about me |
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| I was born in 1963 in The Hague from a Dutch father and a Polish mother.They met because of the War, not during it. The story of their meeting is a novel in itself and maybe one day I'l find the time to get it down on paper. In the mean time you'll have to do with this snippet of information about my parents. I am an only child. The first language I learnt was Polish. I came to get to know the world in a Polish context, which - believe you me - is quite different from the Dutch perspective. My mother didn't speak any Dutch at first and my father was pretty fluent in Polish, which he picked up after the war while living in Poland with his first wive. Luckily I inherited my father's knack for languages and learnt Dutch pretty quickly once I started going to kindergarten. From then on I was bi-lingual. To this very day I can't decide whether being bi-lingual and having parents who come from two so different cultures is a blessing or a burden. Yes, it broadens your horizon, but it also makes you painfully aware that you always are the odd one out. In Holland, where I lived permanently, I never felt very Dutch and in Poland, which I visited frequently, I never felt very Polish. My parents argued a lot and then the shortcomings of their respective adopted second languages became more than apparant. I always understood what either of them was trying to express and I attempted to translate, mediate and became an expert interpreter at the age of six. The blessing part of this scenario was that it gave me a love for languages, words, sentences and meanings. I speak Dutch, English, Polish, German (rusty), French (very, very rusty) and Spanish (beginner). In 1974, at the age of eleven, I started to learn English at school and from then on I've been an anglophile. I just love the English language and I'm fascinated with the country. In the same year we moved from The Hague to a boring suburb. The upside was that it was the first town to have cable television in the country. Suddenly instead of only two Dutch channels I could watch the Belgian and German telly and... the BBC. Wow, I was in heaven! And from then on the BBC became my main teacher of English. I guess it was a form of escapism. I couldn'd choose to live through Dutch or Polish so I submerged myself in a third langauge. I love reading novels, poetry, collumns, dictionaries, shop signs, clothes labels, subtitles, advertisments on busses, trains and trams, - any message in words. I love pronouncing words and thinking about them, feeling and tasting their meanings. I love to talk about words and sentences. And I love to teach them to other people. After highschool in 1981, I went to a Teacher Training College in Delft (yes, where the Delft Blue earthenwhare comes from) and studied English and Dutch. But teaching loud, undisciplined kids was not my cup of tea. So after graduating, in 1986, I decided it was about time to go and seek my true identity and went off to Poland to study Polish language and literature at the Catholic University of Lublin (Pope John Paul the second used to teach there - not that I am religious, but I think that's a nice little piece of info worth sharing with you). I stayed there for a year and did a course especially designed for foreigners with Polish roots. It was quite a tough time, as communism was still in full swing and after a couple of months I - who vowed I would never queue for anything because it was beneath me, ha ha!! - found myself standing in a queue for two hours waiting to buy a kilo of oranges. I never knew how much you can miss an orange. And I am not even talking about banana's, because they were just not to be had. Not one single banana for 10 months. Can you believe that! I had some good times in Poland, but it was mostly hardship; limited toilet paper, no bananas, no oranges, except for that one time, 25 degrees sub zero in winter, no junk food, busses so packed that when you fought your way out of the bus your buttons on your coat would be missing. To visit my grandparents in Warsaw I needed to go to the station two days in advance to buy a train ticket and that also involved queueing for a long time. The good things were that I got to know the Polish language, history and literature better. They have some great novelists and poets and the history is laden with battles, wars, colourful heroes, beautiful palaces etc. Anyway, I decided I am more Dutch than Polish and returned to the Low Countries, still wishing I was English. Since I still didn't want to teach I moved to Amsterdam to study Translation Theory. It seemed like an obvious choice. For 4,5 years I did a lot of practical translating and lots of theoretical thinking, talking, writing about what translating actually is. Robert Frost once said "poetry is what get's lost in tanslation." And I guess he was right. A lot gets lost in translation and a translatior has to be a magician, a word wizzard to get it right. Still lots of translated books are nothing more than that; translated books.The words just stick in your throat, bump around in your head, leave you dissatisfied and hungry for the original. The thesis I wrote was about my biggest literary hero: T.S.Eliot. I compared three Dutch translations of the pub fragment from the Waste Land. "When Lill's husband got demobbed - I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself, HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME..." Hmmm, still lovely after all these years I moved to Amsterdam in 1987 and I am still here. I had a number of McJobs as operator, secretary, office manager, translator of romance novels, translator of subtitles. Then in 1996 I finally discovered that my calling actually IS teaching of languages. I spent some time in Santiago de Chile, where I tought English. I never really thought about teaching adults at private language academies, but discovered that it is a great thing to do and that I do it very well. Then upon my return from South America I started teaching Dutch to foreigners here in Amsterdam. And I'm still loving every minute of it. It's like disclosing a new world to another person. Giving them words, meanings, sayings, pronounciation. Making them discover new horizons. It's very satisfying to work with something that's your passion. HOME |