Hi there. As you have managed to find my homepage, I assume you know at least my name, so we don't have to dwell on that.

 

To start at the beginning: I was born. My parents (and the Luxembourgish version of Wikipedia) tell me that this very important event took place on 23 September 1972. I don't actually remember the occasion, but I guess I must have been present.

 

Fast-forward some nineteen years...

 

 

Realizing that school wouldn't teach me anything that I couldn't learn faster and more agreeably from a book, I left for Los Angeles. The City of Angels - where everyone, sooner or later, becomes a rock star. Be it music-, earthquake- or drugwise. Incidentally, I never managed the second one (I just missed the 1992 quake by a month or so, and when the 1994 tremor struck, I had just left California). I eventually returned to Luxembourg and finished highschool in evening classes (which, by the way, is much more rewarding than regular school. I can only recommend it to dropouts).

 

After a short stint on the only Literary Translation university course in Germany (which was abolished soon after), I decided that, like so many things in life, translating is a lot more fun when you just do it instead of blabbering on about it.

 

 

As I've always been intrigued by things that no one seems to know much about (be it Denisovans, Sumerian grammar or neutrinos pretending to buzz faster than light), I enrolled into Mediaeval Studies at Düsseldorf University. So for the next four years, I learnt all about Beowulf, the Green Knight and Marie de France, not really caring how this would translate into any cash-rendering activity later on.

 

Good thing I hadn't worried, as in 2001 I was offered a job at the Centre national de littérature in Luxembourg. So I switched from one little-known language (namely Anglo-Saxon) to another (which happens to be my mother tongue) and learnt all about Michel Rodange, Rosemarie Kieffer and Guy Rewenig. Sometimes, you just need to be lucky.

 

 

In my spare time, I still preferred to read books in English, be it Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Michael Crichton or Mark Billingham. But in Spring 2013, I decided to cast my net of literary predilections a bit (or a lot) wider, and now I'm a very decided fan of Cingiz Aitmatov, Jorge Amado, Jonas Avyžius and Konstantin Paustovsky.

 

Apart from literature, my two enduring loves are heavy metal music and road trips around Europe, both great ways to explore the soul of this amazing continent that I call home. In five decades, I managed to fall in love with so many topics and places, often through the intersession of a rock band. In fact, I seem to develop a burning passion for a new band every decade or so. That's Queenrÿche in the 80s, Iron Maiden in the 90s, Rammstein in the 00s, Kipelov in the 10s and Týr in the 20s. Meanwhile, my current all-time favourite road trip countries remain (in reverse alphabetical order) Russia, Portugal, Macedonia and Georgia.

 

 

And, as any seasoned traveller will tell you, it's never a bad idea to know a few words in the local lingo. A few years ago, I started to study Russian (even got my A2 diploma in 2015), in 2022 I obtained my first certificate in Chinese (HSK1), and I also tried for a while to get better in Arabic and Persian. These are all amazing tongues, but the language of Pushkin (and Valery Kipelov) will always have a special place in my heart.

 

Anything I forgot? Ah yes, shoe size. I'm a 38 (that's a 5 in the UK, I think). So now I told you everything about me. Which, of course, is the smartest way not to reveal anything at all.