Two Languages Were Always Too Many

At some point early in this journal’s life—vaguely in the era before everything got complicated—the decision was made to run a parallel English version. The ambition was genuine: translate every post, let the wider world in. Volunteers helped for a while, trading their time for free shoes and lunches that, according to the collective mythology, always ended well for everyone involved.

Then the output grew. What had been two posts a week became twenty, then more. Every piece needed a shadow life in another language, and somewhere along the way I stopped actually translating and started feeding texts into Google Translate and hitting publish. The results were hallucinatory—grammatically confident nonsense, sentences arriving at conclusions no human had intended. A friend read one and asked if I was having a medical event.

So that version is gone now. Plans to branch further into Russian, Swedish, or Japanese die here with it, quietly, without ceremony. What remains is what it always actually was: one language, one voice, one notebook. The English experiment ran its course, and the course was short and embarrassing. Goodbye to the other one. It was never really alive anyway.